• Ex-wives, Boat­ing, & Alco­hol don’t mix. http://twitpic.com/1xkyqz #
• @dgarr22 thanks, man!! Still not sure if I stepped for­ward or every­one else stepped back. Ha ha. in reply to dgarr22 #
• @dgarr22 in fact I think I mar­ried a bat-villain. in reply to dgarr22 #
• @dgarr22 thanks man!! Tell Jack­son I’m look­ing for­ward to it too. in reply to dgarr22 #
• Karma is sooooo get­ting a Christ­mas Card this year!! #
• Ozzy Per­forms Shot in the Dark: http://bit.ly/bEOPcW #
• : Test http://gregbo.com/197 #
• : Does The iPad Change Every­thing? Pub­lish­ers Chime In http://gregbo.com/wordpress/201 #

We’ve fiercely debated the mer­its of the iPad (here and here and here and here) and whether Apple’s “mag­i­cal” device will trans­form the mass mar­ket. The ques­tion, of course, is not whether the iPad is the leader in the tablet mar­ket but whether the iPad will become the iPod of its mar­ket. And if the iPad is indeed the iPod, how does that shape the dig­i­tal strat­egy of publishers?

At the Big Money Unteth­ered con­fer­ence in New York this Thurs­day, a clus­ter of top pub­lish­ers includ­ing Don­ald Gra­ham (CEO, Wash­ing­ton Post), Car­olyn Reidy (CEO, Simon Schus­ter), Vivian Schiller (CEO, NPR) and Sarah Chubb (Pres­i­dent, Conde Nast Dig­i­tal), gath­ered to answer those ques­tions and eval­u­ate the explo­sive tablet mar­ket (accord­ing to For­rester Research, there will be 59 mil­lion tablets in use by 2015). We pitched a sim­ple ques­tion to the pan­elists, does the iPad change every­thing and how is it trans­form­ing their busi­ness? Their answers in the video above.

Excerpts :

Vivian Schiller, CEO, NPR

It’s def­i­nitely a trans­for­ma­tive device…[iPad] is the most dis­trib­uted, well known tablet, there’s no ques­tion other man­u­fac­tur­ers will come in with other vari­a­tions of the tablet but the idea of this new form fac­tor is a really excit­ing one.

And for us, the way that it’s trans­form­ing our busi­ness is we have cre­ated an appli­ca­tion for the iPhone, excuse me for the iPad, there’s too many i’s out there! That is really designed specif­i­cally for the form fac­tor of the tablet…and it is designed for the size and scale of the iPad…it’s been treme­dously pop­u­lar we’ve had over 350,000 down­loads so far and there are only 2 mil­lion iPads in cir­cu­la­tion. So what is that 1 in 6?

I would never bet against Apple.

Car­olyn Reidy, CEO Simon & Schuster

I would say that it has trans­formed our indus­try because it is the first reader that has enabled us to com­bine text with video…It’s the first thing that will enable us to do chil­dren books, to make dig­i­tal chil­dren books, to make enhanced e-books, and to actu­ally make a com­bi­na­tion of video and read­ing book that is not an app. In our world it’s very dif­fi­cult to do an app it gets lost…the audi­ence for a book is not the size for most of these apps that sell hun­dreds of thousands.

Jacob Weis­berg, Chair­man, The Slate Group

I think when the his­tory of the era is writ­ten, it’s the Kin­dle that will be seen as the break­through device…even though it’s already been super­seded in many ways by the iPad…It was really the Kin­dle that ush­ered in the post-Gutenberg and showed that a printed book was no longer nec­es­sar­ily the best way to read a book.

The iPad is a great toy…Everybody wants one, but the ques­tion is, is every­one going to need one?…In the short to medium term, I think the iPad is going to be very dominant…but long term I’m not sure I would bet on it as the dom­i­nant device because I think Apple does have the ten­dency to make the same mis­take again and again, which is that it likes closed systems….It doesn’t like the messi­ness of the inter­net but unfor­tu­nately messi­ness is part of what makes the inter­net the internet.

Sarah Chubb, Pres­i­dent, Conde Nast Digital

I think that the iPad is trans­for­ma­tive because it’s chang­ing how con­sumers think about the mobile web and how they think about con­tent consumption…

To me it’s not really about the iPad itself, it’s about con­sumers see­ing that they can do things dif­fer­ently and enjoy­ing it which will make them do it more…Even just one year from now, we’re going to look back on it and many, many things will have changed as a result of that.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Word­Press 3.0, the thir­teenth major release of Word­Press and the cul­mi­na­tion of half a year of work by 218 con­trib­u­tors, is now avail­able for down­load (or upgrade within your dash­board). Major new fea­tures in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme devel­op­ers have new APIs that allow them to eas­ily imple­ment cus­tom back­grounds, head­ers, short­links, menus (no more file edit­ing), post types, and tax­onomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Devel­op­ers and net­work admins will appre­ci­ate the long-awaited merge of MU and Word­Press, cre­at­ing the new multi-site func­tion­al­ity which makes it pos­si­ble to run one blog or ten mil­lion from the same instal­la­tion. As a user, you will love the new lighter inter­face, the con­tex­tual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and fea­ture enhance­ments, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plu­g­ins at once with a sin­gle click, and blah blah blah just watch the video.

For a more com­pre­hen­sive look at every­thing that has improved in 3.0 check out 3.0’s Codex page or the long list of issues in Trac. (We’re try­ing to keep these announce­ment posts shorter.) Whew! That’s a lot packed into one release. I can’t think of a bet­ter way to kick off the 3.X cycle we’ll be in for the next two and a half years.

Eas­ier menu sup­port = Pure Awe­some­ness!! [Gregbo]

(Via Word­Press Devel­op­ment Blog.)