The gatekeeper question is of course one of the big issues going forward. Are we replacing the old ones with new ones, just at the moment when the greatest possible freedom was in our grasp? I hope we are not giving up already.

I’m typing this on a Mac, so don’t count me among the Apple boycotters. What I will not do is support their closed, control-freakish iPhone OS ecosystem in any way I can avoid. Learn about it, and learn from it, sure. But my efforts will go into creating things for open systems, period.

I look forward to your wrap-up report.

Here’s the thing: you say, “I don’t believe journalists should participate in an ecosystem they don’t control,” but I think you may have phrased that more categorically than you intended. Because, really, journalists almost never control the ecosystem they participate in, do they? For starters, most professional journalists work for a company that they have zero control over. They produce stories for editors and publishers who they have no control over. Their work gets changed without their consent. And so on. So the traditional journalism world offers precious little control.

On the Web, things are better when you’ve got your own blog, and you know that’s a format I believe in. But go beyond that and, really, control becomes pretty elusive once more. There are gatekeepers everywhere.

Now, yes, Apple is a pretty egregious gatekeeper right now, and like you I resent Apple’s controlled-environment approach to media distribution. It’s hard for me to see how their model can last. The Mark Fiore affair was a harbinger of more intense controversies yet to come. I’m with you on all that.

But I guess I’m less of an absolutist and I don’t feel that I need to boycott Apple or people developing for it, either. I’m interested in the iPad and what people do with it, and though I’m not going to put my own creative energies into producing stuff to be distributed on it, I’ll try to keep up with what others are doing on it. I feel the same way about Facebook, another environment that doesn’t offer any real control or autonomy. I won’t put creative energy into Facebook, but I’m not going to disappear from it, because — whether I like it or not — it’s a big part of the online scene right now.

Along the same lines, I paid for an AOL account from roughtly 1994 to 1998 or so. Hated the service but needed to understand it in order to do my job.

FYI, we do have someone from Google coming to the event to talk about open web standards, so we are definitely embracing that.

And sure, happy to have an Android event too, one thing at a time.

Again, it would have been nice to be asked for comment or even simply see a Twitter mention of this post. And now that there is a response, seems it would be appropriate to update your post.

More important, I don’t believe journalists should participate in an ecosystem they don’t control, no matter how many people are using it. That’s the far larger issue.

Do a weekend on Android and I’ll be there.

I’m curious why you didn’t reach out for comment before writing this post. Yes, I understand the concerns about the iPad being a closed system. But we do intend to foster development of html5 apps that can easily run without app store approval. The fact is, the iPad is the tablet that is now on the market and being used by hundreds of thousands of consumers. Should we wait to develop tablet apps and let journalism keep falling behind? Or why not try to be ahead and learn about how news can work on tablets now?

It is instructive to see the different nature of questions asked on Hack Overflow, our StackExchange install, as compared to what goes on Stack Overflow. I hope that people will start posting more targeted questions to the H&H site.

I don’t know much about the iPad event; that was a local initiative.

Julie Drizin
@AIRMQ2