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We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Moe, who is dead-set on snagging a 13-inch machine just as soon as a model is decided upon. Help a brother out, won’t you?

“I’m in the market for a new laptop, and I want a 13-incher. I need something with a great keyboard for typing, as this will mostly be used for note taking in class. I am absolutely smitten with the XPS 13, but I’m afraid that with its age Dell is going to give it an update soon. Any advice for someone in my shoes? Thanks!”

There’s no doubt that an update is around the corner, but there’s no telling how far that corner is from being reached. USB 3.0 updates are unavoidable, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see a few new SSD options creep up, either. That said, there’s nothing quite like the here and now, so if any of you ultraportable owners wish to help out, you know where to head.

Ask Engadget: Best 13-inch laptop on the market? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How does a scientist study a million genes? In my latest podcast I talk to John Wooley, a leading figure in the new science of metagenomics. Check it out.

G Thompson sends in this absolutely wonderful read by law professor Ben Challis, a former punk musician, explaining the mental back-and-forth he went through after discovering that some of his band’s old music is available online — specifically discovering that some sites are selling unauthorized copies of it. He reacts naturally at first — which is to get upset — but then as he thinks about it some more, he begins to recognize that this isn’t all that productive. Eventually he seems to come all the way around to realizing that this actually is really good market research for him.

He begins to reason through the arguments, recognizing that he and his (one surviving) bandmate haven’t actually put their own music online for sale, and they probably would have put some of it up for free anyway, so maybe having some free music out there isn’t that bad. But more importantly, he realizes that this means there’s actually both interest and demand in his old band (he even discovers that old copies of the band’s single are selling for £35), and he might as well do something about it, rather than worry about what others are doing:

And should I really worry at all? Well clearly at this scale, no, not really. But even so, it does get you thinking and suddenly you see beyond the immediate problems of ‘piracy’ to the new opportunities that come with the web. First of all, now I know we have fans, I have my new blog (I know you are desperate to know, it is www.theignerents.blogspot.com). I then began to think of what other opportunities there are beyond those that just pander to my ego. Well with the Blog, I will soon have set up a mechanism for collecting fan data — and databases are king now (I think!). And if we were still a band we could try and get a gig at the annual Rebellion Festival in Blackpool in March, the highlight of the punk calendar in the UK — and maybe try for a European punk festival or two too! And we could definitely try and sell those last few boxes of CDs I have somewhere — fans in Japan and Germany seem increasingly keen on Ignerents’ collectibles, or I could empty out my cupboards and try and find those last few copies of our first single I have — at £35 a pop that would pay for quite a few nice winter warmer! And what if I autograph them? Hang on, will the value go down? And maybe some PRS monies will come through – eventually I imagine they will; and hang on, and what about that Glastonbury Festival thingy — I work there — I know the main booker! So many possibilities, so little time!

It’s a funny old thing the internet: yes it has destroyed a number of traditional business models in the music industry, and maybe “Ignerence was bliss” for me until a few weeks ago — but the internet has created many many other new and interesting opportunities. The clever bands of the future will be the ones who can seize these opportunities and move quickly and nimbly from technology to technology and embrace and react to ever changing patterns in consumer behaviour.

This is really important. It’s totally natural for people to react the way Challis does above when they first see their work copied online. Even though we encourage people to copy our stuff, there are brief moments when I feel the same way when I see it. But then you think logically about it, and you realize that it’s up to you to do something positive about it, and use it to your advantage. Flipping out and going negative is a waste of time and does nothing valuable for anyone. But learning from it and realizing that it’s actually valuable market research can be quite powerful.

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Here’s the latest action:

Talk of an Apple event in January has sent the company’s shares to an all-time high. Rumors that the company will debut a highly anticipated tablet were set ablaze again after The Financial Times reported that Apple had rented the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for an event in January. Apple shares rose to $209.35, passing their previous high of $208.71. Boy Genius Report has further details on what the user interface might look like based on patent applications the company has filed. That new technology may cover what many iPhone critics have pointed out — tactile feedback!

Heyzap launches leaderboards. The company, which has described itself as the YouTube of Flash games, started offering developers an easy way to create leaderboards so that players can compete against their friends.

Is Google getting too much power in government? As more agencies and local institutions start relying on Google’s cloud-based software applications to handle everyday tasks, should there be regulation to limit the company’s ability to manage government data? Sherri Davidoff writes a thought-provoking essay on the topic:

“If Google (or an ISP) were to decide for whatever reason– economic, political– to cut us off from our data, governments using their services would be, well, Scroogled.

To me, this is an unacceptable level of control for a single private company to have over federal, state or local government. When you reach a point where the government cannot operate without a private company, then the private company has effectively gained control of the government.”

Speaking of cloud-computing, MIT’s Technology Review also did a survey for next month’s issue covering security concerns around the cloud.

Follow Santa on Twitter with the help of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. A holiday tradition since 1955, the military installation tracks Santa’s sleigh ride during Christmas Eve. They just recently started tweeting his whereabouts. NORAD has been doing this ever since a Colorado newspaper accidentally published their phone number as Santa’s contact in an advertisement more than fifty years ago. According to the Associated Press, when the first eager call came in from a child, a military colonel answered and played along with a booming “Ho, ho, ho!” because he couldn’t break the boy’s heart.

A backdoor way to get Google Voice onto the iPhone. Apple may have rejected Google Voice, igniting an government inquiry, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it on your phone. The developers behind a similar app (which was also pulled when Google Voice was) have released a “Black Swan” edition, a web application that syncs with Google Voice and mimics the feel of a native iPhone app.

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Merry Christmas, folks! If we were to put together a list of the things that Palm fanatics like all of you wanted for Christmas, more apps would be on just about everybody’s list. The good people at Palm know that and spent Christmas Eve pumping more apps into the App Catalog, with several new ones landing on our doorsteps. And as per usual, we’ve got the list for you, and it’s after the break.

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Tall, dark and handsome, and oh so fine!! These men embody many women’s definition of sexy.  Here are some of the finest men from the continent.

Great looks, great bodies, and a strong sense of determination and passion to make a difference in the lives of those around them.  We had a hard time choosing the sexiest ones so we put them all there for you to enjoy in random order.  Pick your sexiest man.  Who would you make number one?

Jamati Online has been running an annual highlight of some of the sexiest African women around the world today.  Each year it gets harder to pick a handful from the large numbers that are out there. Our focus this year is on women who are either making a difference through the careers that they have chosen, or are using their fame and fortune as a platform to highlight the plight of others and help garner support for them.

These women are not set up in any particular order.  They are beautiful, strong, and African and we are proud to claim them all. Tell us who you think should be number one.

Back in the fall, we told you about NYC’s BigApps competition, which encouraged technological innovation to benefit government and civic engagement. Public voting for the submitted applications opened this week.

One of the submissions to come out of this competition is Blocks and Lots, an interesting app and API that essentially expose all the property records – more than 5 million records, total – for New York City. For site owners, there’s a customizable widget that can be embedded in just about any kind of site.

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Blocks and Lots’ API allows developers to integrate detailed property information into any web or mobile application. Sample code is available in PHP and JavaScript.

Blocks and Lots comes from BlankSlate, an NYC startup offering a web platform and set of read/write APIs for making, sharing, monetizing, and monitoring web apps. The company provides capabilities such as data, file, user and payment management through REST APIs.

Using the same platform, BlankSlate was able to gather the city’s data files from 45 file sources from three different city agencies, import them and instantly export APIs. This process took just a few days.

For example, you can use the Blocks and Lots widget to dig into the property valuation for Ellis Island, which is apparently worth about as much as Zynga these days.

In the near future, Blocks and Lots will add location-aware iPhone and Android apps (i.e., the user’s mobile device will automatically retrieve property data depending on where the user it), and enabling the writable APIs to add user-generated content to the city’s data (e.g., photos, documents or text).

To vote for Blocks and Lots – or any of the other apps submitted in the BigApps competition – check out the app gallery and voting rules.

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My family laughed at me for wearing this shirt with my Santa Claus hat, but I’m just waiting on the tricks to begin tonight when the senate votes on health care reform. Maybe I’ll get my third Christmas wish list item or maybe there will be more tricks up the elephant’s sleeves. I guess I’ll find out sometime tonight. Anyway, to ChicagoNow readers, happy holidays to you and yours!

 

Updated 1/2/2010: I finally got a chance to read about the health care bill in full. Originally I found this article on The Chicago Tribune‘s site, but I can’t locate it anymore. Here is the same article on Yahoo News “A comparison of House, Senate health care bills” by Erica Werner and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar if you want to know what the new health care bill brings us in 2014. I am definitely pleased with the results.

Here’s hoping that the December holiday season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, Solstice, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, Festivus) renews your sense of wonder for a whole year to come. Postings to Cosmic Log will resume on Monday. In the meantime, here are some Web links to see you through the long weekend:

Wondering about the ‘Star of Wonder’
Telegraph: Angels can’t fly, scientist says
Planetary Society: Happy Christmas on Mars!
AIR: Our shrinking solar system and ‘Horton Sees a Pluto’ …(read more)

Merry, Happy and Joy, everyone! 2009 was a wonderful year in The Kitchn. I was so happy and inspired to be in the company of my fellow bloggers. Each week offered an opportunity to discover, explore and conjure up new tastes, handy tips and useful tools. Here are a few of my favorite posts.

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Someone anonymously submitted a decent writeup by John A. Byrne, the former editor-in-chief at Business Week who recently left (amid the shakeup due to Bloomberg buying the magazine) to start a new media effort called C-Change Media. In this blog post, Byrne argues that the media complaining about Google sending them traffic is biting the hand that feeds them. There’s really not much new in the writeup, which runs over the same ground we’ve covered for a few years now, but it’s a nice succinct summary of the situation:

Rupert Murdoch’s protestations aside, there is no doubt that Google is driving vast amounts of traffic to websites run by traditional media companies. In recent years, most of BusinessWeek.com’s growth came from search optimization and direct traffic. Up until only three years ago, the number one referring domain at BusinessWeek was always a portal until Google’s popularity replaced Yahoo Finance and MSN Money as the top referrer. Search–largely Google–now accounts for some 45% of the traffic at BW.com, up from less than 20% in 2006. That simple little box is driving vast amounts of advertising inventory (and therefore revenue) to the site. It’s a similar story everywhere else.

In the war between the traditional media brands and Google, the old cliche about biting the hand that feeds you is certainly in play. Some of the complaints from media can be attributed to sour grapes. Many incumbents resent that most efforts to find information on the Web no longer starts with a brand. It starts with Google which is largely brand agnostic. So, in effect, Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It’s how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it’s the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area. They’ll google (yes, I’m using Google as a verb) leadership before going to The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, or Harvard Business Review. They’ll google President Clinton before going to The New York Times, Time, or Newsweek. Why? Because they trust Google to serve up unbiased results; because they want to see what is generally available out there and not tied to a brand, and because most brands no longer wield the power and influence they did years ago.

Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers, viewers, users. To offset the massive transaction machine that Google is, media brands need to focus on restoring relationships with users. That’s why “user engagement” is not an idle phrase to throw around but is essential to making a brand successful online. Original content isn’t enough. Gee-whiz tech tricks aren’t enough. Neither is a fancy design or a search trap gimmick. You need an audience that is deeply and meaningfully engaged in the content of a site, so engaged in fact that many of those users become collaborators, and that requires tremendous amounts of work and editorial involvement with the audience.

Indeed. It’s the point we’ve been trying to make for ages. Newspapers were always in the community building business. They would bring together a community of folks and then sell their attention to advertisers. That was the business. But they thought they were in the news delivery business, and that’s confusing them — leading them to do things that are anti-community and anti-relationship (registration walls, paywalls, etc.) that actually harm the value of the community and limit that. Thus, people are going elsewhere for community — whether it’s other media publications or social network sites — and newspapers are lashing out at the wrong party: the one who sends them traffic.

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We need a better American citizen.

Found under: Sprint, WiMAX, Windows Mobile, ,

Its not just Verizon that seems to be working hard on 4G technology. Sprint is also pushing its own 4G version and it looks like the company is ready for a big announcement next year. On January 6 right after the Google Nexus One phone should be revealed Sprint will also launch a hot phone. The company has a must-attend event scheduled for CES in which Dan Hesse and Steve Ballmer will launch a very hot device. The phone possibly manufactured by LG should be Sprints first W

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We hate to be the bringers of bad news, but it looks like the Archos 9 might be serving as a bit of a morality tale, showing why and how PC hardware and software might not be quite ready for the large form factor tablet experience. That’s not to say there aren’t some plusses to the device pointed out by UMPC Portal in its review, like the great build quality and style of the tablet, the sensitive, flush touchscreen, and some great connectivity, but the sum seems less than its parts. The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the 1.1GHz Atom Z510 processor, which is sluggish and single-threaded, and Windows 7 Starter, which is lacking in the standard Windows 7 tablet functionality. We don’t know all the reasoning at play here, but the result is a slow computer with a hacked-on touchscreen keyboard at a $550 pricepoint that doesn’t the hit handheld UMPC size sweetspot and can hardly stand against a netbook in cost or utility. Sounds kind of mean when we say it like that, doesn’t it?

Archos 9 reviewed: too big, too slow, too ‘Starter’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Found under: Verizon, LTE, 4G, ,

One of the most important Verizon Wireless plans for 2010 is LTE. The new 4G network should bring consumers better download and upload speeds and Big Red will want to launch it in as many markets as possible next year. And it looks like Verizon means serious business when it comes to LTE. The company has scheduled a webcast event for January 20 2010 at 1100 AM ET which should give you more details about the upcoming 4G wireless devices. Verizons future LTE handsets will use th

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A map prepared for Michigan’s Great  Lakes Offshore Wind Council shows areas of high wind power production potential in the state’s offshore waters.

One of the first proposals for a major offshore wind project in America’s freshwater has surprised Michigan regulators and begun to stir opposition from onshore property owners. But the company behind the proposal says it has the potential to help right Michigan’s struggling economy with new jobs and leadership in wind energy development.

First disclosed last month, the Scandia Wind proposal to install 100 to 200 wind turbines two to four miles offshore in Lake Michigan for a 1,000-megawatt project comes after a September report by the state’s Great Lakes Wind Council.  That report outlined high potential areas in the state’s Great Lakes for wind power, while recommending turbines be placed as least six miles offshore.

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