Over at Yahoomblr!, Rob Walker asks some folks, including me, “What is your most outdated device?” Here’s my reply:

“The ‘device’ that feels most outdated to me is my blog,” says Carr. “When I started the thing, in 2005, the personal blog was the iconic expression of ‘new media’; having one put you in the oxymoronic category of journalist-hipster. But the action has moved away from blogs, to the more conversational social networks like Twitter and their bite-sized bulletins. To be a blogger today makes you feel a little like Norma Desmond after silent movies were replaced by talkies: ‘I’m still big; it’s the internet that got small!’”

Here’s Kevin Kelly:

“I have a Panasonic land-line telephone from the ’80s right here on my desk I still use every day,” Kelly says, adding: “I don’t have a handset for the phone, I use a headset and a glass globe to hold down the off button.”

That’s the phone in the picture above. The orb is priceless.

Those, I hear, are the official names of the colors that Google Glass will come in when the head-mounted computer is released, sometime in the next year or so, into what Larry Page this week called “the normal world.” Let me repeat those color names, because they’re beautiful and earthy and soothing:

Charcoal

Shale

Cotton

Tangerine

Sky

“More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop, and more delicate still are the marketers’.

It’s hard not to be reminded of the palette of the third generation of iMacs, released back in 2000:

Graphite

Indigo

Ruby

Sage

Snow

The Glass palette strikes me as even better, even more evocative. It may even surpass Simon & Garfunkel’s great herbal palette:

Parsley

Sage

Rosemary

Thyme

That’s a little too green-centric for a product line, anyway.

It does worry me just a little bit, though, that the Glass palette eschews green altogether. Is that a political statement? In fact, now that I think about it, the Glass palette places a disconcerting emphasis on fossil fuels. Charcoal? Shale? One can almost smell the carbon dioxide rising into Sky, almost see Cotton and Tangerine wilting in the heat. Maybe they should have included Tar Sands as a color option.

No, that would have been a downer. “Charcoal” has a much nicer lilt to it. Its emotional connotations diverge from its real-world denotations, in a way that nicely underscores both the semiotic and the marketing possibilities of reality augmentation.

What would be really cool is if the color of your Glass also determined the way the device augmented your reality. So if you wore Charcoal, you’d get this dark, goth view of the world, but if you sported Tangerine it would be like seeing existence through the eyes of a high-school cheerleader on game day. Cotton would put you into a super-mellow, slightly catatonic state of mind. Sky would give you a New Age perspective — all crystalline and feathery. Shale would be totally businesslike, the Joe Friday reality.

As for me, I’m going to hold out for Mushroom.

My article “IT Doesn’t Matter” came out in the Harvard Business Review ten years ago this month. At Network World, Ann Bednarz has a retrospective about the article and the reaction to it as well as an interview with me.

After the article appeared, I tracked some of the reactions to it here. Many of the links, alas, have gone dead over the last 10 years, but the rundown still provides a sense of where IT stood back then, between the dot-com bust and the arrival of the cloud.

If you’re looking for something to do in San Francisco Tuesday evening, I will be having a discussion with Thomas Goetz, the former executive editor of Wired, at the Nourse Theatre at 7:30 pm. The event is part of the California Academy of Science’s “Conversations on Science” series, held in association with City Arts & Lectures. You can buy tickets and get more information here.

As I was writing The Shallows, I kept thinking, “Man, if I could only draw, I’d bag all these freaking words and do this as a cartoon.” Now, thanks to the talented animators at Epipheo, my dream has been realized:

My favorite part is when I burn in videogame hell.

Slashdot notes that Google has filed for a patent on what it calls a “policy violation checker,” which comprises “methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document, such as an e-mail.” Here’s how it works:

A context of an electronic document may be detected. A textual phrase entered by a user is captured. The textual phrase is compared against a database of phrases previously identified as being problematic phrases. If the textual phrase matches a phrase in the database, the user is alerted via an in-line notification, based on the detected context of the electronic document.

“Problematic phrases,” Google explains, “include, but are not limited to, phrases that present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.”

The patent application, which was published last week, sketches out various ways the service might work. For instance, the “in-line notification” could take the form of the immediate “underlining or highlighting” of the problematic or troublesome word or phrase as it’s typed. The notification could also be accompanied by “a hyperlink to a webpage.” The system could also use “machine learning techniques to identify problematic phrases without human intervention.” Most interesting of all, the system could be programmed “to alert a third party to a match between a textual phrase and a phrase in the database.” For instance, “if a user creates a text document, presentation, or other document with a problematic phrase, the policy violation checker may notify a member of the legal department of the existence of the document.”

One can imagine all sorts of immediate applications for a service that highlights and records “problematic phrases” as you type them. But it strikes me that the policy violation checker’s real potential will emerge only when Google perfects its neuronal interface — the one that Sergey Brin described as “a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.” At that point, policy-violation checking could become preemptive. The moment a problematic thought entered your mind, you would be alerted to the looming transgression and the thought would be deleted before it even reaches the expression stage. No one else would need know the incident ever occurred, except, of course, the designated third party.

Photo via x-ray delta one.