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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.

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.

Howard Owens talks (among other things) about the value of trying small seat-of-the-pants ideas that can move a media property forward. Yes.

Insistence on applying metrics stops these little efforts, Owen says. I think there's also a print mindset that likes things always finished, which is antithetical to the mind of the online tinkerer, who perpetually works in draft, and likes it that way.

Print editor: Is it done?

Online editor: No, it's never done. Isn't that great?

Print editor: I hate that part. How can you stand it?

Online editor: Well, the downsides are balanced by all kinds of joys. The least of them: can you snatch back your magazine out of the reader's inbox?

Concreteness and product and sure bets versus flux and process and experimentation.

While reminding myself this afternoon how Moodle's glossary module works I noticed it has its own RSS feed. It could be the feed is mainly intended so instructors can be notified when a student submits a new term. But it struck me it could also be output in a different way to make a little word-of-the-day widget.

I'm messing around with the glossary with an eye toward putting some textbook glossaries online for work, and possibly trying to make it work as an English-Spanish safety dictionary.

I was so happy to see all the developers popping up with ideas in answer to Dave Winer's advice request for the best way to go about porting the OPML Editor to Linux. Great idea to approach it that way, and get a fresh crop of techies thinking about it. The open-source Frontier crowd doesn't seem to be doing much at all anymore.

God knows I don't work at that level, and barely even understand what's needed or what the aim is, but I know I'd love to see the Linux build so the OPML Editor Community Server can run on it. That makes all kinds of sense.

But who knows, maybe Dave is thinking more along the lines of fractional horsepower servers. That's cool, too, and even more groundbreaking.

Hell yeah, I'd put a teensy web server in my little Sansa mp3 player to sync podcasts with my home network. Put one in my cat's collar or on the bottom of my shampoo bottle. Or, how about this? In a bookmark in my paper book that tells me where I left off so I can continue in audio when I get in the car?

Maybe this widget has been around for a while but I only noticed it today at the bottom of a story about disputed war casualty counts. (You may have to log in to WaPo.) Made in Flash and served on the Clearspring widget platform. I'll check out Clearspring.

I've been writing some fiction on my OPML blog, an experiment using paid posts as product placements within the story. (Except after doing it for a few days, my enthusiasm about the paid post aspect is waning.)

I'll be archiving the story here, using the Drupal book module.

If I published a draft of my two-thirds-finished novel with a service like Lulu and ordered a copy for myself, I wonder if it would inspire me to finish it?

I had not gone looking for these demand services in a number of years. I notice CafePress doesn't do it anymore. When did that happen and why, I wonder.