Mark Hedlund, for example, is a super-smart guy. But I’m baffled by his post praising the iPad for its lack of multitasking capabilities — running more than one program at once so users can a) let automatic updates occur behind the scenes while they do stuff, such as read or work, in the foreground; and b) quickly switch back and forth, working on several tasks in a quasi-parallel mode.

I’m not the only one who thinks multitasking is an essential part of a modern computing device. In Apple’s case, the Pope Steve Jobs has decreed multitasking will be in the next version of the iPhone operating system, which is also the software heart of the iPad.

In any event, Marc writes that the iPad is in a different category from a personal computer. I agree on that, to a degree, but consider what that means to Marc:

I love how focused I am using an iPad, versus working on a laptop. New mail isn’t constantly arriving; tweets aren’t Growling into view; I don’t even have an RSS reader installed. Instead I’m just reading a book or just playing a game or maybe just working. This is a huge relief, an antidote to interruption. (I’m sure having more than just one app running, as promised in OS 4.0, will be a benefit in some ways, but for today I love not having it.)

That focus, plus the direct manipulation interface that loses mouse and keyboard in favor of pointing and tapping, makes the experience of using an app more intimate than on a laptop. I think now of personal computing and iPad computing as significantly different. It’s not just a different form factor, but a different kind of work that I do on the iPad. Put simply, it seems to produce a flow state much more easily for me, and once I’m in it, I fall out into distraction much less easily.

I confess, I don’t get it.

Although the Mac I’m using to write this posting has multitasking built into the operating system, it’s my decision whether to become distracted or not as I work. I choose, at the moment, not to be distracted by Twitter, email or the latest news from my favorite journalists and bloggers. I choose to be writing this post, and I’ll stop when I’m finished.

I can prevent email and Tweets from arriving (and often do) without crippling the computer. Here’s my system: I often shut down my email and Twitter software when I’m working on a blog post or book chapter or anything else demanding as much of my attention as I’m able to give. Works like a charm, and when I want to leave myself open to distraction again I start up the other software.

Again, I’m not oblivious to Marc’s basic point: He doesn’t see the iPad as a a computer as much as a device that he wants to use for only one thing at a time, given its size and features. When I get a tablet device, however, I’ll want the option even if I rarely use it.

What single thing can each of us do to to assure that we and our communities (of interest and geography) have enough trustworthy, useful information?

That’s the “Question of the Week“  at Nokia’s IdeasProject.com. The idea is that once a week, someone involved in the project asks a question that sparks some interesting ideas and conversation.

Next Sunday, I’ll pick the best response. Remember, I’m looking for a single thing we each can do; you probably have a dozen good suggestions, but pick the one that will give us the greatest return for our time.

There’s a reward for the best answer: The one who comes up with it gets a Nokia phone.

Some background to my question, which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following our conversations here already:

We are in a splintering media world where anyone can commit a globally visible act of journalism — or deception. This means we’re awash in both good and bad information, and if Theodore Sturgeon’s maxim is true, most of it is crud. But with the huge amount of new stuff out there, this also means that there’s an enormous amount of good stuff, too.

So how do we sort the good from the bad? I’ve discussed it at some length in my own new project, but I’d like to be sure I haven’t missed anything.

To answer the question, visit http://bit.ly/9HOh7x to get directly to the Question of the Week. I’ll be updating here and on Twitter during the week. Please use the hashtag “#ideasproject”.

While you’re visiting IdeasProject.com, be sure to spend a little time looking at the other folks who’ve contributed not just the weekly questions but a whole variety of other thoughts, including Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, Robert Scoble and many others.

Several disclosures: Nokia is giving me one of their Netbooks in return for participating in this feature; I plan to donate it to a local school. In addition, in 2009 Nokia purchased Dopplr.com, a company I co-founded. I also have friends at Nokia, and the company gave us some phones several years ago to do mobile experiments as part of student projects.

I’ll talk about Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett and Munger in a separate post on my personal blog. It seems appropriate here, however, to chat briefly about the pros and cons of live-blogging versus live-tweeting, etc.

My regular Twitter followers were definitely not expecting the fire hose from me; normally I post anywhere from zero to a dozen or so Tweets a day, usually in the 6-9 range. Suddenly my Twitter stream turned into a torrent, and it came as a surprise to some followers.

One follower and good friend shot me an email asking, basically, WTF I was doing. I explained and said it was an experiment, probably a one-off. He replied, in turn, that he was kind of enjoying it, but still…

I’m fairly sure it was a one-time affair, and here’s why:

Live-tweeting strikes me as the wrong tool for this kind of task. It’s an impressionistic medium, not a deep one, at least so far in its history. If I’m going to keep notes for you about an event I’m witnessing, I’d prefer that you be able to find them easily as I write them — but also to find them in one place when it’s over.

The plus side of live-tweeting stems not just from what one person writes, but very much as well from others’ contributions to a running group observation and commentary. Hashtags make this easy. (I posted the Berkshire material with the #brk2010 hashtag, which a number of other journalists were using.) Following a group’s blog posts is, due to the nature of that medium, more difficult.

Other tools for this task include the excellent CoverItLive, which I’ll try sometime soon at an event I find newsworthy enough. One advantage of CoverItLive is the ability of several people to simultaneously add to the stream. (Is there a good open-source tool or WordPress plug-in that does the same things or has significant portion of the same features?)

But I’m leaning toward making it simple, and just using a blog from now on. I’d rather keep stuff on my own site, thank you, than turn it over to another company and the ever-morphing terms of service we see from providers of all kinds.

One worry this weekend turned out not to be a big deal: annoying people sufficiently that they’d unfollow me. A few did, especially during the Sunday press conference. Yet more started following at the same time, and the day left me with a net gain.

Bottom line: Next time I do something like this, I’ll probably live-blog and point to it from Twitter.

Of course, I’m still thinking about all this, and reserve the right to change my mind. More than once…

Serious Games Summit
Several interesting things came up at the Serious Games Summit, which is the session track for examining games used for purposes other than entertainment (not that entertainment isn’t a worthy goal itself). Here are the highlights:

• Soren Johnson contrasted game theme with mechanic in a talk titled “Theme is not meaning.” This is an important breakdown when it comes to games literacy as game mechanics tend to deliver the real meaning in a game. Johnson’s thesis was that a game’s window dressing was just that unless the mechanic matched. The Redistricting Game was offered of a solid example of matching theme with mechanic as the player is tasked with literally drawing new voting district lines to win needed votes. The discussion goes much deeper and Chris Dahlen writes more about the talk here.
• Borut Pfeifer has been working on a game about crowds in the Iranian Election. Named The Unconcerned, the game pulls the player through the streets of the Iranian election by putting her in the shoes of parents looking for their daughter. Pfeifer’s talk covered prototyping and the many iterations along the way to figuring out what played well. The biggest takeaway here concerns creation. Traditionally, creating media involved getting one’s ducks in a neat row before creation began. However, games and other digital media find success in testing and getting feedback on many rough drafts along the way. I’m going to hunt down some links for the best practices for iterative design for the Mediactive Tools section.
• While the talk strayed more into digital entrepreneurship, Jelena Godjevac presented a case study of Blossom, a game that places the player in the role of a small business owner. Blossom came out of Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I) as a game-based way of furthering local micro-business. They’re looking for new ideas for games that teach entrepreneurship and are teaming up with HP in a design contest. I’d love to see submissions related to digital media entrepreneurs, like starting a local news site or training citizen journalists.

Game Writers’ Roundtable
Several worthwhile tips came out of a roundtable of both professional and amateur game writers. Here are the ones that apply well to digital media creation.

• Show don’t tell – In an interactive environment, show a story before using words. Figure out what you can say with other forms of media. This applies to even something like blogs. Can you set your stage with a good photo or video? Does a link or a podcast say it better than you can?
• If you can’t tweet it, you shouldn’t write it – This came up in the context of dialogue and text in midst of play. The same could be applied to captions, explanations of mashups and even one’s YouTube video descriptions. There are excellent uses for long form, but if your creation is multimedia, don’t burden it with text. Err on the side of brevity.

Farmville
Social games were a hot topic at the GDC this year, both for the massive jump in people playing these games and for their lucrative nature. I sat in on a session with Mark Skaggs of Farmville where he explained the game’s development process. Farmville itself has been a bit of a phenomenon and a rather controversial one.

Most interesting for Mediactive’s purposes are the rapid creation and development of Farmville. According to Skaggs, the initial team was composed of less than ten people and was developed in five weeks. From the point of release, the game acquired about 1,000,000 new users per week, an above-expectations rate. This critical mass gave the team lots of data, which informed the design going forward. Skaggs explained “fun” as something hard to measure, while behavior could be tracked by clicks. When strawberries received a large number of clicks, the team created “Super Berries” and the resulting popularity nearly crashed the server. This is just one example, but every game action and click was evaluated for new direction in content.

I see a couple lessons here that apply to digital media:

1. Release quickly and design based on data and user feedback.
2. Data-driven design requires greater discussion when it comes to news. Lots of clicks can tell you if a story is popular, but a click can’t tell you if the reader was informed. As well, a click may tell a creator if people enjoy content, but not the impact of that content. For example, a reader may spend more clicks in a day on what celebrities are wearing, but one click given to a long form political story may have the greatest impact on a future vote.

Beyond what I’ve covered here. I ran into some interesting tools for media creation, which I’ll be testing and posting to the Tools page. Games and interactive environments are ripe for experimentation when it comes to new media and I’m excited to see what emerges over time.

an interactive online tutorial for students wanting an introduction to research skills. The tutorial covers the basics, including how to select a topic and develop research questions, as well as how to select, search for, find, and evaluate information sources.

I tend to worship librarians. This is one reason why.

Unfortunately, some sites are creating link aggregations that appear to have another purpose: keeping you as long as possible inside their own garden and only letting you out if you persist. It’s a shoddy practice, and from my perspective it appears to be a growing one.

Go to the homepage of Slate, as I just did, and you’ll see the following list, a new feature the publication calls “The Slatest” — links to journalism on the Web that Slate considers especially worth seeing:

Hmmm. That top item about banks too big to fail sounds interesting. You click on it and you’re taken to this page:

Well, that’s not especially helpful. So you click again on the top item, and you’ll find this:

You start to ask yourself if you can ever read the actual story that Slate finds so worthy. It turns out that you can, if you click inside the long description of the piece — a summary that basically rewrites the original — on a hyperlink that finally, finally takes you to the original journalism.

Making users jump through hoops creates disdain, not loyalty. Let’s hope the beta version of Slatest gets replaced by something truly useful. Right now, what they’re doing is annoying and little else.

The list of 11 wasn’t meant to be comprehensive. Still, I’ve been asked if those items represented everything on my hypothetical plate. Of course not. (Contrary to what some folks said about the previous list, these aren’t just aimed at newspapers; they apply to any media organization that purports to do journalism.)

Anyway, here are 11 more things, not in any particular order, that I’d insist on if I ran a news organization.

1. Nix on anonymous sources: Except in the most dire of circumstances — such as a threat to a whistleblower’s life, liberty or livelihood — we would not quote or paraphrase unnamed sources in any of our journalism. If we did, we would need persuasive evidence from the source as to why we should break this rule, and we’d explain why in our coverage. Moreover, when we did grant anonymity, we’d offer our audience the following guidance: We believe this is one of the rare times when anonymity is justified, but we urge you to exercise appropriate skepticism.

2. Blow the whistle on liars: If we granted anonmyity and learned that the source had lied to us, we would consider the confidentially agreement to have been breached by that person, and would expose his or her duplicity, and identity. Sources would know of this policy before we published. We’d further look for examples where our competitors have been tricked by sources they didn’t name, and then do our best to expose them, too.

3. Mustn’t do this: The word “must” — as in “The president must do this or that” — would be banned from editorials or other commentary from our own journalists, and we’d strongly discourage it from contributors. It is a hollow verb and only emphasizes powerlessness. If we wanted someone to do something, we’d try persuasion instead, explaining why it’s a good idea (though almost not certainly an original one with us) and what the consequences will be if the advice is ignored.

4. Point to competitors: We’d routinely point to our competitors’ work, including (and maybe especially) the best of the new entrants, e.g. bloggers who cover specific niches. When we’d covered the same topic, we’d link to them so our audience can gain more perspectives. We’d also talk about and point to competitors when they covered things we missed or ignored.

5. Pile on big stories: Beyond routinely pointing to competitors, we would make a special effort to cover and follow up on their most important work, instead of the common practice today of pretending it didn’t exist. Basic rule: The more we wish we’d done the journalism ourselves, the more prominent the exposure we’d give the other folks’ work. This would have at least two beneficial effects. First, we’d help persuade our community of an issue’s importance. Second, we’d help people understand the value of solid journalism, no matter who did it.

6. Be relentless: The more we believed an issue was of importance to our community, the more relentlessly we’d stay on top of it ourselves. If we concluded that continuing down a current policy path was a danger, we’d actively campaign to persuade people to change course. This would have meant, for example, loud and persistent warnings about the danger of the blatantly obvious housing/financial bubble that inflated during this decade.

7. “Start Here”: For any person or topic we covered regularly, we would provide a “baseline” — an article (or video, etc.) where people could start if they were new to the topic, and point prominently to that “start here” piece from any new coverage. We might use a modified Wikipedia approach to keep the article current with the most important updates. The point would be context, giving some people a way to get quickly up to speed and others a way to recall the context of the issue.

8. Do Something About It: For any coverage where this made sense, we’d tell our audience members how they could act on the information we’d just given them. This would typically take the form of a “What You Can Do” box or pointer.

9. No sock puppets: We’d work in every possible way to help our audience know who’s behind the words and actions. People and institutions frequently try to influence the rest of us in ways that hide their participation in the debate, and we’d do our best to reveal who’s spending money and pulling strings. When our competitors declined to reveal such things, or failed to ask obvious questions of their sources, we’d talk about their journalistic failures in our own coverage of the issues.

10. Assess risks honestly: Journalists constantly use anecdotal evidence in ways that frighten the public into believing this or that problem is larger than it actually is. As a result, people have almost no idea what are statistically more risky behaviors or situations. And lawmakers, responding to media-fed public fears, often pass laws that do much more aggregate harm than good. We would make it a habit a) not to extrapolate a wider threat from weird or tragic anecdotes; b) to frequently discuss the major risks we face and compare them statistically to the minor ones; and c) debunk the most egregious examples of horrible stories that spark unnecessary fear or even panic.

11. No op-eds from major politicians or executives. OK, this is a minor item. But these folks almost never actually write what appears under their bylines. We’re being just as dishonest as they are by using this stuff. If they want to pitch a policy, they should post it on their own web pages, and we’ll be happy to point to it.

On August 7, the New York Times published a Floyd Norris column criticizing General Electric for financial shenanigans that Norris called Enron-like in some respects. The piece was another bit of the accumulating evidence that the tenure of former CEO Jack Welch had sufficiently sleazy elements to call into question, to put it mildly, Welch’s super-duper-elite reputation.

GE, like most other big companies, pays legions of people to make bad news go away or at least be less bad. In a letter to the editor published Sept. 9 (the one-month delay is curious), the company’s “Executive Director, Communications and Public Affairs” objected to Norris’ column.

The next afternoon, Norris responded in his blog in a posting entitled, “Was I Unfair to G.E.?” In the posting, which as you’d guess answers that question in the negative, Norris linked to some useful Securities and Exchange Commission documents. He also invited a further response from GE.

The GE reply arrived that evening as a comment under the posting, whichi Norris noted as an addendum at the bottom of the posting and then published as a “G.E. Responds” blog posting in its own right. Norris said discuss “parts of that response in a subsequent blog posting,” which as far as I can tell hasn’t appeared yet.

What’s good about this sequence is the conversation — the newspaper being willing to engage in a substantive back-and-forth about a story. Never mind that the odds are slim that Norris or other Times journalists would do this with most of the people they write about, at least the ones who aren’t representatives of the richest and most powerful companies and institutions, much less engage in true conversation with their audience. Let’s applaud the progress, because it is real in this case.

What’s not so good is the way the sequence appears. The original column has a tagline inviting people to visit Norris’ blog, but no hyperlink to the URL that was printed in the paper in the first place. There’s no link to the follow-up letter in the column, much less the conversation that’s now taking place in the blog.

Ideally, the place to let the conversation take place is where it started: below or next to the column, with links inside every element of the conversation back through its threads. This would give people a much better way to figure out what’s going on, and to make their own judgements about GE’s behavior. (For my part, it’s obvious that GE protests too much. If anything, I think Norris went too easy on the company.)

This isn’t just a problem at the Times. Following conversations that take place across sites and blogs can be difficult if not impossible. We need much better tools to track these things coherently in a general way.

But it wouldn’t have been difficult for the Times to do this with material appearing entirely within its own servers. So while kudos are definitely to Norris and his bosses for the engagement, we can wish they realized that they can do it even better.

When called on this by White House journalists, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs responded with arrogance. He demonstrated not just contempt for the Washington press corps (which does often earn contempt) but also to the administration’s promises of openness and bottom-up accountability. A shabby performance, and worrisome if you care about how this White House will behave when its current public favor diminishes, as it surely will.

So when you watch one of these events in the future, be aware that there’s barely a shred of the give-and-take we were promised. This White House would rather rely, at least for now, on the kind of staging that previous presidents used so often, and which candidate Obama and many of his aides and supporters found so correctly offensive.

(Taken at Personal Democracy Forum)