“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.'” It’s hard to believe now, but back when the iPhone first came out, Google engineers were busy building a mobile OS to compete with Microsoft. Then iPhone happened.

+ My indie syndication partner Jason Kottke plans to keep on blogging. But his latest piece makes the case that oldies like us may be the last of the traditional bloggers: “Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.” The blog is dead, long live the blog.