Jobs on pay walls, iPad origins

During an interview last night at the All Things Digital D8 conference in Palos Verdes, the Apple CEO said, "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever." The trick, he said, is to take a more aggressive price position. That's already happening with digital books as a result of the new pricing arrangements publishers worked out with Apple and Amazon. Jobs also explained how he came up with the idea for a tablet (what became the iPad) before the iPhone, and then decided that developing a phone needed to come first. By the way, New Yorker Editor David Remnick was pushing for paid content at a Condé Nast event in NY this week. From the NY Observer:

"There have been many stages of Web evangelical thinking. You must do this! You have to do that! Or you are clueless," clucked Mr. Remnick. "Remember the days of information wants to be free?" he continued. "So therefore the only thing that anyone with any brains could do with a magazine like The New Yorker is to put the whole thing online and give it away. Give it away! And if you were against that in some way or you said, 'Wait a minute,' you were--wait for it--clueless. "I opted for clueless," he said.