Someone get a dose of Ritalin stat to the noisy but deeply misguided critics who took news of a huge number of downloads of apps for the Apple iPhone and immediately concluded it was just not good enough.

Thus, as reported today in The Wall Street Journal, 60 million downloads in 30 days–mostly for free apps, but with about $30 million in revenue, and a runway of three million more new iPhones out there too–is a chance to talk about how it all is just so unexciting and how the apps market is officially saturated?

Am I missing something here? One would assume that were these pundits pioneers, they would get to Ohio and declare that going farther west held very little promise, thank you very much!

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On my recent trip to Seattle, I visited the offices of iLike, in the Capitol Hill section of that lovely Pacific Northwest city, to take a video gander at one of the more interesting start ups to emerge from the social networking arena.

The music discovery site, unlike a lot of others in its sector, has been plugging away for several years with much less funding (about $16 million from the founding Partovi twin brothers, former AOL wunderkind Bob Pittman and a big slug from Ticket Master), but a lot more impact.

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When Apple releases its third-quarter earnings after the close today, Wall Street will be looking hard for a solid performance from the company to help buoy a tech sector smacked silly by weak reports from industry leaders Microsoft and Google last week.

But more important to me is what is happening with the plethora of third-party apps now available on the iTunes App Store–both free and paid–for use on the iPhone platform.

That’s because Apple has finally built a platform for adults.

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BoomTown just spent a few days in Los Angeles recently, and will be there a lot more over the next year, part of a new vision quest in search of what makes great original content on the Web.

And what better way to start than with Hayden Black, creator of two really interesting Web series: a behind-the-scenes spoof of a local news broadcast called “Goodnight Burbank” and “abigail’s ‘x-rated’ teen diary,” in which Black plays a very believable teen girl.

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The annual love-in to All Things Steve Jobs, oops, we mean Apple, opens this week in San Francisco. Of course, the punditry is in high gear over what precious object his iHoliness will pull out of his pocket in 2008.
Or, apparently this year, out of the air, which is some sort of super-duper-double-secret-probation object or [...]

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The post I did yesterday on Universal Music Group head Doug Morris and his grumpy interview with Wired about digital issues got some interesting comments, all of which concluded that the veteran music exec had lost his marbles.
In the interview, Morris took aim at Apple’s popular music player and service, blamed college students for the [...]

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Doug Morris is still a very, very grumpy man about the digital arena.

We did not think it could get worse than NBC honcho Jeff Zucker (pictured here), who demanded a vig for every iPod sold because “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of [...]

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What, oh what, can we say about the latest inane quote from yet another Hollywood mogul about Apple’s Steve Jobs and his hugely popular iTunes and iPod products.
The latest piece of hoo-ha comes from former Disney CEO Michael Eisner (pictured below), pointing a finger at Apple as the real villain in the ongoing strike between [...]

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So when, if ever, will there be a truly bona fide Internet hit?
And please, pretty please, it just can’t be “lonelygirl15″ (pictured below) and some clever music videos.

The lack of lasting and profitable professional content online is once again in sharp relief with the writers’ strike now taking place in Hollywood.
In a Wall Street Journal [...]

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The talks between Hollywood studios and the Writers Guild of America ground to a halt as of last night and a strike could happen anytime, since the contract between them expired at midnight.
The big problem? Digital issues, which are sure to be an increasingly vexing issue for the entertainment industry, as more and more [...]

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Back in July, BoomTown flagged country song “Online” as a surefire hit.

The video of the song by Brad Paisley from his recent “5th Gear” album had just topped the iTunes chart with its star-studded cast, which included Jason Alexander, William Shatner, Kellie Pickler and the original Marcia Brady, Maureen McCormick. It was a feat [...]

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Put your feet up and watch some dandy videos from WSJ Online and MarketWatch, our very nice relatives at Dow Jones (AllThingsD is the crazy cousin of this family and Rupe is our new parental unit).
First, Microsoft unveils newest Zune Media players, in attractive guano-green, as the clever Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski notes in [...]

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Now, in living color, the entire historic joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple.
D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.
That has meant only a few hundred people [...]

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Or at least the hip-swiveling, guitar-picking country music star understands them.

The video of Paisley’s song, “Online,” from his recent “5th Gear” album, recently topped the chart on iTunes, something no country selection had ever done. It could have been the star-studded cast, which included Jason Alexander, Estelle Harris and Patrick Warburton of “Seinfeld,” as [...]

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When Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski got word of Microsoft’s enormous repair bill for the faulty Xbox 360, he also discovered that the defect–the so-called red ring of death–may affect as many as a third or more of the video-game consoles, a fact the tech giant says will cause frustration for “some” of its customers.

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