It's the time of year when dozens of rumors will begin circulating
around the Mac Web regarding what His Steveness will introduce as a new
product at the January Macworld Expo.
It used to be that only the rumor sites published rumors, but these
days - what with "legitimate" news sources quoting sites like Drudge
and all - everyone's into the rumor-writing ecstasy of speculative
fiction.
But what do you do if you don't have any juicy rumors to reveal?
Turn to the Lite Side's guide for nascent news hounds, of course, a
little article we like to call
How to Dream Up Your Own Apple Rumor
There are basically three kinds of Mac related rumors. These
are:
- The kind you make up
- The kind you repeat
- The kind you actually know about
The Kind You Make Up
The best time to make up a Mac rumor is when you've been up all
night surfing the Web looking at tech sites. You're getting a little
drowsy, but you don't want to go to bed, because that means you'll just
have to wake up again. 
There's nothing on TV except reruns
of Matlock,
you're out of Cheesy-Doodles, and you can hear a siren somewhere off in
the distance.
There's a special moment when you're still thinking, "I'm not quite
asleep yet, am I?," and any sudden, small noise - such as a heater
kicking on or a creak in the walls - seems amplified a thousand
times.
You know, sometimes when you can make yourself dream about something
by thinking about it as you fall asleep? And you're thinking of doing
that very thing, just on the verge of deciding whether or not you're
dreaming?
That's when you make up a Mac rumor.
It takes a special talent. You have to blend together two
technologies in a new way. They can be already existing Mac equipment
or stuff that Apple doesn't make yet. For example, when the iPod was
developed, Steve Jobs did this very thing and asked himself
. . . what can I make that has a touch sensitive control and
a hard drive? The devices merged and became the iPod.
If you're reporting rumors, what you're trying to do is
telepathically link into the stream of consciousness of Apple engineers
as they drift in and out of the mental state that allows the synthesis
of disparate technology.
Will it be a commercially released CD of iTunes user picks? a laptop
using a scroll wheel instead of a trackpad? an iPod-shaped mouse so you
can pick 'tunes and maneuver around the Net simultaneously? a new
PowerBook that has a kickstand like an iMac?
Getting sleepy yet?
Keep trying.
You'll get it.
And when you do, you have to drop a pen or something so the noise
will shock you back to consciousness. Then, quick like a bunny, write
it down or you'll forget it. Better have another pen handy.
I don't know how many great ideas I have had that have disappeared
into a Matlock-induced coma. It's a lot, though.
Rumors You Repeat
If you read a lot of Mac sites, you encounter a lot of rumors. The
technique here is to
- Pick one. "Apple is set to announce an oval-shaped flash-based
iPod..."
- Cite it. "As seen on MacRumors...."
- Declare it wrong. "unlike some folks who believe the next iPod will
be oval-shaped..."
- Fix it. "the new iPod will be elliptical with an eccentricity of
0.21."
Nothing to it. Here, let me do a another example.
This
page includes improvements to Keynote that may appear at
Macworld. They're close in assuming Keynote 2 will have a media access
tray like iDVD, but Keynote 2 will go even farther, using Speech
Synthesis to read the presentation to the audience so all you have to
do is create the content, sit back, relax, and let the novelty of a
human-less presentation astound your audience.
See? Nothing to it. Literally.
The Kind You Actually Know About
This cannot be FOAF (Friend of a Fool) or something like that. You
had to hear it directly because you're on the inside yourself - or
you're the UPS guy at Apple and heard someone talking about it on the
loading dock or something.
As far as I know, this has never actually happened, because the
$0.92 you get for selling your inside info doesn't come close to
covering your losses as Apple fires you and you get Excommunicated from
the Cult of Mac
by no one less than Leander Kahney himself.
Anyway, that's how you write Mac rumors. Have fun, and enjoy the
holiday rumor season.
