Liz Strauss discusses the Information and Relationships Webs:

Two very different world views — one informational, one relational. Each point of view defines the experience differently. Static or dynamic, take your pick.

This elephant is standing on the web.

What is a link? Is a link clicks and traffic and Google rankings? Or does a link represent that I know you, that I’ve read your content, that you’re relevant and of value to me? Is a comment conversation or something I can buy or rent?

We’re living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. It’s the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. It’s the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social.

Dan Farber writes:

[Yahoo's] Speiser described search and social networks as dealing with two different problems. Search is more like the index of a book, with keywords with pages references. A social networks, like Facebook, is like a table of contents, and more about discovery and easier navigation.

We know who is winning on the search front today, and if Google were to acquire Facebook, we know who would be one of the leading table of contents, at least in terms of user profiles and relationship connections, in this second (Web 2.0) round of the battle.

“We can be a giant table of contents for the Web,” Speiser contended. “We intend to be one of the players providing a social graph.”

HipMojo.com writes:

If news is still wide open, this begs the question: what would constitute the perfect news product of the 21st century?

I think I can sum it up with three things: Topix + TechMeme + Digg. But, there’s something missing, or rather, all of those things have something to be desired. Oddly, none of those are search engines!

Don Dodge writes about how widgets can be monetised:

What is the business model for widgets?

* The Freemium model, upselling from free to premium services seems to be the best bet, at least for now. Many of the widgets provide a free service with options to buy premium services such as more detailed traffic statistics, more powerful services, enhanced customization, or higher levels of service.
* Sponsorship might make sense. A simple "Sponsored by Big Company" tagline across the bottom of the widget might fit well. I don't see how larger advertising units would work for a small widget, and I doubt the "hosts" would allow it.
* Revenue sharing with your host - Facebook and MySpace don't need to share their advertising revenues with the widget guys, but a smaller social network might want to. If I were the owner of a social network and wanted to build an ecosystem of developers building cool widgets on my platform I would indeed share some advertising revenue with them.
* Syndication network - If your widget distributes content widely,, think YouTube, then the content owners might want to pay you to get their content on your widget.

The Economist writes:

A new storage technology, which will go on sale in the next few weeks after years of development, can squeeze more onto a small disc or cartridge than ever before. With the potential to store hundreds of times more data on a disc than today's DVDs or even the latest high-capacity Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, holographic storage is about to hit the market.

Unlike DVDs, which store data in thin layers just beneath the surface of the disc, holographic storage encodes information in three dimensions, within the volume of the disc. This will enable the first holographic discs to store a colossal 300 gigabytes of data—12 times more than the latest Blu-ray discs and 60 times more than a standard DVD. And within a few years this capacity is expected to increase more than fivefold to 1.6 terabytes (1,600 gigabytes) of data—enough to store five seasons of a television drama, in high-definition video, on one disc. But as is so often the case with new storage formats, rival standards are under development.

Among other things, the iPhone also has Apple's Safari browser, which will make for an excellent Internet browsing experience. Not to mention that the phone runs the OS X operating system. As Lev Grossman wrote in Time in January: “They began by melting the face off a video iPod. No clickwheel, no keypad. They sheared off the entire front and replaced it with a huge, bright, vivid screen--that touch screen Jobs got so excited about a few paragraphs ago. When you need to dial, it shows you a keypad; when you need other buttons, the screen serves them up. When you want to watch a video, the buttons disappear. Suddenly, the interface isn't fixed and rigid, it's fluid and molten. Software replaces hardware...Into that iPod they stuffed a working version of Apple's operating system, OS X, so that the phone could handle real, nontoy applications like Web browsers and e-mail clients. They put in a cell antenna and two more antennas for wi-fi and Bluetooth, plus a bunch of sensors, so that the phone knows how bright its screen should be and whether it should display vertically or horizontally, and when it should turn off the touch screen so that you don't accidentally operate it with your ear.”

PC Magazine has a detailed analysis of tie iPhone features with other smartphones. “The iPhone occupies a unique place in the wireless market, straddling the line between smartphones, feature phones, and portable media players. In some cases, it exceeds the capabilities of all of these devices, while it lags behind in others. Will Apple's magic combination of killer design, features, and a revolutionary touch interface be enough to match its enormous hype? We're only a week away from finding out.”

New York Magazine wrote:

It took half an hour, no more than that, after Jobs unveiled his gleaming new toy for the bloggers to dub it the Jesus Phone. Here was the gizmo we’d all been pining for lo these many years: a music player, camera, e-mail tool, Web browser, and cell phone, all rolled into one impossibly seductive package. After watching Jobs enact the ta-da moment with typical brio—“I didn’t sleep a wink last night”—even cynical observers were smitten. “What a weird fucking day Tuesday was,” Josh Quittner, the editor of Business 2.0, remarked. “It was as if we were all participating in a shared consensual hallucination … All these supposedly hard-bitten tech reporters wandering around like they were getting laid for the first time.”

The panting over the Jesus Phone must have satisfied Jobs no end: Every product he crafts he regards as a sacred object, the primary aspiration of which is to incite naked lust. And in the months since then, the breathing has only gotten heavier. At the launch, the sales goals Jobs set forth were demure: 1 percent of the world market, about 10 million units, by the end of 2008. But industry analysts are less bashful. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster forecasts sales of 15.6 million units in that time—and 45 million in 2009. “Apple has been so good at executing these different multimedia elements with the Mac and iPod that they might be able to take over with their phone,” says a London-based telecom investor. “Nokia and the rest of those guys are absolutely shitting themselves.”

Jobs has done little to dampen either the giddiness or the panic. “It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made,” he says of the iPhone. “It’s an incredibly great cell phone … And it’s the Internet in your pocket for really the first time. If it was any one of those three, it would be successful … but it’s all three!”