We hap­pen to be writ­ing this post a few days after catch­ing a huge wave of inter­est that brought us to #2 on Digg. (Yes, that’s a good thing.)  The post was orig­i­nally writ­ten for the Book Page at Huff­in­g­ton Post. The piece was sub­se­quently front-paged on the same web­site, and was hard to miss for the 27,000,000 vis­i­tors HP gets each month.

The les­son? Humor moves almost as fast as emer­gen­cies. But funny is in the eye of the beholder and can eas­ily back­fire and offend.

iTablet Beta Tester Breaks Embargo

Recently I was given just 24 hours to explore a first pro­duc­tion build of the Apple iTablet — and here are my first impres­sions and dis­cov­er­ies. First, it’s more like an iPhone than a Mac­Book. The oper­at­ing sys­tem depends on ges­tures, and expands the vocab­u­lary. Your hand is going to be dancing.

Sec­ond big news: it’s not just an appli­ca­tion plat­form and full-color reader and media player. It’s also a dual cam­era and, yes, read this twice, a phone. And therein lies a tale. For those whose habits have been formed around their iPhones, be very, very care­ful when your iTablet rings for the first time. That urge to whip the thing with its ginor­mous 10 inch screen up to your ear is going to play havoc with your eye. In the small group of folks I ran into who were return­ing their demo ver­sions, most of us had nasty shiners.

Apple assures us that final pro­duc­tion ver­sions will come with train­ing cor­ners — foam wed­gies that will soften the blow until the user gets used to answer­ing the giant device. And the sec­ond mod will be a catcher’s mitt-like web­bing on the back of the iTablet so you can one hand it.

Killer apps? Try this — for those who will want to mount the iTablet high on their dash­board, this thing is going to block your view. So Apple has come up with the bril­liant iDrive. The cam­era on the back side stays live and you basi­cally can see right through your iTablet, like a vir­tual win­dow. A sec­ond cam­era, imbed­ded invis­i­bly in the screen, can pro­vide help in back­ing up.

When you’re not in your car, the embed­ded cam­eras cre­ates iMir­ror, and one of the coolest apps we’ve seen so far is iTrim. Male or female, select your hair­style from dozens of pos­si­bil­i­ties, and then iTrim gives you cut by cut direc­tions so you can do it your­self. You might need a lit­tle help for the back and top, or you can sync up two iTablets and put them on the Infi­nite Bar­ber­shop Mir­ror setting.

Now with all that extra screen area to dance your hand on, Apple has greatly expanded the ges­tures it under­stands. First, there’s the Full Palm Down. Just spread out your hand and plant it on the screen. What­ever pro­gram that’s cur­rently run­ning will screech to a halt. Flip your hand over and give it the Brush Off, and the pro­gram will go away. Do it sev­eral times and the screen will clear. Then there’s the Fist Bump. Closed fist means ‘Yes.’ Or Agree, or Con­tinue, Install, or ‘Can I have some more, please?’

Finally, all of pub­lish­ing has been pray­ing that the iTablet will be a Kin­dle killer and free the pub­lish­ing world from the threat of world dom­i­na­tion by Ama­zon. Suc­cess may depend on whether peo­ple will want the read­ing part of their life to be as eas­ily inter­rupted as every­thing else in their world. When your book can hurl e-mails at you, ring your phone, cut your hair and even show you who’s sneak­ing up behind you, some may not find that to be the ideal read­ing environment.

Then there’s the con­cern about the infan­til­ism that per­me­ates Steve Job’s atti­tude toward cul­ture. “Peo­ple don’t read any­more,” is one of his bril­liant obser­va­tions. On iTunes, all music has become a “song.” Verdi’s Requiem Mass is down­load­able as a bunch of songs. For an entire gen­er­a­tion, a Beethoven sym­phony is now four songs. This is surely a crime against human­ity of some sort.

So take the same atti­tude and apply it to books. And guess what? You aren’t going to be buy­ing a ‘book’ on the iTunes store. You’re going to be buy­ing a ‘story’ one chap­ter at a time, whether it’sWind in the Wil­lows or Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Logico-Philosophicus, every­thing is going to be just a chap­ter in a story.

The good news is the color is great. You can zoom in for spec­tac­u­lar detail. And when you check in to that “mir­ror” func­tion you’ll be able to track the progress of your shiner.