Without question, this has been the hardest decision I’ve ever made, but I know it’s the right one. And as much as I’m looking forward to new challenges (and grateful they’re not Motorola-related), I’m also really excited to see Engadget continue its evolution with Josh at the helm, and as part of the AOL Tech network (where I’ll continue to play an advisory role as editor-at-large). Pete and I are both pretty happy with how things worked out, and are definitely looking ahead. (You’re following us on Twitter, right?)

As much as wish I could, for the time being I really can’t talk very much about the details of the new company (which does not yet have a name). I’m pretty stoked though — promise, you’ll hear more soon.

I’m a serious resolution and screen real estate hog, so I’ll let that sink in for a sec as I recount my week spent with a 30-incher I bought (and eventually sold) earlier this year. There’s no doubt that productivity goes up and stress goes down as you add more pixels to your desktop, and like many over the last ten years I’ve gone from 14 to 17 to 19-inch CRTs, to 20-inch LCDs, eventually to 24-inch, and more recently to 30-inches. I’m not going to get too into the Dell 3007WFP-HC itself — which is absolutely amazing, and has color rich enough to make your eyes ache (in a good way) — but I could barely believe it when I discovered a display size that was simply too large for me to use comfortably.

Oh sure, I could fill up that amount of resolution easily. And since I’m not a MacBook Air user, actually powering that many pixels wasn’t really a problem. It all came down to the six inch jump, which necessitated dramatic eye movements from distantly adjacent windows, and, eventually, constant neck adjustments to reduce the strain of said looking back and forth.

Part of me thinks I’m crazy though, because I’d love nothing more than a wall of 30-inchers to work on. Guess I’ll have to check out those new 27-inch models — too bad they only add size, and not pixels over the 24s.

What I will say — and it’s the same thing I told Mike earlier today — is that, as I enter my fifth year at Engadget, I’m still totally focused on it, our team, and living up to the enormous level of trust our readers place in us day in and out. (As I’m sure Veronica would tell you, I’m probably actually too focused.) I can also say that I had no idea until today that I owned 39+ domain names, but that’s pretty awesome.

It seems like life in the (rapidly shrinking) print bubble has severely distorted the AP’s outlook in the midst of an increasingly predominent all-digital media landscape. If I were them I’d be careful in the coming weeks and months — unlike the print pubs that syndicate their news, there isn’t any real need for the AP on the internet, and at this rate I’m not sure they’ll be missed.

• Joystiq’s first E3 (Engadget’s second) is where we all brainstormed with Cat Schwartz on the infamous DS vs. PSP video.
• The following E3, former co-editor Vlad Cole (now at Microsoft) was writing a book on all-Pizza diets. This, of course, meant Engadget and Joystiq editors all wound up eating basically only pizza. Not sure I’ve ever lost the weight.
• James Ransom-Wiley has been with Joystiq since early July 2004, making him the longest-tenured editor there. Go James!
• Contrary to popular belief, Kotaku actually started in October of 2004, seemingly as a response to Joystiq.

My favorite trade show of the year is usually E3 — partly because it means we get to regroup with Joystiq and do it up together. Looking forward to that next month, and happy birthday Joystiq!

Bonus trivia: Last E3 myself, Chris, and Pete were all ticketed for jaywalking — at a crosswalk. For some reason my ticket was withdrawn, but Pete and Chris still had to pay theirs. Pics or it didn’t happen, right? Here you go.

This is Engadget when Apple launches a new iPhone. Any questions?

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by today to read our coverage of the iPhone 3G launch — it’s always an extraordinary amount of fun and a real honor to be the go-to place for big news in the gadget world.

And yes, I was fortunate enough to play with it and definitely can’t wait to really put the spurs to one.

I think the question I’m most often asked by people not already in the industry is, “How do I break into writing about technology?” The answer is pretty simple: start writing, keep writing (even when the initial luster has worn off, even if you’re not collecting droves of readers and scads of review units), and with any luck you’ll hone your skill and catch your break — not unlike the path the crew at TeenTechBlog are already on.

Although to be fair, they do disclaim being guilty of the same, and I’m sure the site’s editorial staff doesn’t approve of that kind of advertising nor want it on the site. Trust me, I understand as well as any editor that the people making the content don’t always have much or any say in how their property advertises — but that’s both a double-edged sword and a conversation for another time.

It’s really easy to identify folders for exclusion from Time Machine, which will save time and space during backups. It’s worth noting, though, that if your machine’s drive does fail, you won’t be able to execute a full restore without having some of these locations backed up. Then again, if you’re anything like me, you’re far more likely to just do a full reinstall and just restore your lost user data. (Doing a full restore from backup just doesn’t have many advantages compared to a full system reinstall, anyway.)

These are just a few suggestions — you should NEVER exclude anything from backup if you’re unsure you have another copy, aren’t able to get it again, or are unaware of the possible ramifications. Of course, you’ve got any good folders you think should be added to the list, feel free to drop ‘em in comments.

Obvious
The duh stuff.

• /Applications - This will likely save you more space than any other single folder, especially if you have lots of apps. Just make sure you know what programs you’d want to get back if your machine were to die.

Caches and downloads
Big directories of files that should probably be excluded automatically, but aren’t. Unless you’re a crazy developer debugging code, you’ll probably never need a backup of your caches.

• /Users/[user]/Library/Caches and /Library/Caches - Between the two you can knock off a few hundred megs of constantly changing, essentially useless data.
• /Users/[user]/Downloads - Where all your internet downloads wind up. Frequently changes, and if you’re anything like me, it’s filled with gigs of garbage.
• /Users/[user]/.Trash and /.Trashes - Some people might see value in backing up their trashed files. Not I.

More after the break.

Audio and media
Some more obvious picks. You probably don’t need to back this stuff up.

• /Library/Audio - You can save from the hundreds of megs to gigs here. Keep an eye out for the GarageBand samples, they weigh a ton.
• /Users/[user]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts - I don’t really re-listen to podcasts, but even if I did, they can be re-downloaded easily. So the 3GB+ I save here is a no brainer.

Time Machine un-friendly apps
The data produced by some of these apps can easily be the worst offenders when it comes to backups. Until they get their act together, they should likely be excluded categorically.

• Parallels (/Users/[user]/Library/Parallels) and VMware (/Users/[user]/Documents/Virtual Machines)- You’ll definitely want to keep a copy of your virtual machines, but if left included in Time Machine backups, your system will continuously save the virtual disks each time you use Parallels or VMware. (VMware has become a little more TM-aware though, which is good.) That means potentially hundreds of wasted GB — not to mention tons of lost time during backup.
• Entourage (/Users/[user]/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities) - Same deal here, Entourage uses one giant, constantly changing file to store all your mail. It sucks not to have your email backed up though, so be sure to use something other than Time Machine for keeping a copy handy in case of emergency.
• /Users/[user]/Library/Mail Downloads - Whenever you open an attachment in Mail, it stores a copy of the file in your Mail.app attachments folder. If you’re a heavy Mail user, excluding this will save you some real space.

System
Beware! You likely won’t screw up anything by excluding this stuff, but if you run into trouble these are some pretty important folders. Note: you’ll need to hit “show invisible items” to exclude some of these.

• /usr, /sbin, /private, /bin - Collectively contain about a billion essential system files that can ultimately just be reinstalled in case of disaster.
• /system - Root system folder. Contains lots of essential stuff — gigs of it, in fact. Great place to save space.

So I decided to plot the numbers to prove the theory that Twittering was, in fact, causing my personal blogging to atrophy. I had a very clear image in my head of what the two lines would look like: the blog would be trending down ever so slowly, taking nosedives during busy months, while the Twitter line would be going up pretty fast. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I hit the render chart button and the following showed up.

Although it’s obvious that my microblogging activity has exploded over the past few months, I absolutely was not expecting to find that as each activity goes up or down, the other almost always moves with it in parallel. Clearly it’s not always directly proportional (as most dramatically evidenced in this March’s spike), but that’s easily attributed to the ease and speed of microblogging vs. writing a full blog post — which is probably what led to the assumption that one affected the other in the first place.

So totally counter to that intuition, it would seem that, at least in my case, microblogging and blogging are not at all in opposition. If anything, both are probably just tied to the total amount of free time I have at my disposal. Hopefully others will chart their respective micro/macroblogging output so we can see if this revised theory of blog-atrophy actually holds true.

P.S. -Big ups to Twitterholic for spying keeping track of everybody’s Twitter usage.

Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / underground publishing culture, it wasn’t until the first blog CMSs landed in 1999 and 2000 (like Blogger and Movable Type) that mainstream audiences experimented with self-publishing. Those blogging at the time might remember what a highly platform-based experience it was. RSS and other forms of one:any (not just one:many) aggregation hadn’t yet come into widespread use, meaning some of those early platforms fed right back into their own siloed communities. This was especially apparent in the case of LiveJournal, which was really popular back then. Way late to RSS, LiveJournal instead relied on a light social networking system that aggregated posts to groups of friends using the service. Sounds familiar. Of course, blogging eventually grew up and out of its early stages into something far more horizontal and platform independent, ensuring the activity of blogging didn’t tie users to just one system and set of relationships.

Although Twitter should be clearly wary of users eventually fleeing for a distributed, decentralized, relationship-based cloud of microblogging, I think most in the know would agree that ultimately it’s what the medium needs to make the next step. Because of Twitter’s dependence on relationships, though, that transition probably won’t come easily; perhaps that’s where services like FriendFeed and other meta-aggregators step in as the glue for disparate, distributed life-content apps. Or perhaps that’s the tack Twitter needs to build into its own business, ensuring it makes the transition from early platform to future technology leader.

Owned
Ars Technica - CondéNet (Condé Nast)
Crave - CNET (CBS)
Engadget - AOL (Time Warner)
Slashdot - SourceForge, Inc.
Wired blogs (Danger Room, Epicenter, etc.) - CondéNet (Condé Nast)

Independent
BoingBoing - Happy Mutants, LLC
GigaOM - GigaOmni Media
Gizmodo - Gawker Media
PaidContent - ContentNext Media, Inc.
Silicon Alley Insider - Silicon Alley Insider, Inc
TechCrunch - Interserve, Inc.
VentureBeat - VentureBeat, Inc.

Independent, on hire
Fake Steve Jobs - Forbes
Scobleizer - FastCompany (Mansueto Ventures, LLC)

P.S. -And no, the EIC gig I referenced the other day wasn’t this, so there you go.