ReadWriteWeb

An intern once asked me, what's the difference between a "journalist" of my day and a "blogger" of his? I laughed and told him my day ain't over yet. Then I followed up by saying that journalism is something I do on a blog, and there are many other things one can do on a blog, only a few of which I'll allow.

The thing journalists still do today is extract and present the viewpoints of people who matter more to the business they cover than the journalists themselves. Here now in living color are a handful of the most revealing, poignant, and on occasion, truthful statements made to ReadWriteWeb journalists in the year about to pass.

Microsoft earned a reputation for its "embrace and extend" development philosophy, which recalls a time when it assimilated existing ideas by hook or by something else. Adobe's plan with respect to HTML5 technology is more like "embrace and pummel." Although it's been telling analysts and reporters that Flash is embracing HTML5, the message Adobe's product managers gave to developers this week at its MAX 2011 conference is that the plug-in reigns supreme.

Tomorrow the interactive marketing agency BLITZ will release source code and scripts for using Kinect with Adobe Flash by way of Node.js. The company has also released a short video tutorial, embedded below, explaining how to get Kinect and Flash working together. BLITZ's solution should also work with Silverlight and Unity. The source code will be available from BLITZ's blog at 8:00 AM Pacific on January 12.

All the buzz about HTML5 in 2010 and the Apple/Adobe rift makes it pretty easy to think it was a grim year for Flash. But the Flash team at Adobe wouldn't agree. They've posted The Flash Platform Top 10 for 2010, an interesting list reminding us that 2010 was actually a pretty good year for Flash developers. Apart from all the worrying that the sky was falling or that their skill set was going to go the way of horse-drawn carriage repair.

An enterprising iPhone hacker has figured out how to get Adobe Flash working on the iPhone, despite Steve Jobs' banishment of the third-party plugin from all iDevices for reasons detailed in his long-winded "Thoughts on Flash" memo posted to Apple.com back in April.

Why do you need Flash on the iPhone? To see banner ads?

No, not really.

Within two years, the number of hours people spend viewing online video will easily surpass the time they spend watching television. There's no doubt that online video has enjoyed stratospheric growth of late, but despite that success, the technical underpinning by which video is delivered into your browser hasn't really developed much since the 1990s. Back then, watching a video on the Web meant squinting at a postage stamp-sized low-res player with very jerky video.

No Flash on the iPhone? It's not a problem for advertisers, apparently. Developers tasked with creating rich media ad units for Apple's popular mobile devices have been busy porting their Flash-created ad collateral into an iPhone-friendly HTML5 format using mobile ad firm Greystripe's "iFlash" ad technology, which provides a Flash-like ad experience.

The iFlash ad format has become so popular, in fact, that Greystripe is just now announcing a 200% growth spike for these "iFlash" ads following the iAds announcement.

We were surprised to find a long missive penned by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs posted to the Web this morning. The subject? Why Apple hates Adobe Flash. Ever since the Cupertino-based company opted to reject the plugin-based technology on the iPhone and its Wi-Fi-only companion, the iPod Touch, people have questioned and debated not just the decision itself, but the reasoning behind it. Was Flash buggy? Was is a matter of it being a proprietary product? Did it use too much CPU? The answer, as explained by Jobs in rich detail, is all of the above.

A number of bloggers are today reporting a noticeable change to Facebook's website when viewed from the built-in Safari web browser on the Apple iPad: videos now work. Previously, videos appearing in a user's News Feed wouldn't play on the iPad due to Facebook's use of Adobe Flash technology, which is not supported. Apple has, somewhat notoriously, banished Flash from its mobile devices, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, in favor of supporting the HTML5 web standard instead.

Although still in development, HTML5, the latest revision to the markup language used to create web pages, offers a feature that allows videos to play in a web browser without the need for a plugin like that used by Adobe Flash.

But has Facebook actually implemented HTML5 on its site?

Despite the now-infamous absence of Adobe's Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks.

The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the "lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer."