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In other words, why brands need to be real.

Descriptive words and phrases found on a $6 bottle of hand soap Jason F. Feb 08

3 comments Latest by Jeremy at MicroExperience

• Extremely mild
• Richly foaming
• Naturally gentle
• Deeply cleanses
• Nourishes
• Pure and soothing
• Synergistically
• Refresh and restore
• Skin radiance
• Cool soothing
• Protects and restores balance
• Harmonize and replenish
• Additional moisturizing benefit

What doesn’t this stuff do? Lather up and this naturally gentle, richly foaming, pure and soothing nourishing cleanser will synergistically refresh, harmonize, replenish, protect and restore balance with cool soothing botanicals.

Kinda ridiculous, isn’t it? Reading this should remind you to read your own site, your own marketing copy, your own definitions.

What claims are you making? Do you really believe them? What are you saying? Does it make any sense? How are you describing your product? Is it accurate or just a sea of adjectives that look good and sound good together? What story are you telling or selling? Whatever it turns out to be, are you really OK with it? Deep down inside, is it something you’re proud of?

Blogging is falling out of favor among the young'uns these days as they move to quicker-moving social networking sites. At the same time, older adults are getting into blogging and teens still aren't hot on Twitter, at least according to the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life project.

Only 14 percent of teenage Internet users said that they blogged last year—that's half the number from 2006. Similarly, teen commenting on blogs is way down from 76 percent in 2006 to just over 52 percent in 2009. It doesn't matter whether the blog is on Blogspot or buried within MySpace, either—blogs in general are definitely not the new black.

This isn't surprising, especially given the fact that teenagers have been flocking to social networking sites in recent years. Almost three-quarters of American teens use sites like Facebook and MySpace—up from 55 percent in 2006—and the numbers are virtually the same for young adults (those between 18 and 29).

What they are not doing, however, is using Twitter, or at least not in large numbers. Only 8 percent of Internet users between 12 and 17 use Twitter, while a full third of those between 18 and 29 do so. This data reflects a previous Nielsen report from mid-2009, as well as a report from Morgan Stanley, both of which noted Twitter's relative unpopularity among the younger Internet-using audience.

The trend away from blogging seems to go against data from just two years ago that said the number of bloggers in the world was growing rapidly. What happened? For one, emerging markets like China, Taiwan, Korea, and India are bringing more and more Internet users online by the day, adding to the ranks of bloggers and social networking users alike. Additionally, despite teens getting turned off from the medium, Pew found that older Internet users are actually moving towards blogs—11 percent of users over 30 now regularly maintain a blog compared to 7 percent in 2007, and overall "adult" blogging rates have remained steady.

This may be reflective of older users' interest in reading and writing more in-depth content than 12 one-sentence one-offs in a day, but Pew seems to agree that blogging is quickly becoming the thing that un-hip old people do. "Microblogging and status updating on social networks have replaced old-style ‘macro-blogging’ for many teens and adults," Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart said in a statement. "The fad stage [of blogging] is over."

Steve’s iPad keynote felt just a little off. We got what we wanted, but it still felt a little like the iPad was a vehicle full of potential rather than a self-contained package of productivity. This morning I woke up and realized what was missing: The minor apps.

I’m looking forward to the amazing apps that will undoubtably be written in the coming months, but what about the existing apps that the iPhone and iPod Touch ship with? The iPad’s home screen isn’t just sparse because of all the extra real estate. There are six apps that are simply missing!

I’ve made a matrix of the apps that ship with the iPhone 3GS, the iPod Touch, and those shown on Apple’s web site and during last week’s keynote on the iPad:

.featurematrix { width: 260px; font-size: small; }

.featurematrix td { padding-bottom: 2px; padding-top: 2px; text-align: center; padding-right: 3px; padding-left: 3px; border-left-color: #dddddd; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; }

.featurematrix .appname { border-width: 0px; text-align: left; }

.featurematrix th { padding-left: 10px; padding-bottom: 6px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 6px; background-color: #e0e0f0; }

.featurematrix tr:nth-child(odd) { background-color: #f0f0f8; }

	3GS	Touch	iPad
Messages	✔
Calendar	✔	✔	✔
Photos	✔	✔	✔
Camera	✔
YouTube	✔	✔	✔
Stocks	✔	✔
Maps	✔	✔	✔
Weather	✔	✔
Voice Memos	✔	✔
Notes	✔	✔	✔
Clock	✔	✔
Calculator	✔	✔
Settings	✔	✔	✔
iTunes Store	✔	✔	✔
App Store	✔	✔	✔
Compass	✔
Phone	✔
Mail	✔	✔	✔
Web	✔	✔	✔
iPod	✔	✔*	✔*
Contacts	✔	✔	✔
iBooks			?
*The Touch splits iPod into two apps: ‘Music’ and ‘Video’. The iPad splits it into ‘iPod’ and ‘Video’

The first thing to notice is that the iBook app is missing from all of the promotional shots on Apple.com. Work on these promotional graphics, especially the video shots, must have started weeks if not months ago, and there’s been some buzz on the web that iBook was a late addition and wasn’t a sure thing, so it makes perfect sense that it didn’t make the deadline for inclusion in the promotional assets for the January unveiling. If you check out TechCrunch’s hands-on video, you’ll see at 1:10 that the iBook app is there, but that there are only eight apps total on the machine. Presumably apps not quite ready for prime time were kept (literally) away from the hands of the press.

Far more interesting though are the simple apps that are missing from the promotional materials: Stocks, Weather, Voice Memo, Clock, and Calculator. With the exception of Voice Memo these are all basic apps that have been staples from the very beginning, and it makes no sense that they wouldn’t be on the iPad, so why are they absent? I see two options, one of which is far, far more interesting than the other.

The apps were left off of promotional materials for aesthetic reasons. (boring)

It’s possible though unlikely that Steve wanted to underscore the simplicity of the device by making the home screen as clean as possible. This makes the device seem less cluttered and showcases the beautiful Richard Misrach photo that Apple spent good money licensing. I say ‘unlikely’ because Apple wants to show off what their device can do, and because if this were the case then these ‘minor apps’ would be on the second page. Only there isn’t a second page. The magnifying glass and the dot at the bottom of the home screen clearly indicate that this is the only page of apps.

These apps are missing from the launchpad because they’re no longer apps. They’re dashboard widgets. (interesting)

As I alluded to earlier, what Stocks, Weather, Voice Memo, Clock, and Calculator have in common is that they’re all simple ‘minor’ apps that wouldn’t know what to do with 1024×768 if you gave it to them. They’re intended for quick reference, for quick ‘in and out’ tasks. In short, they’re multitasking apps. It’s clear that Apple believes this because with the exception of Voice Memo all these apps were OS X dashboard widgets before the iPhone ever existed. I would put forward that they’re going back to their rightful place.

The lack of multi-tasking has been a major criticism of the iPad this past week. A more dedicated device like the iPad suffers when you have to exit your browser, book or Keynote presentation just to bring up a calculator or check the weather (or respond to an iChat, but more on that in a moment). Luckily, this is a problem that Apple solved nearly a decade ago in a rather elegant fashion with the dashboard.

Imagine if the same concept is lifted wholesale and brought to the iPad. Imagine that a five-finger pinch caused the screen to dim and a bevy of widgets flew in to the screen for quick consumption and calculation, and then were dismissed by another five-finger flick? With props to Entourage, ‘Is that something you might be interested in?’

It might not be OS multitasking but it’s user multi-tasking and, unlike running several apps simultaneously, it behaves nicely. OS X dashboard widgets sit quietly when the dashboard’s not up and make their calls and updates quickly when the dashboard is called up. Apps are designed either to be full-screen applications or quick-glance widgets. I’m assuming there’s still some sort of occasional polling or push notification mechanism and user notification system so they can be alerted when there’s an action they need to attend to like an instant message or a countdown timer.

It’s also a strong solution for the problem of iChat. Without SMS on the iPad it’s clear that instant messaging will need to come to the device, but it’s also clear that any practical IM client would have to be able to work nicely simultaneously with the user’s primary task. An iChat dashboard widget would fit the bill nicely.

Sixty days is a long time to try and maintain excitement for an unavailable product, and it’s certain that Apple has a few updates planned between now and the end of March. Will they announce a front-facing camera? Maybe, but I’m more confident about this one. It’s too good to pass up.

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About 20 high school students stood behind the butcher counter, staring at a 160-pound piece of meat from a recently slaughtered cow.

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Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Students from Automotive High School in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, visiting the Meat Hook shop, where the meat is fresh and local and every bit of it is used.

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Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Denzel Conze, 18, trying a slice of raw meat as part of a high school course that teaches students to think more broadly about the food they eat.

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Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Brent Young, a butcher at the Meat Hook, demonstrating knife skills. Students visited the store to gain an appreciation of where food comes from.

“All of our meat comes from local farms, and we get it all whole,” said Tom Mylan, 33, one of three butchers at the Meat Hook, a new butcher shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that buys its meat locally and prizes nose-to-tail eating. “We don’t just buy steaks or pork chops or whatever.”

“How much does the whole cow cost?” one boy in a white hoodie had asked moments before. Answer: about $3.25 a pound. “Do you slaughter here?” asked another. Short answer: no—most slaughterhouses are upstate. “What is chorizo?” asked a girl. Answer: a spicy Spanish sausage.

These curious students, all juniors and seniors at Automotive High School in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, are taking a class called “Food, Land, and You.” Introduced by Jenny Kessler, a teacher at the school, three years ago, this elective English course is a primer about food broadly defined — its social, political and economic aspects. While dozens of New York City public schools have edible gardens, or offer student-grown food on the cafeteria menu, Ms. Kessler’s class is unusual in the wider perspective it takes.

“Food justice is a huge issue,” Ms. Kessler, 31, said. “But we study and talk blatantly about it — who has access to this food and why.”

Ms. Kessler’s pupils study factory farming and corn subsidies, read articles by Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry and watch documentaries like “Food, Inc.,” a dark look at the nation’s industrialized food system. They also tend a 2,500-square-foot organic vegetable garden that borders their school, financing it with funds they raise and with support from the New York chapter of Slow Food U.S.A. In season, their plot teems with cucumbers, eggplant, okra, peas, red cabbage, spinach, tomatoes and many herbs. The teenagers can take the food home free, and they sell the rest at an after-school farm stand.

But the popularity of Ms. Kessler’s class — it is one of the most sought-after at the school, according to Mary Brouder, the principal — may be due to the frequent trips, like the one to the Meat Hook.

In the fall, for example, Ms. Kessler took her charges to the Queens County Farm Museum, where they collected eggs, worked with compost and helped clear garden beds. She also secured a stand for her students at the Union Square Greenmarket, where they ran cooking demonstrations, and she organized a volunteer stint for them at the Bowery Mission, where they made lunch for the homeless.

Twice a year, Ms. Kessler also takes her students to Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, N.Y., where they make apple cider and apple pies from scratch, feed the pigs and sweep up cow manure. For many of these students, who hail from gritty neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York, that excursion marks their first visit to a farm.

Back at the Meat Hook, another butcher, Brent Young, 27, was displaying the tools of his trade.

“Ninety percent of our work is done with our knives, most importantly this five-inch European-style breaking knife,” Mr. Young said, pulling the tool out of his scabbard for all to see. He then pointed out the band saw (used for cutting through thick bones), the three-horsepower meat grinder (for sausages and ground beef) and a hand saw (for cutting through muscle and bone). When a student asked if there were ever any accidents, Mr. Mylan produced a chain-mail vest, which he said the butchers use “when we’re doing really serious work.”

“Sometimes,” he added, “the dense bone and hard muscle is not exactly where you thought it was and that knife will just come through and you can really hurt yourself.”

When it came time to sampling some raw meat — something these butchers do every day to ensure the meat is of high quality — the students hesitated.

“If it’s nasty, I’m not going to try it again,” said Denzel Conze, 18.

Ben Turley, 29, another of the Meat Hook butchers, cut a raw flatiron steak into thin slices, sprinkling each with some salt.

“It tastes like salty gummy bears,” Jamie Colon, 16, said after a bite of the meat.

Most of Ms. Kessler’s students live in “food deserts”—neighborhoods with lots of fast food but little fresh produce or other healthy fare. Automotive High School’s students are predominantly low income, too, with 75 percent of them qualifying for a free lunch, according to Ms. Brouder.

Though the students may not return to the Meat Hook to buy the homemade sausages ($10.99 a pound), or even the grass-fed beef ($6 a pound), that’s not really the point. “The purpose of going there is just for them to know it’s out there,” Ms. Kessler said. “It’s really hard to cement in their heads that there are other options to industrial food.”

Sign in to Recommend Next Article in New York Region (10 of 10) » A version of this article appeared in print on February 6, 2010, on page A16 of the New York edition.