I never liked Microsoft. Windows has never given me much trouble, but it is nothing elegant. MSWord I use every day, and detest – clunky, and filled with bells & whistles I will never use. (Alas, I pine in vain for the long lost simplicity of WordStar.)

I never liked Apple. I’m sure their stuff works great, but Mac fans are so preachy, and the 1960s moderne styling doesn’t move me. Anyway I don’t want Steve Jobs deciding what apps I can run.

I like Google. What’s not to like? Its free! The front page and search results are clean, not tarted up. The ads don’t waste my machine’s bandwidth, or mine. The search results are pretty good. They haven’t beaten SEO spam yet, but has Bing?

My other blog uses Blogger, and though I have separate hosting, Blogger itself is also free, and for my minimalist approach to froufrou it gives me all the tools I need, with only fairly rare glitches.

But when the comment registration button on a blog asked me to join Google Friend, I passed up the opportunity to be closer friends with Google. I have Chrome, but still use Firefox as my default browser. As much as I dislike MSWord, I’m not inclined to switch to Google Docs.

I like Google, but I’m not so in love that I want to become dependent on them.

One of the things I keep hearing about is enhancing e-books with multimedia. I admit a bias: That word sends me looking for a link to somewhere else. ‘Multimedia’ evokes every website that wastes my time and slows Firefox to a crawl with bad Flash animation. It has a whiff of marketers who want to make everything more like TV, the better to sell me stuff.

People who read for pleasure generally want to ‘get lost in the pages,’ as Halpern puts it. The last thing we want is distractions that pull us out of the story, fiction or nonfiction. Certainly I would not pay more to get an e-book larded up with video clips of the author typing away, or whatever. And good multimedia costs money to produce.

Of course there are exceptions. Graphic novels obviously depend as much on the images as the words, perhaps more. The same for some kinds of nonfiction pleasure reading, say books about art.

And I can think of a few other possibilities. A hundred years ago even adult fiction often had a few illustrations, beautifully done sketches. If e-book economics allows a return of that charming custom, not many readers will complain.

As always, content is king. And content isn’t just information, it is information we actually want, such as words to get lost in, with perhaps an graceful sketch now and then. But don’t expect us to pay for needless clutter.

My own first Facebook experience was vaguely unnerving. No sooner did I log in than up popped four names of people whom Facebook thought might be friends. One I know, but the other three names were unfamiliar. A quick Google showed that one lives in the same county and belongs to a group I’m active in. We’ve doubtless met, even though I didn’t recognize her name. The other two have no apparent connection to me.

I have a decent online footprint; ‘data mining’ doesn’t need to dig very deep to find me. So what was unnerving? I think it was the hit and (mostly) miss nature of the connections offered.

Facebook did not come up with any commenters on my blogs, nor bloggers I regularly visit and comment on, nor in fact anyone who is part of my actual online social network. The one ‘hit’ is someone I’ve done work for; he’s mentioned on my LinkedIn page, but our connection has otherwise been by email, and the work I’ve done for him is not online.

So, why those particular names? The list wasn’t merely random, but it was odd enough to make me wonder how Facebook came up with it.

That said, I’m not terribly worried about my online privacy – what is genuinely private I don’t put on the Internet, and you shouldn’t either. But the experience was odd enough to leave me just a bit uncomfortable with Facebook.

And there is a more practical concern: For the most popular site in the universe, Facebook is confusing and not very easy to use. When I go to ‘my’ page (I just logged on), I see a couple more recommended friends I never heard of, pitches for some commercial websites, and no hint of how to do anything interesting or self expressive. WordPress and Blogger were a lot easier to figure out!

For now, when it comes to adding ‘channels,’ I think I’ll focus on Twitter.

In other news, we will be making some changes at TecTrends over the next week or two, and I will keep you posted as they take shape.

When I started hearing about ’social networking,’ I had only a vague notion what it meant, and what I knew of it seemed fairly irrelevant. You don’t really care what music I listen to, the same old MOR I was listening to when rockosaurs roamed the earth.

My wake up call came last June, when my blog readership abruptly jumped from a couple of hundred monthly unique visitors to a thousand. Google Analytics told me why: The guy who runs a respected space and science fiction site linked a blog post of mine on his site’s Twitter feed and Facebook presence.

In the cattle rancher’s language of marketing, Twitter and Facebook were driving readers to my site.

This tipped me off to the power of social media, but at the time gave me no reason to follow suit. The Atomic Rockets Twitter feed was bringing me more attention than any feed I could put up, since only people reading my blog would know or care about it.

Anyway, my first job was to keep the content coming, so the people ‘driven’ to my site would come back on their own. That went double for TecTrends Monitor, only launched last summer and in need of a proper archive of content.

Now both blogs have matured to the point where adding more channels to reach potential readers seems like a productive idea. And I will duly be exploring Twitter and Facebook to see how to make best use of them.

Yes, this is going boldly where millions have gone before. But I’ll provide some travelogue along the way, on the chance it will be helpful to any of you who, like me, wonder how to get the most use out of this technology.

It is smaller than I had thought. Seeing and holding it you realize that it is really not a mini laptop, as I had mentally pictured, but a true hold-in-your-hands device.

And I found myself pondering a whole different set of questions – not about operating systems, or closed gardens versus the open Internet, but about carrying it around and how to keep fingerprint smudges off the screen.

The iPod is not the future of personal computers, or the end of personal computers. It, and its prospective competitors, are a way to hold the Internet in your hand that is less fumble-fingered and squint-making than a smartphone screen. Nothing more, nothing less.

Says Shafer, no matter how we get online we end up on the Internet. And once there we’ll surf it; we won’t be kept on the reservation of apps that only take us to one website.

Not so coincidentally, Ryan Kim reported at SFGate last week that HP’s tablet device, due out this fall and also called Slate, will be a computer running Windows 7.

In the Apple-verse of the iPad nothing could be more un- sexy, but like my good old QWERTY keyboard there is a lot to be said for a familiar interface, one  I already know how to use.

Mobile access is different, yes; more spur of the moment, fewer extended sessions. Much of the time we just want handy access to a few services – mail and messages, driving directions or bus connections.

Businesses love the idea of a simplified, app-ified online experience, a virtual mall where they get to choose your menu of choices. And sometimes this is convenient.

But we have seen this video before. The multi-use personal computer and the full Internet will always win against specialized devices and restricted access, whenever they are in the game at all.

Meanwhile, by way of a spoiler space, Michael Copeland of Fortune says that ‘the iPod changes everything.’ Yeah, that is what everyone is saying, but Copeland gives it a new twist and a new term.

One more thing he sees the iPad as driving is the ‘app-ification’ of software – away from traditional do-everything packages (think Microsoft Office) to small apps for specific purposes.  Says Copeland, we ’snack’ on apps now, using them and discarding them casually.

(Doesn’t that sound like how people use traditional print newspapers? Today’s news, tomorrow’s swatted fly. No wonder the newspaper business has hope for tablet devices!)

And now, spoiler time. Is the iPad just a big iPhone? No. The iPhone is just a small iPad (that makes phone calls).

Ziing!

You can follow the link to read about ‘groundbreaking’ data plan options, and various nifty features. But one item jumps out, made a subtitle so you won’t miss it.

‘Reading is fundamental,’ says Moren, and with that the light of comprehension dawns. Everyone wondered what exactly the iPad really is. Now we know.

The iPad is, at bottom, e-reader, just packaged in with music, a way to go quickly online, and video if you decide you just want eye/brain candy. It’s a compleat e-reader.

The cult of Apple can get annoying, but Steve Jobs is really, really sharp.

But it is a hot new trend, says Bill Siwicki at Internet Retailer, and the merchants are jumping onto it. As usual there is a big generational divide; a quarter of mobile phone users under age 45 used their phone while shopping in a store; fewer than one in 10 older users did so.

Middle-aged fogie though I am, phone-a-friend (or product review site) while shopping makes a lot of sense. The only reason we weren’t doing it before is that we didn’t have the right gadgets. And now we do.

On another front, we all know that newspapers are hurting, and they do not suffer in silence. A whole genre had emerged decrying the death of newspapers and worrying about the future of news.

The worries won’t be eased by a new Nielsen survey reported at SFGate.com (the San Francisco Chronicle website). Internet users, especially in North America, are a tough sell when it comes to paying for news content.

But the same study shows that people are a good deal more willing to pay for movies, music, and games (and professional quality video, but not the user generated kind). The Kindle shows that they will also pay for books.

It seems that people are willing to shell out for content they regard as individually distinctive. If you want a particular song, or a particular book, you’ll pay for it.

The problem for newspapers is that people usually don’t care about a news story for its own sake – its sparkling style or dramatic mood – the way they care about a book or movie. They just want the news, and understandably regard widely available information as a commodity.

No, this does not lead me to a magic solution, but understanding the source of the challenge is a decent place to start.

Analysts are paid to commit truth, and Rich Doherty of telecom market research firm The Engineering Group has some embarrassing truth for AT&T, ‘I’m not aware of any company in this country that has had so aloof a stance toward quality of service.’

I get my landline and broadband from AT&T, and have no problem with them. But I have none of the warm and fuzzy feelings I have toward my computer or software. Bandwidth is a classic commodity good, without distinctiveness, something you only notice when it isn’t available or reliable. But it can’t be good for a company when the only buzz it is getting is about bad service.

In other news, people talk about having thousands of tunes on their iPods, and they can’t have bought them all from the iTunes Store at 99 cents a pop. Lee Gomes at Forbes lets the cat out of the bag. Content piracy remains pervasive – and in fact the industry depends on it.

People find music to play on all those iPods. And Gomes cites one representative from a computer maker that produces high end home theater setups, who admits that they are used mainly for viewing illegally downloaded movies.

Also in Gomes’ sights, ’some newspaper publishers’ – read Rupert Murdoch – who complain about Google. People don’t need Google News to read stuff lifted from Rupert’s rags; there are a million gossip and political blogs happy to provide it. And if they didn’t, how many readers would pay for it?

The underlying truth is that we have no problem paying to use the Internet. Mobile or landline, we pay every month, and only complain if the service is bad. What we won’t do, except in exceptional cases, is pay a second time to see particular content.

And yes, my implied stance here, which is that of most Internet users, creates an impossible business model. But if content is king, the customer is emperor, and the users will likely win in the end.

Also the article is worth reading just for the wind-up quote from William Watkins, former CEO of disk drive maker Seagate, about the content his products are used to store. ‘We’re not changing the world,’ said Watkins. ‘We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap–and watch porn.’

Of course, that is a way to change the world, too. It worked for a tech entrepreneur named Johannes Gutenberg.