On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast Ben and I talked mostly about his new paywall business model for The Brooks Review. We talked about how the paywall will impact his site’s readership and growth, why Ben chose to go that route, and why it’s not a scalable business model for the Web. Relatedly, we also talked about the rising generation of high-profile independent writers and how credibility and conflict of interest relate to them and how that compares to bigger media conglomerates.

Brought to you by Studio Neat — who is offering 20% off using the coupon code “b&b” — and Bartender, an organizer for your Mac’s Menu Bar.

A friend of a friend of mine is on the Kansas City Google fiber team, and apparently Google is very adamant about keeping the details of their high-speed internet roll out on the downlow.

I’m a TWC customer because it’s the only option in my neighborhood. But once Google Fiber becomes available I plan to switch faster than you can say, “holy high-speed internet connection, Batman!”

Marco Arment:

Tweetbot for iOS has been the perfect modern client for displaced Tweetie refugees.

As a public alpha, Tweetbot for Mac is already off to a good start. I’ve been using it for about a week and have had but one bug that was fixed in the version that’s shipping today.

What I’m most looking forward to is the syncing of timeline location, and read/unread status of @replies and direct messages. This won’t happen until Tweetbot for Mac ships via the Mac App Store because of its need to use iCloud for syncing between the Mac and iOS apps.

One of the things I love about Tapbots’ software is the playfulness and clever interactions. It will be interesting to see how that personality translates from touch-based iOS apps to a trackpad-based OS X app.

Something else I’m intrigued by is Tapbots’ change in marketing strategy. Up until now all their app releases have been kept a tight secret (well, Tweetbot for iPhone got leaked simply because folks were testing it, but no other news of it was shared).

In a Q&A with Matthew Panzarino on The Next Web, Paul Haddad answers the reasoning. Paul says:

We wanted to do something different, we can’t really do any wide scale alpha/beta testing on iOS and so that’s never been an option. We’ve also gotten so many requests for Tweetbot for Mac that we felt even an incomplete product would be really appreciated and useful for lots of our users. Doing an Alpha also let’s us get lots of feedback on what’s important for people and we can make the first paid release even better.

Thomas Brand on some of the hardware, features, and names that OS X will be leaving in the dust later this month.

Garrett Murray:

Recently, user @rabble put together a blog post titled Origin of the @reply – Digging Through Twitter’s History, in which he did some research to show when it was first used. Only his research isn’t entirely correct and it doesn’t give fair credit to everyone involved.

Remember when @replies were seen by everyone who followed you and then Twitter started hiding people’s @replies if it was to someone you didn’t follow and we were all upset about it because how were we going to discover cool new people to follow? Good times.

One of the best things about Twitter is that my experience using it has hardly changed at all since I first signed up in March of 2007. Since I follow who I chose, it doesn’t matter to me how big Twitter gets or how many silly people join it. Because I don’t have to follow those people.

With all the kerfluffle about Twitter’s aim to unify the user experience, I just hope they don’t kill what I consider to be the next best thing about Twitter: it’s 3rd-party clients.

(Via Kottke.)

Jeff Atwood:

Windows 8 is, in my humble opinion, the most innovative version of Windows Microsoft has released since Windows 95. Maybe ever. And it’s good. Really good! I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a Windows release, except when I was kind of obsessively running betas of Windows 95 and waiting for Windows 95 to be released.

Cute. And very Apple-like. (Via Cameron Moll.)

Speaking of the iPad, Dave Caolo just kicked off a series of posts where he’ll be exploring the brief and incredible history of Apple’s runaway tablet. Today he starts off looking at “the greater history of tablets and the pen-driven devices that preceded [the iPad].”

So great. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the series.

Daring Fireball at its best: smart, witty, fun.

This 72-minute interview that Robert Cringely conducted with Steve Jobs back in 1995 is just great. It’s a $4 rental on iTunes and is well worth your time.

Stephen Hackett wrote down some great notes and miscellaneous thoughts about the interview, and Garrett Murray transcribed one of the best lines from Jobs.

One of my favorite segments was towards the end. Jobs was talking about people who are able to nudge the direction of the computer industry so that in the future it will develop into something great. When asked how he knew what the right direction was, Jobs answered that “it comes down to taste”.

Part of what made the Macintosh great is that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been for computer science the people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in each these other fields into this field.

Tell me that doesn’t describe so many of the people who use, write about, and develop for Apple’s platforms. We may be nerdy (in part by association), but we’re artists at heart.

Fred Wilson on how web growth is somewhat plateauing and mobile is growing like a weed:

All of this is good news for entrepreneurs since they are in the best position to take advantage of all of these changing dynamics. It is not as good news for those who find themselves operating a big Internet business started more than five years ago. You are going to need to make a hard right turn super fast without flipping over the car.

In the past fifteen years, we have seen Microsoft go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, we have seen Google go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, and I suspect we are going to see Facebook struggle with the same thing. RIM is dying quickly now. Yahoo! is a question mark.

I also loved this observation:

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

I remember seeing a lot of tweets during John Gruber’s surprise talk at Úll, and how he said something along the lines of iOS being like a game where users build their own levels via the apps they install.