Shawn, who publishes The Carton, has some great points on the growing shift towards the indie writer. Not just in regards to writers going indie, but also in regards to us, the reader, tracking with individual writers over the larger news conglomerates:

Finding a good writer has become more about the authors writing and less about which company they are working for. For example, I follow Andy Ihnatko because I heard him on MacBreak Weekly and I continue to subscribe to his articles because of his writing and intense command of comedy. I don’t follow him because he writes for the Sun Times.

We are just now on the cusp of this change. Or, as Mandy Brown wrote so eloquently last week:

It’s impossible to recognize a tipping point until it’s behind you, but I suspect that we may be able to look back and see something shift right around now—see the point at which the way we read broke ranks with the way the news is made. We are no longer monogamous readers, loyal to a single source; rather, we read voraciously, looking for patterns, teasing out the things that matter to us, making connections, and then (often) writing about them ourselves. We are consumers of news, not The News.

Some of the special offers seem pretty nice. $10 for a $20 Amazon.com gift card for example is great if you regularly shop on Amazon.com. But some of these are just plain old 3rd-party ads. (Via Josh Puetz.)

Amazon is selling a version of the Kindle Wi-Fi for $25 off (18%), but it comes with “special offers”. The special offers only show up on the screensaver or as banner ads on the home screen — they do not interrupt the reading experience. Or, put another way, they are passive rather than intrusive.

At first it sounds like you’re getting a measly $25 discount for the “privilege” of “getting” to look at ads on your Kindle. However, reading about it a bit more about the special offers actually doesn’t sound like too bum of a deal.

Basically, it looks like you’ll be getting coupons and discounts that work on Amazon.com as well as relevant ads that you can opt in to seeing. In a way it sounds as if you’re buying a Kindle with a built in Gold C coupon book.

But if that’s the case, then why not charge more? Probably because nobody would buy it. And then the other obvious question is why not give it away for free if it’s going to be ad supported? Probably because Amazon wouldn’t be able to keep up with demand.

Speaking of how it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert, this is a great article about Dan McLaughlin who is putting Malcolm Gladwell’s theory to the test. Dan quit his job in 2009 to learn golf and try to become a professional golfer:

There are more than 27 million people in this country who play golf. There are 125 permanent spots on the PGA Tour. Smith has told Dan the odds of him earning one of those spots are astronomically long. He picked golf, Dan says, because he wanted something not impossible but close. He grants that there’s a “99 percent chance I’m not going to become a PGA golfer.” But that’s not the point.

“Basically,” he told the people at the conference, “what I’m trying to do with this project is demonstrate how far you’re able to go if you’re willing to put in the time.”

My goodness, I love this music video.

Aaron Isaacs’ honest thoughts as a new OmniFocus user:

It just presents it in a way that is harder to ignore your tasks, and also lets you look at things in a way that doesn’t make tasks and projects look overwhelming.

That sums up perfectly why I use OmniFocus.

A moving post from Jorge Quinteros. Now I know a little bit more about why I love his photography so much.

Noah Brier:

…one of the product development things that bugs me most is building for a new medium in an old way.

A great overview of what gear is and can be involved in producing a podcast. I use a Blue Yeti microphone and Wire Tap Studio for recording Shawn Today.

If you’ve been tracking with me on Twitter over the past week you already know I’ve been working on a review of LaunchBar that has now grown to include a serious look at Alfred as well.

Last Tuesday I downloaded Alfred (and bought the Powerpack of course or it wouldn’t be a fair comparison against LaunchBar), and have been using it exclusively ever since for the sake of research. (If you’re going to really write about software you need to live with it for a while, you know?)

One of my favorite things about Alfred is its usage report. It’s a needless geeky feature that tells you how often you’re using the app each day and what your daily average usage is. Over the weekend the developer, Andrew Pepperrell, began work on improving the usage report to include how often you use the clipboard history and how often you use the app to control iTunes.

The added reporting has not yet been rolled out to the public, but it is a great example of something I’ve noticed about Andrew and the Alfred team: they are committed to making the best application launcher available for Mac OS X, and they sweat the details. I can’t say that I’m ready to give up LaunchBar (I’ve been using LB for almost two years and am quite fond of it), but that does not mean Alfred is anything less than a great app.