That is a line worthy of H. L. Mencken.

-jcr

Sent from my Nokia 1011

Just to clear things up, every article that appears on Macworld.com is chosen for publication by an editor at Macworld. Nothing posts automatically, and nobody at IDG orders us to post things from sister publications.

Your suggestion that “the Macworld staff isn’t going to agree with the content” is, in my mind, irrelevant — if someone has an interesting perspective it need not pass some sort of ideological test. We often post opinions we disagree with because they’re interesting. Sometimes we post things specifically because we disagree with them, because we think readers will find them interesting. It’s not our job to be some sort of Pravda that only published articles that make our readers feel happy and reinforces their own world-views — our our own.

However, your point about the article being “dumb to a embarrassing degree” is a lot more relevant. I imagine that the editor who published this piece possibly didn’t read it as carefully as they should have. We may need to exert more effort on carefully reading pieces from sister publications, because they may not meet our editorial standards even though they’ve passed through the hands of one of our editorial colleagues at IDG.

But once again, I must reinforce that we are not obligated to run any IDG content we don’t want to. And I’m not quite sure where you got the idea that we “can’t talk about why either” — there’s no gagging order in place, and that’s a pretty wild and paranoid claim. Neither of those assumptions are accurate. I’m not quite sure why you assumed they were, and stated those things as fact when they’re simply not.

It’s an addiction, and the only way to deal with an addiction is to give in to it completely.

Right…?

I’m pretty sure that the “Sent using” tagline was first pioneered by RIM with the Blackberry as a way of positioning it as THE mobile e-mail device (which in its day, it pretty was the only game in town).

Of course, then the carriers get involved, and you end up with taglines like, “Sent Using my Blackberry device on the ROGERS Wireless Network” …. Of course, I can’t imagine who would actually want to *advertise* being a *Rogers* customer (although I’m sure some silly pundit could make a case that people want to show off by demonstrating how much they can afford to be ripped off). In reality, however, I think most users quickly edit that one to change it or take it out entirely.

….and that’s rather the point. The tagline is just a default signature block which you can edit to whatever you like. In reality, most professional people I know leave in this sort of tagline or some variation of it just to reiterate that the message is being sent from a mobile device and manage expectations (ie, “Don’t expect a twelve-paragraph response and please forgive the occasional typo.”)

—-
Sent using a Sony Ericsson mobile phone