Here are Marco’s speculations on where the MacBook Pro lineup is going. I think he spot on, especially since his guesses are based on the current MacBook Air.

These next three paragraphs I wrote back in October when the new MacBook Airs were introduced. They were part of a larger article I drafted after the press release where Apple introduced the Airs, and demoed Lion and the Mac App Store. I never finished the piece and it wasn’t ever published. But, here’s the bit I wrote about the MacBook Airs and how they are the laptops which lead the way for the whole lineup:

The Air is Apple’s the secret forerunner laptop. Over the past three years it has subtly led the way in many areas of Apple’s laptop design.

When the Air was introduced in 2008 it was the first laptop to sport the unibody design, the black plastic keyboard, and the wider multi-touch trackpad. And it was the first laptop with an SSD drive as an upgradeable option when purchasing on Apple’s website.

Now, it’s the first laptop with flash storage as the only option. My guess is that flash storage will be the default storage option in the entire MacBook Pro lineup by Summer 2011. I think the performance improvements that flash storage brings to an OS are likely a huge factors for an optimal running environment to OS X 10.7.

The transcript from Steve Jobs’ commencement address at the Stanford Graduation of 2005. (Via Marco.)

C.J. Chilvers on why he switched from digital tools back to paper ones for managing his task list. It’s interesting because much of C.J.’s change in workflow was based on the findings in Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, which hits conclusions about how computers and the internet are re-wiring our brains. In short, C.J.’s point is that keeping a paper-based to-do list actually leads to better concentration and focus by sheer virtue of the fact that it’s on paper rather than a monitor.

Clay Shirky:

The economics of content creation are in fact fairly simple. The two critical questions are “Does the support come from the reader, or from an advertiser, patron, or the creator?” and “Is the support mandatory or voluntary?”

This article was written in 2003, but it is still just as relevant today as it was then. Because 8 years later there is still no single answer. There is no clear way forward for the independent writer, designer, developer, podcaster, et al. to generate income from their work.

It’s an entrepreneurial conundrum.

Technology has created a platform for people who may have never been creative professionals to now become so. The Internet has allowed would-be writers or designers to grow into actual writers and designers. But to sustain their work, many of these curative professionals are now forced to also become entrepreneurs as they seek out ways to keep the content flowing and the lights on all at the same time.

I’ve been saying all day how sites I enjoy the most and most want to support are the sites I usually read on their website. But Justin Blanton has been piping them through Readability for years. Why? For consistency and efficiency in his reading:

For the last couple of years I’ve routed everything through Readability, no matter how visually pleasing I find the site, or how easy it is to read its text. (I stuck with Readability even after Instapaper offered a similar bookmarklet.) I really don’t care how good your site looks, etc. — I want a consistent reading experience no matter what I’m reading (mainly because, over time, it makes my reading more efficient).

A lot of people have been pointing this out to me today. Before today I’d never heard of Flattr.

The payment concept is a lot like Readability’s in that it’s a social micro payment system. The consumers send a flat fee to Flattr and then it gets divided up each month based on who’s sites they visited and chose to “flattr” while there. But you can only “Flattr” someone if they have signed up as a content creator and put a Flattr button on their site.

This morning, while writing about the payment distribution model in my link to Readability, I made a comment that the sites which I am least likely to read using the Readability service are the sites I most likely want to support.

Nate Peretic hits on this issue as well, and offers some other revenue sharing options beyond having to bookmark a web page in Readability:

Readability may want to consider expanding their offering to include an easy-to-update whitelist of sites that are automatically tallied as you browse. For sake of example, each time you end up at Marco.org and have the Readability add-on installed in your browser the clock starts ticking. Alternatively, a one-click way to mark an article as read without necessarily invoking the Readability interface would suffice.

But do you want to know what really excites me about this whole new business model that Readability has introduced? I’m excited about what users seem to be complaining about. They’re complaining that Readability doesn’t have an even easier way to support and fund the sites they love.

Chris Bowler, who regularly gets up at 4:30 every morning, chiming in on the recent conversation about rising early:

Many folks believe the benefits are there, but it’s simply not natural to them.

Also, this article by Steve Pavlina was an interesting read for how to create a sub-concious habit of getting up right when your alarm goes off. Did you know that if you oversleep for an hour each day you’ve snoozed the equivalent of nine 40-hour work weeks?

Daniel Jalkut on paying for good software:

But smaller companies don’t often have the variety of products and services that lends itself to such a complex strategy [of giving things away for free]. Given a good product idea and a market to sell to, they’re forced to adopt the simplest of all strategies: pure payment. Build something brilliant, and be rewarded with money. This money translates into a great motivation for the developer, which in turn translates back into product greatness. It’s easy to understand why the majority of great products in this world do cost money to obtain.