OK, back to TechMeme, er, I mean, iPhoneMeme. It’s all iPhone all week long. Deal with it John Dvorak. You should have taken that trip to Antarctica that you were thinking about. That might be the only place to avoid iPhoneHype this week.

But, I am interested in this. I have a family of three people. Two of whom are going to get a new cell phone. My son has been saving up his allowance money and doing extra work here and there to save up his $600. He already has a cell phone that I pay for. It’s already on AT&T. I have no idea if I’ll have to pay a cancellation fee for that or not when Patrick gets his iPhone.

Maryam is tired of her TMobile service. It doesn’t work in Half Moon Bay very well. AT&T works just great. I have a full set of bars inside the house here where her TMobile phone doesn’t even work at home. Very frustrating.

So, I read all the posts about iPhone service plans and I see nothing about any discounts for families who’ll have two or three iPhones running (I probably will end up getting an iPhone too if this thing even comes close to matching 1/10th the hype). This is gonna be one expensive thing to get for all three of us. The Apple press release says numbers can be moved over from existing AT&T accounts, though. That’s good, I wonder if there’ll be a fee to do that?

Anyway, see ya in line at the Palo Alto Apple store on Thursday sometime. Hopefully I can find a power outlet.

What is the second most important category to Google after its main search engine?

Hitwise says it’s image search.

So, don’t miss this announcement about Flickr photos getting integrated into Yahoo Image Search.

It’s surprising to me that Google continues to let Flickr run away with the metadata. What is the meta data? Well, Thomas Hawk, my photographic partner at PodTech, does a good job of explaining how the social features in Flickr give photos on Flickr more metadata which makes building a better image search possible.

Personally I’ve done a lot of testing of image search cause my Microsoft friends keep telling me “look at us, look at us” and I want to believe that Microsoft has its act together somewhere. But Flickr’s image search always pulls back better images for me than Ask, Live, or Google’s image search, for that matter.

The one reason I think Google hasn’t bought more companies like Photobucket, Zooomr, Piczo, etc. is that the Picasa team at Google thinks they can solve it some other way. I don’t believe them and they should reevaluate their strategy of not investing in a real social image service. Their tactic of letting people add tags to images isn’t working as well as Flickr (and won’t).

Anyway, Thomas Hawk does a variety of searches on a variety of image search engines to demonstrate that Yahoo is running away from the pack in this area.

What do you think? Are you going to change where you search for images because of this new announcement?

This video is hillarious!

I’m still getting an iPhone, though, for Maryam. I’ll probably keep my N95. We’ll see on Saturday, though, after I get a chance to put the iPhone through its paces.

News might break out. Yesterday those of us at PodTech were smoked out by a grass fire across the street from our offices on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. The fire started near the famous “dish” on Stanford University lands near freeway 280 and quickly moved toward Page Mill Road. Luckily no structures were involved but it caused a lot of smoke. It’s the first time I’ve been close to a news event with my cell phone camera.

I Twittered from my phone too, and it was interesting to see the responses from people who could see my photos and Twitters live. Damn I love my cell phone because of its camera. It’ll be very interesting to test out the new iPhone’s camera and compare it to the one in my Nokia N95.

If you read my link blog you’ll find out why the Internet is silent today (most music playing and Internet radio sites are taking the day off to protest far higher fees).

You’ll also find a variety of other interesting (or possibly not) things including links to my Steve Ballmer impression on the Jason Calacanis show tonight. Doing that freaked out Maryam and Patrick.

I should explain a little bit more about how Jason did his show. We were using a new Internet video app called Operator 11. What is it? Well, it’s like a videoconferencing application where multiple people can join in. You see a live chat between both participants and audience members. Anyone can be added into the conversation live. Jason was using it to produce his show. He could play clips, choose cameras, and choose which audience member gets to talk in the live show. You could watch it live, or later on like on Russell’s blog.

Sam Sethi on Twitter just told me there’s a competitor, called GlobalIPVideo, that is in alpha stage (Operator 11 crashed on us during the show, so these things are pretty brittle. Jason hinted that he was going to invest in Operator 11 to help them buy more servers and such).

Anyway, the video arena is just exploding. Tomorrow we’ll have up some videos of Jaman and Kyte that’ll show off other innovative video services.

This shows that live video streaming services veodia.com, Justin.tv, Ustream, and Blogtv.com are going to have competition and lots of it.

danah boyd wrote a humdinger (viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace) last night and now is surprised that she got more attention for her writings, which she says were NOT up to her standard well-thought-out, well-written analysis.

Here’s why I was interested in her paper last night where some of her other, more “researched” writings just leaves me cold.

1. It clearly defined a conflict. And a big one at that between two classes of people.
2. It fit my already pre-defined stereotypes. My brother, Ben, for instance, is on MySpace. He’s a blue collar kind of guy. His MySpace page? For the bar, Benny’s Tavern, he owns in Virginia. Actually, I’m partially responsible for the belief that college students dislike MySpace. When I gave a speech to a class at San Jose State University the entire class said they switched from MySpace to Facebook since leaving high school. Of course these kids totally fit into danah’s post last night.
3. Most of danah’s posts are written for an academic audience. Put a little simpler: they are information dense and hard to get through. The one last night had a breezy, conversational feel to it. It was more approachable than her usual writings. I think that in our RSS “J, J, J, J” fast track world we just give up on posts that are too academic and not interesting to us as humans.

Oh danah, do you forget that we live in a world that pays 1,000,000 times more attention to Paris Hilton in jail than we do to whatever our President is doing? And you wonder why your article yesterday got so much attention? You hit the same nerve that Paris Hilton does.

One other thing, though. Danah’s previous work made her an authority on the topic (yeah, we do pay attention to her denser, more academic work, and even if we don’t word gets around that danah is doing the deepest thinking on social media and culture out there). That’s another reason why this got pushed around so many conversations today. It was danah’s perfect media storm.