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What do you think about Kindle content on iPhone? I was dead set against the whole thing when I first heard about it.

A few days later comes moderation and accommodation with the idea of it – just not for novels, never for novels.

I figure you need to make yourself perfectly comfortable when consuming media that's strictly for entertainment. So, while I love my iPhone and how it gives me a convenient way of dipping into my streams at any time or place, I want no squinting or any sort of discomfort when I'm about to spend five hours at a stretch with a story.

An analogy might be a movie theatre in the days when they still had newsreels. If all you cared about was the news, you wouldn't mind a stand-up movie house: catch up on the news, be on your way. You kind of want to sit down in a cushy seat to lose yourself in the movie.

If you're a fan of Orson Scott Card's Ender series, check out "Mazer in Prison," about a small slice of the general's time in forced relativistic flight. If you recall, he had to take a trip just to prolong his life so he could train Ender.

At this point Mazer Rackham didn't know it was going to be Ender who would command over the last war, or even that the IF had settled on recruiting children, but he does make Hiram Graff's acquaintance via ansible, and that's the interesting bit.

Here's the interesting business bit for me. The story was written for Card's online Intergalactic Medicine Show magazine. I'm not likely to buy it, even for $2.50 an issue, because I don't read all that much science fiction generally, just Card and a couple others, and not all of Card -- I like Ender and Alvin Maker. It's nice that Card is trying to bring along less familiar scifi writers, but you can't force readers to try something new.

I was drawn to the idea of an audio short story. It's just over an hour and only cost 69 cents (member pricing) on Audible. Just a snack to please myself.

That's going to be the key to the success of micropayments -- for newspaper stories or anything else. The purchase has to be one-off and small. Like iTunes. You don't think twice about buying something that costs less than a dollar. For a news story it would have to be pennies. It's like an impulse candy bar purchase at the checkout. Subscriptions or any sort of commitment isn't going to work.

It's not just that the price makes a negligible dent in your budget, there's something fun about buying something that's valuable and pleasurable for such a small amount of money. You feel like you got a bargain, almost like you've gotten away with something, and in hard times I think more and more people might get off on that feeling.

I righted a terrible oversight and watched the 1949 movie, "The Third Man" for the first time today.

The Criterion Collection DVD is a real treat for fans of literary adaptations. The treatment by Graham Greene was written in novella form and is read aloud as an audio track option.

It's a repository of speeches and other presentations that lets you embed video, and download audio, video or transcripts.

Check out the way you can follow along in the transcript while the video is playing, and skip to "chapters."

Here's a Commonwealth Club talk given last year by Paul Krugman.

It looks like just the video is embeddable, not the running transcript feature.

New York Times interactive features are getting better and better. Check out this Flashy way of displaying movie box office earnings and theatre run longevity.

It's beautiful.

Note that it's almost a year old. One thing I've struggled with in making web features for magazine I work for is: how much time can you afford to keep them updated? So far our answer has hinged on how many readers are still looking at them. In general it seems that certain features become unpredictably "pass-alongable." Things like quizzes, and if they contain timely info we update them.

Essence magazine did nice job in integrating the site look into Ning for its community site.

The community has about 2,500 members, and doesn't look very old.

Aspen Institute conferences attract heavy-hitter speakers and present some fascinating topics. Talks are nicely archived here.

I've been especially enjoying the NYTimes David Brooks' talk on Neuroscience and Socicology.

Here's another good one: Clay Shirky talking about the ideas behind his book, Here Comes Everybody.

Only two criticisms of the Aspen video offerings: how about RSS and sharing?

Providing the MP3s is a nice touch. I'm going to take advantage of them this morning. Watch a little more of the Brooks talk, then listen to more of it on my commute.

The notion of switching media to suit where you are -- or what sort of media mood you're in -- appeals to me. I've often wished I could do that with books: read the tactile product when I'm at home, and bookmark my leaving-off point so I can pick it up on audio. It seems like the Kindle theoretically could do something like that.

Kindle is sold out until after Dec. 24.

While all sorts of office applications are going online -- Google Docs, Zoho, and they're getting better all the time -- Web 2.0 hasn't come to more complicated applications.

Online stats packages are available, but visit a few of the apps listed on this page and you might come away with the same impression I have -- that have a sort of homemade feel, and a mission to discourage all but the geekiest stats geeks.

Maybe the market for it isn't large enough to bring the sector into the mainstream. Yet. Or it's entirely possible the largely academic audience for such tools actually likes the 1996 vibe. Don't laugh; there's something to that. It means to a user, "This is so not a commercial gig. We're not slicksters here; we're not pitching you."

Yes, the Hardball host started a fundraising phenomenon in the 6th congressional district in Minnesota with his Oct. 17 MSNBC interview with incumbent Michele Bachmann. She called for a media investigation into members of congress to see which of them might be anti-American.

But, Chris, come on. Be a little generous to the internet effect. You implied on Monday night's show that it was entirely the power of your show that drove outraged viewers to contribute hundreds of thousands to Bachmann's opponent.

You did good, but what you did was to start a viral effect. Check out the blogs that helped spread the influence of your interview in the first few days. Factor in the rabid use among politics junkies of microblogging tools like Twitter that have replaced our RSS readers to pass around these blog and video links, and there you go.

A single interview in isolation would not have caused the Democratic National Committee to take notice of Elwyn Tinklenberg's campaign. Thank you for getting the snowball rolling, but individual contributions flooded in from the combined influence of your interview and the net effect. The DNC recognized the resultant phenomenon. There was a team at work here, and as quarterback it would be gracious of you to acknowledge the whole squad.

See the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report for details.

Don't be fooled by John McCain's shell game. It's not plumbers that he and the Republicans are concerned about. All the railing against "spreading the wealth around" is focused on keeping the trend going just the way it's been headed.

The GOP always uses small business as a dodge to persuade ordinary folks they should favor policies benefiting the base that Republicans listen to when it's not election season -- big companies and the very rich. George Bush was fond of traveling to little machine shops or other blue-collar settings to talk about business taxes. Nice trick.

The heartland buys it, too, and that worries me a little. We're still living in the Cold War era in so many ways. The Red Scare still works.

Fact is a lot of economists, including Alan Greenspan, think the growing disparity in income in the U.S. is dangerous for the economy. The gulf hasn't been this wide (.pdf file) since that other depression.