If you’re hoping to get in the door for the Minnesota Twins home opener at their new ballpark, better to wait until closer to gametime on April 12, rather than pay scalpers now.  That’s the sort of thing you can discover by using a cool new tool called SeatGeek. The service combines data from ticket-selling sites like StubHub and others, then uses that data to give advice on when to land a ticket.

For example, go to SeatGeek and type in Minnesota Twins, and you’ll get a list of every game this season, road and away, along with a recommendation, ranging from  BUY NOW to WAIT TO BUY in several levels of severity. Detail links provide the tickets for sale found on various services.  Since ‘market’ prices to ballgames and concerts often fluctuate in the days and weeks leading up to the event, SeatGeek uses algorithms to predict which direction prices will go, and they claim 80% accuracy.

Clever use of technological aggregation. As a partial season-ticket holder at the new ballpark, I’ll probably use this tool in the months and years ahead when buying additional tickets or advising others on the topic. As for that Home Opener, I’m already in, baby.

Last Wednesday’s keynote announced the Apple iPad, and it produced a colossal wave of feedback in the digital (and even analog) worlds.

The Minnov8 gang dedicated their whole weekly podcast to this new gadget, and the reaction there was largely positive.  I believe it was Phil Wilson who suggested that, even if version one of the IPad lacks certain much-wanted features, the device still stands to be a game-changer over the next several years.

In the geek gadget community, reaction leaned negative.  Engadget and Gizmodo focused on what the iPad doesn’t have and doesn’t do. Still, I noticed that the gadget hound sites, which were blasting insults full-force on Wednesday and Thursday, are quickly walking back, making certain that search results going forward show summaries that are more wait-and-see than the earlier point-and-laugh. Why are they doing this? Look no further than a brief, Slashdot review from 2001 of the iPod, in which Apple’s then-new mp3 player was dismissed as “lame.”   Ooh. That stings.

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David Carr of the New York Times submits  Why Twitter Will Endure.

On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

There is no small number of folks out there – and alarmingly, more than a few journalists – who continue to eschew Twitter, based on misconceptions and simple lack of familiarity.  That’s a little crazy at this point. A year from now, or two years from now, Twitter won’t necessarily be a hot buzzword or even an important brand. These things are hard to foretell. But the method of Twitter, well that’s a permanent fixture of the online world going forward. For certain.

Complete New Year’s Eve fireworks display from Sydney, Australia. They do it up down there.

As 2010 approaches, rumors continue to circulate that Apple will soon roll out a tablet device, sort of a hybrid between their laptop computer and the iPhone/iTouch line.  Newspapers and magazines are watching this scenario closer than most, as some believe that a page-sized mobile device represents a better-than-ever way to display digital content.

Apple’s track record is one of polished usability, simplicity, and performance, so count me as one who believes that if any company can turn a tablet device into a new standard, it’s got to be Apple.  There’s even speculation now over whether the new product has a name. A few more weeks or perhaps months will tell if this is all the result of mere gossip, or Steve Jobs’ next big stamp on modern communication.

I truly like the idea of a tablet. Ever since Amazon brought out the Kindle some three two years ago, I’ve looked forward to a theoretical device, larger than a smart phone but sleeker and simpler than a laptop. For the majority of Web browsing, it could be ideal. If properly done.

Whether tablets are a cure for print media revenue woes, though, is another matter.

Jack Shafer at Slate points out the variety of reasons why the tablet computer – and some recent impressive demos from Sports Illustrated and Wired that are clearly based on tablet computing -  are likely another mere hype-wagon for big media companies to climb aboard.  Shafer’s brief history of big-media forays into digital distribution doesn’t throw a wet blanket on the tablet as savior, but it certainly puts the whole idea into a reasonable perspective.

Time Warner famously squandered millions on the mistaken belief that its ultimate Web portal should be populated with the magazines it published. The site was called Pathfinder.com…… That’s not to say that the tablet has no future. It’s just if the past is any guide, the future of the tablet won’t look like the SI or Wired prototypes—any more than Pathfinder turned out to be the future of the Web.

It’s nothing new.  Media companies tend to get exhiliarated by anything that preserves their established methods while mapping them onto a new medium. Problem: the evolving audience isn’t nearly so attached to those established methods.

Still, the concept of media organizations as curators can’t be ignored as a means of connecting long-held skill sets with the expectations of digital natives.  I’m intrigued by this conceptual video from Bonnier R&D. Eschewing the “page-flipping” gizmo that is so often used in presenting PDF-style editions – a gizmo that ceases to be interesting or useful after approximately 20 seconds – this model promotes free-flowing, nearly page-less technology.

Moreover, as Jason Kottke astutely observes, the demo video itself is innovative in the sense that narration and video aren’t automatically co-mingled.  It’s true, we don’t always need to be told what we’re seeing.

In the runup to a new year, blogs and other social media are flowing with speculation on where journalism goes in 2010, and where technology goes.  These tend to be separate discussions. I continue to believe that certain individuals will find ways to bridge media and tech with innovation that is, above all else, useful to its audience. And they’ll do so by focusing as much on what to leave behind as what to include.

As Google Wave users get their sea legs, there’s nothing so useful as examples. From an outfit called Whirled Interactive, here’s a clever, concise and perhaps even jammin’ Goodbye to 2009.

[ Via Mashable, which also brings us a post on Google Wave's massive potential for business users. ]