journal," judy feder examines the debate on health care reform. the report talks about the provision of the house health care bill that would make individual private medical insurance illegal, and from the national governors' association in mississippi, will talk with south dakota governor mike rounds and governor jim douglas from vermont. .

>> walt mossberg, how is the average person supposed to understand what that is about? >> hopefully, the average person will understand it because i tried to write them in english and to write them conversationally >> so compared to what you might read on a more techy-oriented web site, for instance, i'm stopping to explain terms, i'm pretending i'm talking to a smart person but somebody who's not a techy and not interested in being a techy. >> what motivated you to write about fire fox and what is it? >> fire fox is the second most popular web browser in the world.

obviously, web browsing is an enormously important activity engaged in by all layers of society. and there needs to be a competition, just like there needs to be a competition in tv sets or any other gateway into a medium. a web browser is a gateway into a medium. and fire fox is the principal competitor to microsoft's internet explorer which i've also gone into great detail in reviewing. and there is actually a new browser war going on. about 10 years ago there was a browser war, microsoft won decisively against a small outfit called net scape. now there is a new browser war and there are four principal combatants in that war. and fire fox is one of them. so when any of them bring out a brand-new web browser there's a lot of interest among my readers. what's different about it, should i switch to it, is it slower,

faster, it got different features. so it's a good topic forney to wry about. >> what has been your reaction the fact that you personally after what is it 18 years of writing? >> about 17 1/2. >> have become a personality? >> well, i'm a personality in a certain world. i can walk down the streets here in washington and most people -- most people have no idea who i am. but it's a little different if i'm at a computer trade show or something where a lot more people do know who i am. so my reaction is that it sort of comes with the territory. and you certainly understand that as well. >> well, you had a "new yorker" profile and wired magazine stories and other magazine stories. and one of the things that i think it was a reporter in the "new yorker" called you a curmudgeon. >> well, that's commonly used to apply to me. i guess it's because i don't always give

everything a good review. that review this morning, i mean, firefox is a cult-beloved product. i use it myself. and i thought this particular new release wasn't quite as good at advancing their position as some of their previous releases. so somewhere along the line i picked up that title of curmudgeon. >> how often do you write? >> i write two columns a week. and i also have a working for me a terrific young woman named kathryn berett who writes a third column that i edit but don't write and it's really her work. so i write two and i edit one every week. and then when the spirit moves me i do a blog post on a web site that i comanage. >> back in 1995 we did a little interview over at the bureau. and i want to show you what you sounded like,

looked like, and also what we were talking about and talk about the change. >> it sounds frightening. >> all right. let's take someone like me. i just happen to have bought my first ever computer not more than three months ago. and it's one of those little laptop jobs that you can take around with you and plug in. c-span went on america online on december the 1st so i can take it anywhere i want to and plug in and find out the c-span schedule. what about somebody like me? what would you tell me if i had never touched a computer, how would i get started and figuring outy should even have one? >> the first thing i tell everybody, and i write this and i also say it personally to people is to figure out what you want to do with it. in other words, the idea that i just want to work a computer and i want to become "computer literate" is good for the hype and ad campaign of the computer industry but it's not good for you. because you're busy. you're smart about what you know.

and you don't necessarily want to pick up a second career unless it's your hobby. the first thing is what i do want to do with it. in your case i think you said you wanted to write some probably and wanted to be able to log onto america online which is an online service with a lot of information including now a section for c-span. and you are probably traveling to some extent so you wanted something portable. so once you get that figured out, then i think what you need to do is go for the best combination of not only price and power, but one factor that people tend not to consider a lot which is ease of use. ease of use. how quickly after you turn it on can you get into doing productive work without having to learn a lot of tech know basketball? -- technobabble. >> reaction? >> well, those glasses were pretty big. i guess that's my reaction. you know, i think both

of us would have the same point of view today. you bought a computer at that time. i would point out, brian, the personal computer really went mass market in 1977. that was what '94. so it took you a little while to buy your computer. but you have probably bought a number of them since then, and you still want to do a lot of the same things. from my part, i would say -- i still say the same things to people. i mean, the most important thing is, what do you, whoever i'm talking to, including my readers, want to do with this computer? and there are different kinds of computers now, including things like this iphone, which, you know, is actually a computer, not really a phone. it's a computer that happens to make phone calls. and it has more power i'm sure than that laptop you bought back in '94 and '95. >> i thought i was

obsessed with the fact that we could get our schedule out. that was the only thing that mattered at that time. but there's another clip i'm going to show you from that interview that uses language of products. and you tell us what's happened to these. >> ok. >> america online i think is basically the most economical. for $9.95 a month you get five hours, and those hours can be spent on any feature of the service. >> they can get our schedule on america online. >> they can get your schedule. but though can get a lot of other things. on prodigy you pay $14.95 a month. but once you use two hours, certain parts of the service like the bulletin boards start costing you extra, and then there are other things that cost even above that. come pew serve is $8.95 and you get a bunch of basic services. after that however it may cost you $8 a hour. or if you have a high-speed mode up, $16 a hour. >> what happened to aol, prodigy and come pew serve?

>> -- compuserve. >> prodigy died and that was a deserved death because they were more of a one-way broadcast service, not very attuned to users wanting to contribute. compuserve was acquired by aol. aol had been the upstart at that time, compuserve and -- aol bought time warner and the merger kind of fell apart. and at that time warner is spinning it off again and it probably is going to be reborn in some other way. it certainly has nowhere near the power that it had in those days. but i think one of the interesting things, whereas you noticed i was explaining the pricing and the pricing was metered pricing. you got so many hours for so many dollars. and then maybe so many features and then it went up.

and of course, just a few years after that, the worldwide web became open to people and came into existence. and except for the fee you have to pay every month for access, which can be 40, $50 a month, it's not cheap, the actual use of the content on there is not metered by time or by what you're doing for the most part. and this is right at the heart of a gigantic debate and a gigantic business issue right now. >> which is what? >> well, the issue is, if you're producing a service or content like the "wall street journal" or c-span or, you know, nbc or cbs or a very good blog or whatever, can you charge people for it. can you sell enough advertising to make your

profit cover your costs, make your profit? and there's a big debate. and we at the "wall street journal" are almost alone. there are a couple of others like "consumer reports" but we're almost alone in taking the point of view that we're doing a mixed model. some things we have are free and some things we have require subscription, just like the printed newspaper does. >> what does it cost to subscribe online to the "wall street journal"? >> i honestly don't know. i'm not in the sales side of it. my sense is it's something on the order of $100 a year but it can be a little less in combination. you know, they run offers. and if you're a print subscriber it's less. so i don't know. but i think it's somewhere in the order of $100 a year. >> last time i saw it something like 800,000 subscribers? >> oh, it's now about 1 million. >> what about walt mossberg life? go back to 1995 where we were. what has changed in your life besides the fact

that rupert murdoch owns the "wall street journal"? >> i've been very lucky. both in my work and in my personal life. i mean, my kids are grown up. one of them is going to get marrieded next year. so that's a great thing. >> how old are they? >> one is 30, one is 27. i now as we said a minute ago i now write several columns. i think at the time we were talking i wrote one. i do have an excellent colleague, young colleague that works for me and gives me a female and a younger perspective, which are really helpful. and, you know, like everyone else, i went through various health things that i've come through. and that's been good. so -- but probably the most interesting thing i've done is about seven years ago, another "wall

street journal" columnist named kara swisher and i started a conference called the d conference, all things digital. and that brings together sort of the leaders of the technology industry and also the media industry to tack about these issues like how do you make money, does everything have to be free, is there an advertising market online. and more to the point, what are the technologies of the future. and that conference has been very successful. and it has spawned a web site that i now coproduce with kara called "all things d.com." so i still write my columns in the journal. they still are my main job. and i still enjoy doing them. but i'm also now a little bit of an entrepreneur in the sense that although the journal owns the conference and the web site, kara and i run them kind of autonomously. and that's been a really interesting experience. >> all things digital,

the conference, was conducted when in june this year? >> this year it was conducted -- it's always conducted right after memorial day. so it was really at the very end of may. may have ended on june 1st. >> here's some video, i think it's from this year, i think this is from the may 2009 conference. and it's kara swisher. but i want to show this because then also in "the new yorker" he talks about a personal relationship you have in this situation. let's watch this. were. >> on my way down here, i drove down in my minivan type of car, ed my assist can't and my mom has come every year to d and she hands out swag. i hope she was plight to you all. -- polite to you all. that's a big home. she was good. all right. in the swisher family. i interviewed her in the gas station about twitter. i was asking if she tweeted. here's the movie that i made. as you know i always make movies and assault

people. i assaulted my mom this time. >> so here's kara's mom on twitter. >> here we are in california. >> do you twit? >> no. >> why not? >> are you crazy? >> what do you think it's for? >> i don't know. why would i want people to know what i'm doing? well, i'm sorry. it's nobody's business. [laughter] >> if you were kara what would you tweet? >> why would i want to do that? >> thanks, mom. >> it's going to be worth dollars. >> well, good. lucky them. [applause] [laughter] >> you know -- >> some people think people like us in the media are elitist but we're not. we're with the people. there's the people. >> the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

>> so what did she use a flip panel? >> she used a flip, yeah. >> that didn't exist. >> we gave away a flip camera to everyone at our conference this year. >> so what's the -- did we get a good taste of what kara swisher's mother's like? >> yeah. i think you did. she's feisty, she's smart, she's not techy. she's not into technical things. as far ace know she doesn't use the computer or anything like that. >> how much have you heard responses like her response to this thing called twitter? >> well, look, brian, one of the great fun things that writing about technology is there's something new all the time. and some of these are just new gimmicks and some of them stick. and social networking is something that i think is going to stick. but it has different forms and different people try their hands at different ways of doing it. and twitter is the kind of flavor du jour.

the for those watching us who don't know, it's a social networking service where you really are just sending out verse and information 140 characters is all you can type. in fact, in our program book for the conference our little biographies of the two founders of twitter who were the guys we were interviewing there on stage were limited to 140 characters. so people talk about sometimes somebody says, "oh, i just had oatmeal for breakfast." personally i don't care about. that but other people have actually been the first to report news or make pitty and interesting comments -- pithy and interesting comments about things going on in public events. some of them may be your c-span viewers who saw some interview on here and tweeted, as the term goes, a comment, a quick comment about it. >> when did twitter start? and i know in watching some of your conference, they're not making any money. >> right. it started -- i don't know the exact date. i think a couple of

years ago. probably no more than that. and it's unlike -- some people have heard of my space or face book, some of these other social networks, or even going back to that really old tape we showed. aol, you know, had chat rooms where back in those days where people got to meet each other. unlike those, on twitter you don't develop "friends" you develop "followers." so people if they think your "tweets" your messages are interesting enough, can just click and follow you and then they see all your messages. and it's tough for them to figure out a way to make money. they've been given a lot of money by investors, by venture capitalists and had plenty of it to build it and to hire people. but they haven't, so far as i know, started running ads or doing -- or charging anything for it. and they -- we questioned them quite a bit at our conference. because our conference

is a journalistic conference where no one is allowed to make a speech, no one is allowed to share slides. we just interview them on stage. and we mentioned many times, how are you going to make money? and they said, well, they have a lot of data about our users. maybe there's some way with the users' permission to find some way to make money using that. but they were kind of vague about it. >> and i know i watched it they didn't say they knew how they were going to make money on it. >> right. >> do you think they do? >> no, i think they don't know how they're going to make money. i think they have more ideas than they were willing to say on our conference. >> they only have 43 people working for them? >> something like that. >> how do you do something this global with 43 people? >> well, because the users do all the work and it's called an ugc, user-generated content. same as youtube. think there are people sitting around google producing all those

videos of cats on skate boards? those are done by average people. so they're not producing any content for twitter. it is expensive and it does tame some work. and it's not simple to operate the servers and keep the system going. i don't mean they do nothing. they certainly do a lot of, you know, under the hood stuff. but the actual creation of the content is done by users. >> i want to read this paragraph. and it's very personal. and a piece on you which ran in 2007? >> yeah. >> mossberg is not shy about expressing his opinions. he helped recruit kara swisher from the "washington post" in late 1996 and encouraged her to move to silicon valley. by the way, where is silicon valley? >> just south of san francisco, between san francisco and san jose. >> what's there? >> most of the -- it's probably the biggest concentration of companies in the internet and technology, you know, intel is

there, hewlett packard, apple, palm, google, twitter, all these companies are there. >> i know one of your bosses wanted you to move there and you said no way. >> yeah. that's a different story. >> you stay here because? >> i stay here because i want the consumer focus always to be first in my mind. and i go to silicon valley quite often. i'm there six, seven times a year. i know how to drive through those streets almost as well as i know how to drive around here in washington. but i was extremely concerned that if i lived among the industry, i would become kind of infused with the industry mindset. and it's not that there's anything evil about that, it's just that i wanted to stay infused with the consumer mindset, so i stayed here. >> this goes on to say when she met megan smith, a google competitive decided to marry, swisher told her mother was troubled by the idea of a gay wedding. that's in quotes. she and smith haves when

she came home with her first baby, mossberg was there and so was her mother who really likes walt a lot. swisher went on "we were having dinner and she was being difficult. she was arguing with me. i was getting really uncomfortable. walt took her down like i've never seen anybody take anybody down. how dare you do this. this is an important issue and you have to be supportive as a parent. my mother was just shocked and he was relentless in not letting her off the hook. explain that. >> well, i wish kara hadn't told that to the new yorker, that story. i lie kara's mom. we're on good terms today. we were on good terms before that. and it was just one of those moments when i came to the defense of a friend. that's all. i mean, you know, these things happen in families when new babies are involved. i mean, she's crazy about the kids, by the

way. she takes care of them quite a lot because both karen and megan work, you know, heavy-hour jobs. and she is a wonderful grandmother. and i guess that's all i want to say about it. >> actually the main reason i ask you is here again, here you are -- your personal life is being written about and you're just a technology writer. although, just a technology writer, they say you make a lot of money. >> i'm just a technology writer. and you are just a television guy, and yet everyone knows you. and particularly people who are interested in the things c-span covers. and lots of people know who i am or think they know more about me than they do because they're interested in what i write about. >> give us an example of where -- it can come at you, desperately wanting your endorsement. and what do you do

personally? is that where the curmudgeon thing comes in? you just push back? >> first of all, i don't endorse in the sense of, you know, putting a blush on a box of something. people can run quotes from my reviews because that's fair use under the copyright law but i don't ever agree to enforce -- this product is endorsed by walt mossberg. i don't do that. that would be unethical journalistically and unethical under the rules of the "wall street journal" and. -- and my own personal ethics. but it's just like being a movie reviewer. i'm an opinion columnist. i'm not a reporter. i used to be a reporter at one time. but i am a columnist who is paid to write opinions, who is paid to be subjective. i test these products, and then i tell people what i think about them. which ones should you

buy? which ones should you not buy? what are the strengths of this? what are the weaknesses of it? but i have a big audience. so people want to put their product in front of me. and i do. i will spend the rest of this day, once we're done here, meeting with companies, looking at their products. and some, some of them i won't. some of them i will give a good review to and some of them i will give a kind of middle of the road review. to once in awhile i'll give a really bad review to something. so companies pitch of nefarious. nobody tries to muscle me. they just pitch me. they'll come, they'll say, here's this new gadget or new web site or new computer or whatever it is, digital camera, and i'll take a look at it. >> well, they do say you make and break products. >> i never said that. >> no, i didn't say you did but they. you know, people are writing all the time. >> yeah. i don't believe that.

look. it's perfectly obvious that if you are someone whose name is well-known, let's say a movie reviewer, and your movie reviews appear in a trusted and well-known and widely-read publication, that if you like a movie, that will help ticket sales of the movie. if you don't like a movie it will probably hurt them. and that's sort of the analogy here. obviously if i say, "firefox is the best browser and i recommend you use it and not use this other one" which is kind of the thing i sometimes say, some percentage of people who wouldn't otherwise have done so will go get it. and if i say, "this thing is the worst web browser" some percentage of people who might have used it won't use it. but that's not quite the same as saying make and break. i don't believe that. >> if you go back to what we were talking about earlier, the prodigy and compuserve

is gone, aal has not succeeded in the way they intended to. looking at what you see in front of you today, what do you think is going to not make it? what indication do you have that some of these companies will not make it financially? >> well, i don't cover the finances of these companies. i think it's really important for people to understand -- especially technology fans to understand -- when they are thinking about investments, that just because you love the product or just because it looks like a cool product or all your friend are using it doesn't mean that the company is managing the money correctly or is planning the next product correctly or is doing all of the boring non-techy financial and management things. maybe they made a bad deal for memory chips and their competitor is paying less and can underprice them, even though the product isn't quite as good. there are millions of these factors. which is why i have never, in the 17 ever

given any investment advice and why i'm not going to start here today. but i would say that most of the tech products that are out there today will fail in the sense that they won't become megahits and they will be replaced by something else. and a few of them are landmark products that are kind of game changers and change the industry. you know, like the original ibm and apple computers were big deals, they were game changers. the original web browser, things like that. but those don't come along all the time. >> i want to show you a clip from our '95 interview where there were a couple of computers in the office there. and you'll see what they look like. >> all right. >> well, right here in order to do the column, i have the two most common kinds of computers. this happens to it might

be another brand. and it's running microsoft windows, which is a system that makes ibm compatibles easier to use. and then this is an apple mc intosh which is running the mc intosh software. i use bptj of them. i write the column alternating them on one platform or the other. and i try out software for both kinds of computer. >> now, these computers operate differently? these two? >> well, somebody who's never had a compaq or apple? >> right. these computers have different operating systems. the programs that a mc intosh program won't run on an ibm compatible and vice versa. however, what's been happening in the last few years is that apple approach, which was to use the mouse and icons which are little pictures on the screen that you click to get things done and use a lot of plain english lists of command, that approach has been adopted widely on the

ibm pc through this system called microsoft windows the. and what you wind up with is very similar-looking computers now. and even though a program is made for one, won't run on the other, many companies make two almost identical versions of the same program so that if i were running say the microsoft word, word processer in windows and the microsoft word word processer in mc intosh, on the screens they look almost identical. >> so what's happened to the compaqs, the apple, the windows, all the different language you used? >> one thing that i was saying there is still absolutely true today. the two most prominent computer-operating systems and the two sort of almost religious rivals here are apple and microsoft in terms of their operating systems. and apple is a vertically integrated company that makes the mac, their computer. and all their other products. and they make the software, the operating system and all that.

third-party companies can produce programs that run on them but apple doesn't own or make any money from. but they make both hardware and software. microsoft, which is a much bigger company, makes no hardware, no computers. i should say they make a small amount of hardware. and they principally -- make microsoft windows, which is still the dominating operating system. and they make microsoft office which i mention there which includes word and excel and all your viewers know that. and so those things are similar. compaq, the particular maker of that computer, you can still buy compaq but now it is owned by hewlett packard and it is merely a brand of hewlett packard. they'd been an independent computer company.

apple, in the time between that tape and today, suffered a near-death experience. some people say they were within 90 days of chapter 11. in around '97 or so. and steve jobs, who had been one of their founders and who had been thrown out by the guy he brought in to help run the company, was brought back. and he has revived that company pretty spectacularly if you were an investor in it at least. and have produced a series of landmark products in the whatever it is, 12-years or so since he's been back. >> your paper has covered a lot of steve jobs and his illness. if steve jobs wasn't there, what impact do you think it would have on the company? >> it's very hard to say. he's one of these unusual chief executive officers, brian, who tends to be very detail-oriented.

and he's a product guy. and hoe had his hands in a lot of things. so obviously it wouldn't be a simple matter of replacing a sort of -- a sort of nonassertive c.e.o. on the other hand, he's not personally sitting there designing the next iphone or the next macintosh. they happen to have a brilliant designer and design team. and they have a c.o.o. who has run the company during his medical leave of absence who seems by all outside accounts to have done very well. i imagine over time the company would change because he is such a strong personality and a strong presence. but i don't know that you could say the company would fail. it just might be a little different. i don't know. >> if you had to live with just what you wanted to use and you weren't in this business any longer, what would you have right now in your possession? >> meaning --

>> everything from your laptops to -- >> yeah, i'm not going to sit here and endorse a bunch of products. i'm just not going to do that. i use every day a windows computer and a mac. and i use different ones. i personally own -- between what i own personally and what the journal owns on my behalf -- probably eight or nine computers roughly split between windows and mac. some are laptops. add diminishing number are desk tops because desktops are kind of going away. but i use all of them. and in terms of the device, my phone has changed over the years. i do carry a iphone right now. i have carried other brands in the past. and i may carry other brands in the future. >> what about a net book? and tell us what that is. >> a net book is a marketing term at the moment.

it may someday be a real different kind of animal. but right now it's a marketing term for an especially small and inexpensive laptop. that's really all it is. if you go to, you know, best buy and you say, i want to buy a net book, they will sell you a small laptop for somewhere between 3 and $500 usually, running windows xp, which essentially is like any other laptop except it's very small and light and didn't cost you very much money. and we're in a terrible economy. and people do genuinely want something smaller and lighter, people who travel particularly. so the appeal of something that is only a few hundred dollars and is about half the weight of what you might have had before is strong. and so they're doing very well. >> on your web site, here's a -- you're giving some advice, recommendations and all.

and i want to run this and you tell us what you do and when you do this. >> this week i thought i would talk about just a handful of the ones that i find myself using most often on my iphone. and recommend them to you. and let me just quickly tick off some of them here in this video. the first one i'd like to mention is called tweety. if you use twitter like i do and like millions and millions of people do, it's good to be able to use it on the go of twitter apps for the iphone. but tweety is the one that i like the best. i think it does a great job of letting you make your own posts, read other people's posts. and do searches and do other functions within twitter. another closely-related app, social networking app is face book.

this is officially produced by face book itself. it has -- it covers all of the core functions of the web-based facebook service. you know, updating your status messages and your photos, viewing other people's, news, and viewing their photos, dealing with internal facebook e-mail and internal facebook chat. another app i find myself using a lot is amazon's kendall app for the iphone. this is a free app that performs the basic functions -- not all of them but the basic functions of the kendall e book reader hardware that amazon sells for $360. it can allow you to read on your iphone the same kendall books you can read on your kendall device. and it will even synchronize between a kendall device and a iphone if you happen to own both. >> first, where can

people see those kind of presentations? >> what that was was me. that was a week where i chose to write a column recommending some iphone apps. >> want to explain what that is? >> i do. ok. so the most -- i think the most important hardware technology -- and in a way also software technology going on right now -- is the rise of the hand-held computer, the super smart phone. unlike the net book that we just talked about which is more of a price play and a size play, this is really a new kind of computer. and i have a few of them here. but the most famous one is the apple iphone, which i do carry, which by the way any of these have more power than those computers in my office in 1995. but one of the cool things about these, all of these, this is the palm pre, which is a competitor to the iphone that came out

recently. this is another relatively new competitor called the nokia n-97. this one has a kind of a flip-up screen. and just for historical interest, here's really i think the first really good smart phone, the palm trio from, i don't know, 10 or years or so ago. but these iphone-class, let me call it that, iphone class smart phones, and there are others that i don't have on this table with me, are essentially hand-held computers that happen to make phone calls. and one of the cool things about them is, they are also, like the windows computer, like the mac computer, they are platforms for people to write software for. useful software that can get things done, that can entertain you, whether it's a spread sheet or a game or the c-span schedule i'm pretty sure is somewhere on this iphone.

and there are and -- apple recently announced that after one year of allowing people to write and sell programs for the phone, which are called apps. the word is short for "application" and application is the effecty's term for a computer program. so apps. after one year of allowing associated presses on its iphone product, they now have 65,000 apps available, which is an astonishing thing. and they have been downloaded by people 1.5 billion times in that year. now, many of these are free. a lot of others cost a buck, some cost as much as $40. but it's quite astonishing. and so what you saw me doing in that video was talking about some of the apps that i use on my iphone that i find most useful. >> where do you find out where those 65,000 apps, what they do and why you -- >> oh, apple and the

apps store can be reached either right on the phone by touching an icon, which brings up essentially a catalog of these apps and describes them. in that video you saw screen shots of like that kindle app and so forth. those are in the catalog. and you get a chance to read about it, what can it do, look at what it would look like on your phone and then you can click and buy it or not buy it -- by the way you can do the same thing either on your windows or mac computer with the itune spread. there is a section on that program where if you click on it is a catalog of apps for your iphone. >> how did you do that video? did you do it on your own? >> yeah. >> did you think the production values were fabulous? >> i'm not sure the production values matter when you're looking for information. what i did on that video and what i do every week, i write my column. and this is another change i guess from

1995. i write my column. and when i have finished writing my column and filing it to new york to the editors, i then go and sit down in front of one of the computers in my house which has a built-in camera. most computers sold today have a built-in camera. fire up a program that records video. and i talk into that little camera as you saw me do there. and then i send a raw video to new york. and at the "wall street journal" in new york -- and this would have been astonishing in 1995, completely unheard of, there is a video production unit that takes that video and puts in b-role. >> showing the kindle. >> showing the things that i'm talking about. putting my name to identify me, which i'm sure will happen on this program. and i could do that on the computer myself. the software i have has the capability for that. but in my case i send it to them in new york,

they do all those things. they then send it back to me. i look at it to make sure it all seems right. and then we publish it on the web. >> so let's go over all things walt mossberg. what days of the week can they read your column? >> if they're a print reader, my columns which are called personal technology and mossberg's mailbox appear on wednesdays. they appear on the web starting the night before. so wednesday night at usually around 9:00 eastern they appear. on either the "wall street journal" web site, wsj.com or the web site that the "wall street journal" owns but which i run with kara swisher which is called "all things d.com." they can also read on wednesdays in print a column called "the mossberg solution" which despite the name i do not write. it is written by kathryn

barrett. and it is on the web. and she does a video every week. and her column is on the web tuesday nights on those same two websites. >> we have some video of her. so let's see what -- is it katy or -- >> kathryn is her by line but she goes by katy. >> let's watch this. >> hi. this is katy barrett with the "wall street journal." it can be really frustrating to type in a search online only to receive hundreds of results so you have to comb through to find exactly what you want. this week i tried two free tools that you can use to improve your searches online. one is from the search giant google. and it is called search wiki. it is available for anybody with a google account. and it only works when you're signed into your google account. first wiki is something that appears on screen when you conduct a regular google search. it includes arrows beside each search

results. a little tiny icon that represents notes or comments that you can add to a search result. so what's the point of all these search wiki i cons? well, those can be clicked and then a search result shoots to the top of the screen. that means that you value that result. you think it's important for you. >> where did you find katy? >> katy came to me from the university of delaware. a young woman. she's still a young woman. and she started as my -- what we call reporting assistant, which is just a job title at the journal which means you do some reporting, you do some clerical things. and she turned out to be terrific and she's now a full-fledged reporter at the "wall street journal." and an employee of mine. and she's great. >> go back to "all things digital conference." where was that held?

>> that conference is held in carlsbad, california. just outside san diego. at a hotel there. no law that it always will be held there but it has been held there. >> who can come and what's it cost them? >> anyone can come, actually. people think it's invitation only. it's not. it's not cheap. it's a $5,000 ticket to attend the conference. and we tend to have a lot of repeat attendees who enjoy it. because like any good conference, it's a combination of what's on stage, what am i learning, if anything, from the speakers, but also a lot of networking. brian, there have been a lot of business deals done in the hallways of that conference that sometimes kara and i don't find out about until years later and somebody will say, you know, we negotiated this big billion dollar merger, you know, starting at d three

years ago or something. and we're like, well, geez, we'd be rich if we could get a cut of that. but of course we don't. and we can't. >> how many days is it? >> it's about -- it stretches over three days. but it's not three full days. it starts in the evening of the first day with a single interview -- a dinner ant a single interview. and then an entire, very long day the next day. and then about half or two-thirds of a day that last day. >> does anybody dare say no to you? >> sure. people say no to me all the time. >> on the conference? i mean, have you called up and ask them and they just don't show up? and wouldn't that impact you or kara in your writing and coverage? >> well, nobody doesn't -- we haven't had a case where somebody has agreed to come and then bailed on us if that's what you mean. we certainly have had cases where people have said, no thanks, i'd rather not be a speaker. but we're persistent. we go back to them.

this year we had the c.e.o. of nokia, which is in some waist most important tech company in europe. and that was about a four-year effort to get the c.e.o. from folk ya to -- nokia to come. rupert murdoch, my ultimate boss now, before he bought the "wall street journal" declined to be a speaker a couple of times. even after he bought the "wall street journal." i think it took me three months to con and he was a terrific speaker. -- to come and be a speaker. >> why do you think you've become so valuable to the newspaper? >> you'd have to ask the people that run the newspaper. i try to do a good job. i have a following. i think most of the readers find what i write to be useful. and beyond that, you really are asking the wrong guy. >> well, take yourself -- the name out of it --

but put the column in there. and in the last, you know, 17 1/2 years, why has this become such an important subject? >> oh. well, the subject is -- i mean, we are living through one of the greatest periods of technological change in modern history and maybe in all history. and it's confusing to people. lots of aspects of their lives, whether it's getting their news, getting their entertainment, television, making phone calls, you know, taking pictures. all these things are changing rapidly and dramatically. and it is useful to people, i think tox have some of this explained to them. i think of myself in some ways as a subcontractor. people have subcontracted to me the task of testing a bunch of this stuff. and from a normal person's perspective, trying to give them a sense of what's it like to use it, does it work as promised and that

sort of thing. but actually this kind of journalism is very popular across many publications. and not only in technology but in other fields. we've been very successful at the journal with columns on health, with columns on investment and other topics. the so people are looking for advice. >> so from your own experience, is there a printed newspaper in 10 years? >> you know, i don't know the answer to that. it's certainly -- it certainly is changing faster than i would have said three years ago. part of that is hayesened by the overall economic climate. but the point isn't to save newspapers or to save television stations. the point is that we need to have journalism and journalists. and it doesn't matter to me if people are reading

me on a screen or on a dead tree. it just doesn't matter. >> what's the difference in the number of visitors you get in the newspaper and on the web site? >> i don't know the answer on the newspaper because it's very difficult -- i mean, i know the circulation. >> 2 million. >> about 2 million, yeah. i can't tell you how many of those 2 million people read my column. the traffic is quite respectable on the web. and it's much more easily measurable as well. and i would guess that partly because i am writing about technology, i probably get a higher percentage of people than some other journalists might reading me on the web as opposed to reading me in print. >> what kind of a column gets the most response? >> columns that touch on

brand-new, much-anticipated product. and i would have to say especially brands that have tremendous loyalty among people. so a new blackberry, anything new from apple, they tend to have tremendous interest because they have very passionate customers. and i am sure i'm leaving out several other companies like that. >> well, from reading it, i can remember a column i read some time ago on snagfilms.com. all documentaries all the time and free. any idea? i know you wrote about it before it was even rolled out. do you have any idea how they've done? >> actually i literally got an e-mail today from them. it's their first anniversary tomorrow or today or something. and i think they feel like they're doing pretty well. i mean, i have no idea if they're making money or what their financials are. but i think they've managed to distribute

hundreds of films in the last year. >> i notice they have advertising on there now. steve case is involved in that. ted leon. >> who were all involved years ago. >> at aol, yeah. >> what about -- i can feel your excitement when you do something like the iphone 3-gs. you can get a sense that you're really -- are you as excited about it as you write? >> yeah, i'm very excited about -- i'm very excited when technology produces something new and useful for people, for average people. and that's beautifully designed. and i think the iphone fall noose that category. but not only the iphone. i'm excited about -- was excited about the palm pre and the android phones from google. this is a new class of device that i think changes the way people live and work without requiring them to learn a lot of techy stuff. and that always gets me

excited. so i think that's a really important category right now. and i thoroughly enjoy writing about it. >> if you could have your way in technology and science and all that, where do you want all this to go? >> i want it to remain human-focused. i want it, just like i said to you a long time ago in that tape when i was wearing the bigger glasses, i still think ease of use is the most important thing. and i think it has to be human-centered. and i think having people's opinions whose opinions we might not have been able to read in the old days or watch in the old days is really a treat. it's really a privilege. loads of smart people out there who don't happen to have a job at the "wall street journal" or the "new york times" or on c-span. and those people have a lot to contribute.

and it's great. one of the reasons i do use twitter is because i'm interested in hearing what they have to say. >> here's a brief 24-second clip showing a little bit of the walt mossberg personality. >> this story is really interesting because then of course -- it's grown. i mean, we were showing you some sort of negative numbers at first. but truth is, what are you, 32 million now? >> we don't release those numbers. but it is growing. >> it's growing very rapidly. >> right. right. >> i'm going to say it's 32 million, ok? >> those are the founders of twitter talking about how many people follow them. what was your ex aspiration about? >> oh, i think they should be -- i didn't see any reason why they wouldn't say how many people follow. they i think people ought to disclose as much as is reasonable. and to me that was a reasonable thing to disclose. >> are you worried about

the power of outfits like google or microsoft that matter? >> well, we have a lot of power centers in our society. and i worry about the power of companies that have a lot of -- whose products have a lot of control over our lives in certain ways. or who we depend on quite a lot. but i also -- you know, i worry about world hunger, i worry about the economy, i worry about the planet. i worry about politicians and bankers and people in the media as well having outside influence sometimes, and doing the wrong things. so just me, walt mossberg personally, i worry about a bunch of stuff like that. >> how much longerrer do you plan to do this? >> i have no plans to stop doing it. unless the journal decides that i should stop doing it. and i've had no indication that they

feel that way. so i'm going to keep doing it as long as people keep read it. and at the moment they are. >> do you have any idea what your next column will be about? >> i have some idea, but i'm not going to tell you. >> and why is that? >> because i tend not to broadcast what i'm going to do next. in advance. >> and can you remember the worst kickback you got since you've been doing this since '91 from any manufacturer? >> there have been a couple that have tried to get me fired. it hasn't happened recently, but toward the beginning when it was a newer phenomenon to have somebody like me reviewing their products, there were a couple that tried to get me fired. and i actually didn't even find out about those cases until much later, because editors in new york just, you know, refused and didn't tell me about it until later. >> walt mossberg of the "wall street journal." we thank you very much. >> i'm delighted to be

here. thanks, brian. >> for a d.v.d. copy of this program call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q and a.org. q and a programs are also available at c-span podcasts. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> tomorrow in come member racial of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, a group of apollo astronauts gather to share their thoughts about that day and the future of space travel. among the astronauts, buzz aldrin, a member of the first lunar landing mission and the second man to walk on the moon. that's live at 12:30

p.m. eastern on c-span 3. tomorrow on washington journal, judy fader from the center for american progress examines the debate on health reform. and from the national governor's association meetings in mississippi we'll talk with governor jack markell of delaware, south dakota governor mike rounds and governor jim douglas from vermont. washington journal live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> how is c-span funded? .