DISQUS

Why the pre fails for me in one word: Sprint.

What's sneaky about it? They've long encouraged IE6 users to upgrade to IE7. Now that there's a demonstrable speed increase in moving from IE7 to Firefox or Chrome, they encourage users to switch. If Gmail is slow because of the browser, users blame Google, not Microsoft.

The idea that this will "lessen the brand" (whatever that means) is just stupid. Walmart already sells the $399 32 GB Touch, and it hasn't seemed to lessen demand. This isn't about selling cheap iPhones, no matter what the hipsters think of Walmart. It's about selling iPhones to the many, many people who live near a Walmart but aren't anywhere close to an Apple Store or a Best Buy. Judging from my experience, they're far more likely to get good service from Walmart than an AT&T store. Besides, anything that makes the "I'm better than you because I have an iPhone" crowd uncomfortable is a good thing (and I say that as an iPhone owner).

More expensive than p2p, but also significantly less illegal. That may not matter to many, but it does matter to some of us. I have no particular loyalty to the iTMS, so if someone else has songs for less than a buck or albums for less than ten and I can get them on my iPod, then I'll check it out. What the labels really want is variable pricing, so some stuff is marginally cheaper, but some stuff is materially more expensive. The average cost of a track on Amazon/Wal-Mart won't be less than $0.99 for long.

In Engadget's case, I've begun to wonder if their software does it automagically. Two-thirds of their self-links are links to tags, so is it possible those links are automatically added to the first instance of any use of a post that includes a word that happens to be a tag? The remaining links are actually useful (links to a specific previous post on a topic), although they hardly ever make any effort to provide contextual information via the keyword linked (a little bit of usability most bloggers ignore).

Techcrunch's self-links, on the other hand, are to their directory of companies, and are clearly hand-coded. Lazy and useless.

Will Zillow succeed as a hyperlocal news hub? Probably not. I just don't see anyone heading there who's not in the market to buy a house, sell a house, or extract information about their neighbors because they are nosy.

That doesn't mean it will be a failure, however. US laws and Realtor codes of conduct mean that there is a host of information realtors cannot provide buyers. How are the schools? What's the crime rate? How many students get free or reduced-price lunch (unfair and classist, perhaps, but fairly well correlated with school performance)? All of this information is easily obtainable, just not from your agent. If it (and more subjective discussion of "is the neighborhood a nice place to live") is available from Zillow, it gives them something their meatspace competitors don't have.