At certain points during the run-up to the launch of the Apple iPad, it seemed like techies were more excited to buy the tablet for their mothers than for themselves. Something about the intuitive, super-simple interface just says "Mom" to a lot of people.

I'm among them (although I'm also pretty eager to get one for myself). I could hardly contain my excitement when the iPad was finally released on Saturday, heading over to the nearest Apple store as soon as the lines died down to get a hands-on look at the new device. And I dragged my reluctant mother along, trying to convince her that the iPad was something she'd want to see.

My mom is someone who cares little about electronic gadgets. For her, computers are strictly a means to an end. She uses a laptop primarily for basic word processing and Web-browsing tasks. Her computer is a slow first-generation MacBook with a broken optical drive and a cracked case—but it works for her (most of the time) and that's all she really cares about. She politely listens when I frequently blabber on about exciting new technologies—but for the most part, she couldn't care less.

Fishbowl NY has a nice and lengthy interview this week with Newsweek's Mark Coatney, the senior articles editor who helms the magazine's Tumblr blog. Writes Fishbowl:

One of the first major publications to make its presence felt on Tumblr, Newsweek has been one of the pioneers of the social-media/blogging site. Thanks in part to its highly personalized voice, Newsweek.tumblr.com has collected 6,000 followers. That's a lot for a Tumblr site, and even more considering hardly any other magazines are playing in the space. Unlike the PR-choked Internet voices of many rival publications, the Newsweek Tumblr eagerly engages other bloggers and provides odd details that hint at an actual human behind the red-and-white avatar. 

Read on for more (much more) from Coatney. And if you're eager to delve even deeper into the Newsweek-Tumblr love affair, the blogging service has set up a special page that aggregates all posts by the many magazine staffers with Tumblr blogs, at tumblr.com/newsweek.

It's the kind of outcome most entrepreneurs only dream of. Last September, the financial-planning startup Mint.com was acquired by Intuit for $170 million-earning its founder a reported $20 million. As the kudos poured in, another Web entrepreneur, Jason Fried, assailed Mint in a blog post for selling out to a corporation it could have taken down. "Is that the best [we] can do?" Fried wrote. "Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the s--t out of the old guys?"

The company Fried founded, 37signals, makes Web-based business-efficiency tools—hardly stuff to set the heart racing. But 37signals is about more than software: Fried and cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson use the company as a pulpit for entrepreneurial evangelism. And their message-a sort of minimalist's approach to capitalism-has developed a cult following. The company's blog, Signal vs. Noise, reaches 100,000 readers a day, by offering takes on such topics as the design of laundry-detergent jugs (Method's new one-handed pump bottle kicks ass) or a satirical attack ad for Karl Rove's book ("Does he really expect taxpayers to carry a book that heavy?"). The company's founders gleefully admit to bias, since their own second book, Rework, was at No. 10 on the Amazon bestseller list in mid-March, only a few slots below Rove's.

Rework is a Webby manifesto for post-recession success. Forget about strategic planning, they advise. And ignore your competition-unless you feel like picking a public fight. Don't waste time on meetings. Stay as small as you possibly can. The 37signals guys scoff at workaholics (masochists who compensate for intellectual laziness with brute force) and traditional ideas about promotion (emulate drug dealers: make your product so addictive that giving a free taste makes customers come back bearing cash). They believe businesses should "under-do" their competitors-do a few things well, rather than many things adequately. Their company is the ultimate hands-off employer: 37signals doesn't care where its 16 employees live or when they do their work. 

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The reviews for the iPad are in, and predictably, they're raves. "Apple has pretty much nailed it with this first iPad," says Ed Baig in USA Today. "This beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly," trumpets The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. Even the usual nitpick for critics, battery life, turned out to be a plus: Steve Jobs actually undersold what the device could do, with one test lasting more than 12 hours.

Apple says Flash is buggy and hogs resources, and flatly refuses to consider implementing it for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The company thinks it can leverage its position as the dominant maker of mobile Internet devices in the United States to force sites to use a different video standard—this is why you might've seen the term "HTML5" batted around lately. It's a fairly audacious position—even for Apple—to insist that the entire Internet change to better suit a few devices.

Nancy friggin' Drew—happy birthday, baby! Our favorite slim sleuth of River Heights turns 80 this year, not that she looks her age. Botox, Pilates, intravenous chardonnay therapy—to whatever she's doing to look so fab, we say cheers. In her latest incarnation, Drew sports a trendy motorcycle jacket over a sporty striped shirt and uses some slick Ashleigh Banfield glasses to help scan for crime-scene clues. And she's kicking it these days with a new gig, as the title character in a THQ Nintendo DS game out this month: "Nancy Drew: The Model Mysteries."

Of her celebratory, birthday reimagining, we should start by saying that this isn't the first videogame version of Drew's sleuthing (it's just the latest), nor is a makeover for the teen a new fad. Quirky, multiplatform reboots are all the rage for young-adult lit serials: witness the revived Goosebumps novels (now a new series and online "theme park"); the Hardy Boys spinoffs; or this month's revamped Babysitters' Club books, which will adapt to modern times by replacing references to getting a "perm" with "an expensive hairstyle." That willingness to revise is something that Nancy and Carolyn Keene, the collective pseudonym for Drew-series writers, are particularly bound to celebrate: without a crucial series makeover in 1958 and '59, in which the publishers finally removed racist stereotypes and outmoded terms from the novels, the series would have gone the way of the Dodo. (Or at least the way of the Boxcar Children—anyone heard from those guys in a while?)

From the late '50s, it was movies, swag, more books, games, feminist dissertations about Drew's WASPy, privileged sleuthing strategy and its problems for empowered posterity. And suddenly, 80 years later, you're using a stylus to extract a dusty, top-secret dossier from its pixelated hiding spot. A great thing for the assured future of Nancy.

Well, sort of. 

We'd argue that there's a ginormous opportunity for genuinely inspired interpretation in the gulf between this...

...sorry, we just fell asleep there for a second.  What were we saying?

Oh, yeah: the creative gulf between the first Drew talkie, and reimagining the characters as sexy, 25-year-old bridesmaids whooping it up at a bachelorette party while being filmed for a reality-TV show (Model Mysteries). All of the younger female characters, shown from the shoulders up, are in some scanty little clubbing tops, which might be troubling on the body-image-for-children front if it weren't so hilarious. Against a bright blue sky in the outdoor scenes, with birds chirping sweetly, it looks like every girl is doing the walk of shame. (Notable exception is female pal George—short for Georgia in the books, and defined throughout Keene's novels as a sleek sidekick and cousin to Nancy—whose "tomboyish" good looks are evoked with a backward baseball cap, short haircut, a boy's undershirt, and some bicurious overalls. Subtle!)  Bess Marvin, Nancy's other best friend and categorized in the books as the "plump one," always gaining and trying to lose those last five pounds, is in this game a dead ringer for Lindsay Lohan in that famous purple bikini photo shoot. (You're welcome, Tech Shifts readers. You are welcome).

The between-puzzles plot involves reality-TV fame whores, conniving girlfriends, a snafu with bridesmaids' dresses, glass shards baked into a wedding cake, and a lot of other "brought to you by Bravo" stuff. It's hard to keep track of all the word-y thought bubbles, but who's playing this to read? We're here to navigate the world of Nancy and her slutty pack of best "Housewives," not scan sentences, for Chrissake. For that, we'll buy the books.

We will, won't we?  Won't we, guys? Guys?

Rupert Murdoch strikes again! His News Corp. said today that starting in June, online readers of The Times of London and its sister newspaper, The Sunday Times, will have to pay for article access.

That's a bold move for The Times, a paper that didn't even start putting articles on its front page until the 1960s (it was all advertisement until then—proof that everything old becomes new again). And it might provide a preview of how the planned New York Times paywall will—or won't—work.

News Corp. has long been on the vanguard of charging for content. Its Wall Street Journal, for example, is the most prominent American paper with a paywall—readers can access some articles for free, but must pay for others. Friday's announcement begins to fulfill a promise Murdoch made last fall to charge for all of his properties. Of course, he's also been rattling his saber at Google, saying the search engine is "stealing" News Corp.'s content, and NEWSWEEK's Weston Kosova made a compelling case in this space that that's no more than bluster. The changes announced today—which also include splitting a single combined site into two—are action, not just talk. Readers will have to pay ₤1 per day (about $1.50) or ₤2 per week.

The papers that have successfully begun to charge are those that offer premium, value-added content. The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, for instance, offer high quality business news—and many companies are willing to buy subscriptions for employees.

...

On a desktop computer, your choice of browser says a lot. Using the copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer that came with your PC screams "novice"—even though recent versions of IE are much improved, the program is still a symbol of an Internet that was slow, buggy, and insecure. Switching to Chrome or Firefox or Safari says you're Web savvy, care about speed and security, and want complex web apps to perform at their best.

On the iPhone, you have no such choice of browser. The device comes with a mobile version of Apple's Safari, and that's it. Pretty much everyone is fine with that—it's a functional and minimalist app that does an amazing job of squeezing full Web pages onto the iPhone's 3.5-inch screen.

Now Opera Software, a Norwegian company that has long been an also-ran in the desktop browser wars (its market share is less than 3 percent), is trying to inject some competition in the mobile space.

Last week the nebulae swirled, the interstellar dust motes accreted, and a Web star was born: Merton, a.k.a. the Chatroulette piano-improv guy.

First, for those of you living off the grid (or actually using their computer to, you know, work), here's a little background: Chatroulette is the latest Web fad, a stripped-down site that randomly connects you and a stranger via Webcam. If you don't like your chat partner, hit "next," and within seconds another in a near-infinite line of anonymous strangers is brought before you. Evangelists hail Chatroulette's power to connect people, to relieve and confront the loneliness of human existence; exhibitionists use it to show off their genitals. Merton's revelation was to use Chatroulette as a stage:

A self-trained pianist with a voice like Ben Folds and a penchant for hoodies, he recorded his sessions on Chatroulette, improvising songs about the strangers he came across. The result was hilarious, and racked up nearly 4 million views on YouTube in its first week.

China's decision today to block access to Google's search sites represents a dramatic, but perhaps inevitable, escalation in the conflict between the open search service and the closed government.

The situation is still fluid, but here's a recap of what's happened so far. Yesterday Google announced that it was moving traffic to its Chinese search engine to uncensored servers in Hong Kong; if one of China's 400 million Web users attempted to access google.cn, he would have been redirected to google.com.hk instead. China permits freer access to the Internet in Hong Kong under its "one country, two systems" philosophy. "We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, wrote in a post on the company's official blog announcing the switch. But Chinese officials reacted angrily, and as of Tuesday morning, would-be Googlers in the country's mainland appeared to be blocked entirely.

It's easy to get numbed by the traffic stats for Facebook: more than 400 million users, the average user spends 55 minutes a day on the site, 3 billion photo uploads per month. Even so, this chart from Hitwise stopped me in my tracks:

The headline around the Web was that for the first time, Facebook had eclipsed Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. for a full week. Previously, Facebook had hit No. 1 on a few big holidays, like Christmas and New Year's Day. That makes sense—everyone is home and uploading photos from that digital camera Santa left under the tree, or furiously untagging photos from the night before (respectively). But for the week ending March 13, the biggest holiday I could find was Registered Dietitian Day. It's clear from the chart above that Facebook's days of needing major events to eke past Google are long gone.

By Jessica Ramirez

It started with Michael Coppola taking things apart at the age of five: the remote control, his mother's house lamps, the family's VCR. He was curious about how things worked. By the time he was in fourth grade, he moved on to software. After building Web sites for his parents and their friends, Coppola, now 17, decided to try his hand at hacking. "When you have this passion for technology, you're not satisfied with knowing how to use something, you want to know how it works," he says. What started out as mere curiosity now makes this Connecticut high-school senior a rare-and highly valued-commodity: a hacker in the making.

While billions of dollars are being spent to secure U.S. cyberspace, the number of elite cybersecurity experts needed to protect and traffic this area for the government and the private sector is dangerously inadequate. The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush lists the need for better cybereducation and more experts as part of 12 core initiatives, but its large-scale implementation will take time. According to national-security authorities, time is something we don't really have.

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