Believe it or not, there's a lot more going on this weekend than the NCAA tournament, the World Baseball Classic, and continued spring training. I hate to admit that at times, there's a lot more to life than sports.

As widely reported, today marked the third anniversary of the Iraq War (II). The Bush Administration took the occasion to celebrate the progress they've seen, and again argue that the insurgents are losing and that the US will be remembered well in the history books. On the other side of the aisle, people are questioning the reasons behind a recent air offensive there, and continue in their frustrations as we see the many trillions of dollars and thousands of lives that have been erased in this conflict.

In the blogosphere, Guy Kawasaki emphasizes how important it is to be nice to those who can best help you, the little people, while the Redeye VC warns that as with other investment cycles, the bubble may soon burst on Web 2.0 companies, just as they got started. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley Sleuth updates us by saying the Google/Sun rumormonger is now backtracking. By the way, those three sites? Bookmark them all.

Spring Training is about a lot more than just winning or losing. It's about AAA players trying to make their way to the big club, about veterans improving their skills, improving teammate camaraderie and for some, recovering from injury or avoiding hurting others (I'm looking at you, Bobby!). But there's no doubt that the Cactus League is full of "pins and needles" for all. Some of this year's themes are explored in this week's ANtics!

BTW - On my trip to spring training, I gave away printed copies of last year's ANtics to Barry Zito, Eric Chavez, Billy Beane, and the radio team of Ken Korach and Ray Fosse. You can download your copy of the handout in PDF.


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ANtics Archive: 2005/06 ANtics | Extras | Giveaway | PDF

When you think of Apple's iPod, you probably have some images in your head - the white earbuds connecting to the device, or the neon silhouette ads prominent in their commercials and billboards. You may think of "1,000 songs in your pocket", or the newly introduced iPods that play video, including TV shows from the networks and select cable shows. But for me, my iPod is boring. I get it out when I need to get work done, and when I connect it to the home laptop, my wife knows I'm focused on work from the office.

The reason for this is that ever since acquiring my first iPod (a mere 12 hours after they were announced), I've used the iPod as the go-between portable hard drive between the home computer and that of the office. The iPod functions as backup storage for the company Web site, and the primary repository for day to day tasks, and archived activity. With 60 Gigabytes available and an ultra-fast Firewire connection, it's just as good as the local disk drive, and work stays in the same state from one machine to another. While it's true that nearly 30 Gigabytes of music is stored on the iPod, as well as my address book and a small handful of personal files, it's definitely a work device.

I've grown reliant on the iPod being available, which has only caused me grief in two instances - once when I left the device at home on a day of a presentation, and zipped back home to get it, missing an hour of office productivity, and the second, much more alarming, incident, when I left a previous iPod, with 20 Gigabytes of data on it, in the seat cover of a flight from Chicago to Baltimore. While I had done periodic backups of the data, it's sure that some data was irrecoverably lost, and whoever took the seat on the flight immediately following had a nice surprise in store - and they certainly weren't interested in letting me know they found it, for after repeated calls to the BWI airport, none was ever reported found. I ended up having to purchase the latest iPod the following weekend from the Apple store and started the arduous tasks of restoring the data from backups, e-mail attachments and whatever I could find - and have been much more diligent about backing up since.

Because I think of the device as my work iPod, it's plugged into the computer at the office first thing every morning Monday through Friday, rendering all its stored music unavailable to me. I've even considered getting a second iPod, a smaller one, just for listening to music at the office, without disturbing my coworkers. Truth is I don't know if I could do that, and still look professional enough while getting everything I need to done, so that idea hasn't manifested itself, but it may some time. It also would seem funny to lug in two iPods to go with the two computers I've already got in the cubicle (one Mac and one Dell), making things just a bit crowded.

My iPod is essential, but not for what most people think. It's a serious work device. A portable hard drive, backup device and yes, it does fit in my pocket.

In the late 1990's, rumors on stock boards from Yahoo!, Silicon Investor, The Motley Fool and Raging Bull would often have impact on the financial markets, whether through bumping up penny stocks in a quick pump and dump scheme, or suggesting rumors of mergers, take overs, new product shipments or product delays. While some of these people were caught, others made a lot of money in gaming the system.

Now, with community-generated media growing by leaps and bounds through personal blogs, and aggregation sites like Slashdot and Digg wielding a great deal of power in the blogosphere, some are trying to game the system through promotion of their own company's products, or through purchasing stock cheap, hyping a rumor, and selling when the stock goes up - migrating away from discussion boards, and to more legitimate, yet still unsourced sites.

One of these recent activities is described by Silicon Valley Sleuth, who charts a series of posts by a no-name blogger to Digg.com about the possibility of Google (GOOG) acquiring Sun Microsystems (SUNW). The blogger made multiple attempts to have his rumor picked up by Digg, and Sun stock, coincidentally or not, is up fractionally since he started. Should this be illegal, or has this person simply found a loophole, and enough suckers to help him make a profit?

Given the wide opportunities offered through freedom of speech, this individual and others like him, certainly have that right - but the responsibility is on site owners for Slashdot and Digg to reign in their algorithms or editors, to offer their readers the highest accuracy. Only though accuracy and consistency will readers continue to trust the sites, for Web users are fickle and can move along.