On the iPad, I’m not sure I agree with Dave that Google’s own “pad” will be out anytime soon. I think we’ll see a lot of Android tablets produced by Taiwanese entrepreneurs which will have various levels of user interface sophistication that will start out crude and gradually catch up with where Apple is today in a few years.

As an education tech person, I’m thinking that gateless tablets might be extremely compelling as read-write devices in schools if the price were low enough.

Minor request: Can Dave get a better mic or connection? Jay (probably in his multi-gillion-dollar NYU media lab) sounds terrific, but Dave’s voice is sometimes hard to hear without the high-end of a good mic.

“Question Time” can indeed be formulaic, although there are similar exchanges between members of the parties on most days in the Parliamentary system. One of the upshots of this, as you suggest, Jay, is that there is not quite so much reliance on the equivalent of the “White House press briefing”.

One very interesting upshot of this is the much more combative relationship between the press and politicians, specifically on the BBC4 morning radio show “Today” and the nighttime television show “Newsnight”. A typical interchange features the news presenter asking a question, the politician refusing to answer it explicitly, the presenter asking again, the politician trying to spin it a slightly different way, repeated several or many times. One particularly infamous example is . This can be entertaining but occasionally goes overboard (as when the same technique is applied to civilians rather than deserving politians).

I can’t imagine this is a technical limitation, but maybe it is. If it’s something you guys are imposing on yourselves, do you mind sharing the reasoning? I, for one, have no problem with a podcast that’s “about 45 minutes” instead of exactly 45.

Thanks for the mention, Jay and Dave. I think “People come back to places that send them away” will go into my next edit, along with Clay Shirky’s “Nothing will work, but everything might.” (Although, at this rate, I might have to change the title to “A quick guide to the maxims of Jarvis, Rosen, Shirky and Winer.”)

On the iPad discussion, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Shirky’s observation that one of the fundamental shifts that characterized the rise of our web-oriented culture was the fact that the same devices that we use to consume media now also give us the power to create that media. (I remember Shirky saying it’s as if owning a television set also gave you the power to make TV shows, or subscribing to the newspaper also gave you the ability to produce one.)

That’s where the iPad feels so regressive to me: With the iPad, we’re stepping backwards across that line, as our consumption devices are once again distinct from our creation devices. It’s another way of explaining, as both of you said, why old media folks like it: It reintroduces a split between the tools of production and consumption that had all but disappeared in the world of the web.