Make Magazine is calling on TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington to open source the failed CrunchPad project.

When the CrunchPad concept was announced last year, Arrington made open source design a central feature:

“Let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them. If everything works well, we’d then open source the design and software and let anyone build one that wants to.”

Now Make Magazine’s Phil Torrone is asking Arrington to follow through on the open source promise. Since TechCrunch is killing the project, why not open source it?

mike – phil from MAKE magazine here. you said many times that the project was an open source project (the hardware and the software) – where are the files, the schematics, the source code, the PCB files, etc? is it correct to assume that “fusion garage” is not going to release any source or continue this project as an open source (software/hardware project)? if that’s the case it seems like “open source” was used again just to get good will and marketing and not really put any value in.

Is there anything there to open source?

It’s not clear – but maybe Make readers and the open source community could make something of the project.

If you’ve been hoping for a touchscreen Internet tablet, it looks like you’re going to have to keep waiting.

TechCrunch today announced that they were sending their much-hyped CrunchPad design to the deadpool.

According to TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington:

The CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.”

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project.

Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Except that Apple wouldn’t wait to the day a product was to be launched to hammer out their legal agreements. And if Apple had problems with a supplier, it would find a new one.

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Royal Pingdom has taken a look at social network site use by gender, and found that social network site use is dominated by women:

Highlights of their research:

• 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users.
• The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users.
• If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males.
• Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
• The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
• The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

All the sites are predominantly female, except for Slashdot, Reddit & Digg.

Why are these predominantly male? Is it because men find them especially appealing? Is it because women find them uninviting? Is it because the sites are dominated by technology news?

Or is social news just a “guy thing”?

There’s been a lot of discussion, growing out of the tremendous popularity of Twitter, that blogging is going to be replaced by microblogging, or some other “next best thing”.

Last year, for example, Wired magazine’s Paul Boutin weighed in on the subject, arguing that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg weighted in on this today, stating something that should be obvious – that “new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging”:

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

The entire Twitter vs WordPress meme is a flawed view of new media technologies.

A more significant thing to consider is this: What are the best tools to use to publish new media?

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HandBrake – a free, multiplatform DVD ripper and video transcoder  – has been updated.

HandBrake is a great tool if you want to rip DVDs for backing them up or using them with Apple TV or other multimedia system.

The update should provide better quality conversions for all users and should work faster for many.

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Apple has opened up iTunes LP and iTunes Extras, publishing Templates, Best Practices and a Development Guide so that anyone has the capability to create interactive content that can be played back in iTunes 9 or on Apple TV.

• iTunes LP lets you create digital albums that include links to listen to album songs and view lyrics, liner notes, photos and videos (such as artist interviews).
• iTunes Extras is designed to present a movie with interactive menus, bonus content, and chapter navigation, similar to those supplied by DVD or Blu-ray authors.

Apple has also published information on testing and delivering the new formats.

Complete information on building content for the new formats is available at the Apple site.

Leading blogging/podcasting/content management platform WordPress today announced that WordPress.com now supports email subscriptions for blogs:

This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.

If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.

All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.

It’s easy for new media content creators to undervalue email, because we tend to focus on newer, realtime communication options, like Twitter.

Email is still the communication tool of choice for many, though. This announcement means that WordPress.com users now have a painless way to offer email updates.

Note that this announcement is limited to WordPress.com hosted blogs.

If you’ve been waiting for Apple to release a cheap Mac netbook or an inexpensive tablet computer, don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

Or ever.

Here’s why.

While the Mac is a niche computer, Apple’s targeted the most profitable niche and it’s done it very successfully.

According to the latest numbers from NPD, Apple gets nearly half of the US retail revenue for computer sales. The reason for this is that Apple has intentionally ignored the cutthroat bottom-end of the PC business and has focused on selling great premium computers.

The average selling price for a Mac laptop in October was $1,410, compared to $519 for Windows laptops. Apple isn’t interested in competing in an unprofitable area of the industry.

I’d like to be able to buy a cheap Mac netbook or tablet for blogging and mobile audio production, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Or ever.

via betanews

Amazon today announced two new enhancements to the latest generation Kindle—85 percent more battery life and a native PDF reader.

The 6-inch Kindle now has a built-in native PDF reader. This will let users read documents in  PDF format without conversion.

To read PDFs, users can email PDFs to their Kindle email address or move them over using a USB connection. Users that prefer to have their PDF documents converted to the Kindle format can type “Convert” in the subject of the e-mail when sending documents to their “@kindle.com” address.

Amazon Finally Opening Kindle’s Closed Gate

The Kindle has failed to become the iPod of e-readers that it was hyped to be. This is something we predicted when it was introduced:

In order to be anything more than a speedbump on the road to the future of written media, the Amazon Kindle needs to be open to the rapidly expanding world of user-generated content. With 88,000 ebook titles, the Kindle is a expensive, boring gadget. With open support for Internet content, it could be a contender for the next new thing.

Opening up to PDFs, though, could make the Kindle a much more interesting device. Getting content on the device is still a bit of a kludge, but the Kindle’s closed world is opening up to user generated content, at last.

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The decline of traditional newspapers isn’t as bad as it looks – it’s worse.

According to an Associated Press story, newspapers are loosing subscribers at a staggering rate, but you wouldn’t know it from their circulation figures because they’ve changed the way they count circulation:

Since April 1, new auditing rules have made it easier for newspapers to count a reader as a paying customer.

These looser standards are especially helpful to a newspaper if it sells an “electronic edition.” That can include a subscriber-only Web site, such as what The Wall Street Journal has, or it can be a digital replica of a newspaper’s printed product.

Under the new auditing standards, if a newspaper sells a “bundled” subscription to both the print and electronic editions, the publication is often allowed to count that subscriber twice.

If not for these rules, the industry’s numbers would look even worse. Average weekday circulation at 379 U.S. newspapers fell 10.6 percent during the six months ending in September.

Between inflated print numbers and fuzzy tracking of unique visitors on the Web, is it any wonder advertisers are confused these days?

Image: just.Luc (just.Censored)