Oh man, great morning for links. Here's an interesting conversation about online publishing between Bob Guccione, Jr. (a major figure in the magazine industry) and Gaby Darbyshire, VP of Gawker Media (one of the top web publishing companies).

One of the best bits:

Online media isn't after all so different from offline media, though: the best content, with the most loyal readership, wins out and gets the revenue to survive while others fall by the wayside. The difference is that a niche operation can survive on a fairly small budget with staggering distribution potential online in a way that offline operations never could. So that means more choice for the consumer, which is a good thing if you are the consumer who was underserved before. But beware too much choice: it leads to decision paralysis, and so you reduce your intake to a manageable level--and that in turn diminishes the size of the available pie to sustain new content creation. There's a lot of white noise out there, and a lot of people betting on being the voice that's heard above the din. It's no different with TV, or books, or any other form of media in any era.

Sure most of that is stuff I've been saying for years, but if, like me, you're looking for a little inspiration to keep at your nascent web publishing business, this is an excellent read.

As a white person, I love Sarah Silverman. I also get quite a kick out of presidential politics. Ergo, imagine how thrilled I was to discover the following video, put together as part of "The Great Schlep" — an effort to get young Jews to talk to older Jews about Barack Obama:

Well, they don't make 'em like they used to. Case in point: my Nintendo Wii died a few days ago. It lived a pretty leisurely life on my (well-ventelated) entertainment center before passing away from what I believe is a fried motherboard. It was only ... let's see ... two years old? Meanwhile, I have an original NES that still works after 22 years (you know, provided you blow on it).

Well, since I can't currently log in to my freshly Leopard-ized Mac G5 here at the office and thus have to make due with the Adobe Creative Suite-less HP PC that also sits on my desk, I figured I would crank out a blog post. And naturally the topic is going to be those new Microsoft ads which I wrote about in the last post.

By now, you've seen them: The not-quite-adorably dorky "sean@windows.com", an obvious stand-in for Apple's "PC" character, announces he's a PC and that he's been stereotyped, which launches us into a series of people proclaiming they, too, are PCs. These people include a fashion designer, a genetic scientist, a shark researcher and someone with a beard whom I suspect writes comic books... but, more notably, the commercial also includes "I'm a PC" claims by such celebrities as Pharrell Williams, Deepak Chopra and Eva Longoria.

Being a bunch of Mac-centric elitists, bloggers have been all over this story and they've been working hard to "expose" the celebrities as Apple fans. Turns out Deepak once wrote a blog post in which he said something positive about iPods (scandalous, I know). But it gets worse: allegedly, Eva Longoria was once seen in an airport using a Mac laptop. If that doesn't shake your confidence in the world of advertising, get this: Pharrell Williams not only uses an iPhone but he is on record saying he likes Macs. Is there no deceny left in the world?

OK, here's the real deal: Mac vs. PC is stupid. Look, I like Macs... I'm really happy that I get to use one at work and that I have one at home. I feel like the Mac user experience is better thought-out than the Windows one (though there are certaily some questionable UI decisions in Leopard) and there are countless small things that make the Mac more enjoyable to use (iPhoto is not one of them, by the way). But in the end, it's just a computer and you pay a huge premium for those countless small things. What's more, there's a certain pride in being able to build your own PC from scratch even if it will never have quite the fit and finish of a Mac. To be perfectly honest with you, there are times when I miss that DIY feel (and Picasa — I miss that a lot). But everything has trade-offs and opportunity costs ... one thing isn't inherently better than something else. Except for Picasa, which is superior to iPhoto.

Attentive readers may remember about a month ago news broke that Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates were teaming up to star in a series of ads designed to help change the perception that Windows is uncool.

The first ad was a bizarrely unfunny 60-second farce set in a discount shoe store. Once it hit the airwaves the reaction on the internet was an almost universal "WTF?" ... even my sister got in on the act.

Well, after just one more ad in the Seinfeld/Gates series, Microsoft is canceling the campaign and replacing it with one that seeks to directly address the stereotype of PC users created by Apple's "Mac vs. PC" ads. The new MS ads seek to do so by (a) the use of a John Hodgman look-alike saying he's been unjustly maligned and (b) showing that hip celebrities like Eva Longoria and and Deepak Chopra use PCs.

Setting aside the fact that this makes the mighty Microsoft look like it's reacting to a company with a tiny fraction of its market share, the most entertaining thing about this is that Microsoft is claiming they'd always intended on dropping Seinfeld after two ads.

From the article:

"This has always been the plan from the beginning," said David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft. "There is a storytelling arc between [the two iterations], even if the tone and style are different," around the idea that "Windows has connected 1 billion people."