Since I spent a good couple of months in 2002 editing John Dean’s e-book “Unmasking Deep Throat,” I had my own interest in today’s news unveiling former FBI honcho Mark Felt as the original deep-background source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting. But if this outcome felt anti-climactic, it’s not just because the conclusions Dean so painstakingly reached — among other things, that Deep Throat was almost certainly an attorney, and that he couldn’t have been at the FBI — were simply wrong (to be fair, it appears that the bobbing and weaving Woodward and Bernstein have done through the years. and Felt’s own vehement disavowals, left a somewhat deceptive trail for the attentive sleuth). And it’s not just because Felt has been the “most likely suspect” for over a decade now.

It’s really because it marks the end of the mystery at the heart of the investigative-reporting act that inspired my generation of journalists. I was 15 years old in 1974; I listened to the Watergate hearings in the car radio every morning as I rode with my dad on the way to my summer job. I chose to become a journalist at perhaps the one moment in American history at which the public’s trust in reporters was higher than its faith in political leaders. The naming of Deep Throat represents the final coda to this old story — and reminds us of how much things have changed.

Meanwhile, the current generation of executive malfeasance awaits its comeuppance. Which public servant will step forward, in shadows, pseudonymously or not, to blow a loud whistle on this decade’s lies? Or has the Deep Throat of the George Bush White House already fed his tips — say, to Seymour Hersh — but we’re simply too fatalistically inured to the “disassembling” of our leaders to do anything about it?

Backpack is the latest Web-app info-management tool from the gang at 37 Signals (Basecamp, Ta-da Lists, etc.), and it is a winner, I think: I’ve already taken it past the “I’m playing with this to see if it’s any good” stage into the “I’m using this quite a bit and considering whether to move some part of my life into it” stage.

The 37 Signals approach involves not trying to do a million things but doing a few things really well. Backpack offers a smart, usable Ajax-style interface for storing random data in Web pages that can be loosely structured as lists and notes. You can (if you upgrade to a paid version) also store files and photos. You can flip a switch on a page to make it “shared” (essentially, public) and others can then not only read it but modify it (wiki style). The final, most unusual innovation here is email integration: No, it’s not an email client at all, but each page is addressable by email — you can send stuff to a page at its unique email address — and each page can be set to send out reminders via email. It’s a relatively small, contained application, but I haven’t even begun to explore all the possibilities.

Oh, it’s also been developed on the same much-buzzed-about software platform 37 Signals has used for its other products — Ruby on Rails. It serves as a pretty fine advertisement (in the best sense) both for that technology and for its company’s philosophy. Congrats, and thanks, to all involved.

Time Management for Anarchists: This little flash slideshow does a good job of summarizing the principles of the faddish-yet-sensible David Allen “Getting Things Done” philosophy using imagery drawn not from the warrens of corporate America but instead from Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin.

If you haven’t seen it already — it made the blogosphere rounds a month or two ago — They Might Be Giants’ “Bloodmobile” song and (as animated by Dave Logan) video is a thing of beauty. “A delivery service inside us!” For fans of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, which definitely includes our household’s younger echelon.

For starters, don’t miss the amazing piece John Heilemann contributed to New York magazine this week, which tells the saga of a lawsuit about child molestation at a famous choir school in Princeton, New Jersey. The lead lawyer was also a victim; his name is well known to the world that pays attention to the intersection of technology and law: Lawrence Lessig.

I’ve got a ton of backlogged stuff to post about, links and comments, both from D and elsewhere. So tonight, I’ve decided that, rather than try to perfect little posts on things, I’m just gonna start posting stuff in a random flood. Which is sort of what blogs are meant for anyway. I’m still fighting the decades of training in linearity!

The Net connection at the hotel for the D conference kept flaking on me (it was a fine connection, it was just the dumb Wayport authentication process that was completely hosed — you’d think a Four Seasons Resort, with its overwhelming luxury in so many other ways, would stop trying to eke out that extra $10 for the stupid Net connection and just throw it in, like the water and towels and TV). So I’m going to do a retrospective post tomorrow…

Here at the “D” conference, Steve Jobs announced the impending addition of a podcast aggregation feature to the Itunes music store — to go live in “the next 60 days.” The idea is, you won’t need to use a separate application to make sure the podcast content you want will sync with your Ipod — you can do it all through your Itunes interface.

“Podcasting is like Wayne’s World for radio,” Jobs said, and the new ITunes functionality is “sort of like Tivo for your radio for your Ipod.”

Jobs promised that the ITunes podcasting platform would be open to all comers; there’d be a simple automated system to get your content included, he said. But it wasn’t clear from his demo — which featured material from professional outlets like public radio stations — just how grassroots-y the Apple model is going to be.

There was a moment of amusement when Jobs clicked on an Adam Curry podcast that began with Curry complaining, “I’ve had to restart the show 3 times, my Mac has been acting up like a motherfucker.” Jobs just smiled. You have to figure that he knew just what he was playing; it was funny nonetheless.

Some other notable bits from Jobs’ Q&A with Mossberg and Swisher:

He defended Apple’s suit against Web sites that had published confidential info about forthcoming Apple products, saying that the law was clear here, and the First Amendment ends where breaking the law (in revealing confidential trade secrets) begins.

Pressed to talk about whether Apple would pursue a video Ipod product, he talked about the hardware limits in delivering good video via small devices: “Headphones are a miraculous thing. There’s no such thing as headphones for video.”

The much rumored Ipod phone? “It’s a hard problem.” Swisher countered, “You’re a smart guy.” Mossberg asked why it wasn’t reasonable to assume that all portable-device functions — music, email, voice — would converge on the cellphone. Jobs’ cagy reply: “I thoroughly understand the question, and I’ll have to leave the answer to our actions inthe future.”

Finally, it seems there’s a betting pool inside Apple about how soon Yahoo will raise the prices on their (rock-bottom-priced) new music-rental service ($5 a month when you buy a year). Jobs’ bet? Five months.

I have been on a strict diet when it comes to attending conferences this year — I must hunker down and write! I allowed myself one exception this season, so here I am at Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s third “D” conference, the Wall Street Journal’s technology-and-media extravaganza.

Last year’s event kicked off with Bill Gates tantalizing us with the wonders that were to be Longhorn, and how the new version of Windows would transcend the whole notion of “search.” Google? We won’t need no stinking Google, Gates all but declared: “Longhorn’s about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup… Longhorn brings the notion of an object-oriented database to the way information is stored…”

Well, in the intervening year those exciting features of Longhorn’s much-touted new file system seem to have been left on the cutting room floor, as Microsoft labors mightily to move this massive project forward so that it might conceivably see the light of day before 2006 winds down.

This year, then, while I’ll pay close attention to what Gates — and every other technology executive here (tonight’s event kicks off with Steve Jobs) — has to say, I’ll also remember that it’s much easier to talk about great technology than to make it work and get it into people’s hands.

My colleague Tim Grieve is in Washington covering the Senate follies for Salon. His dispatch tonight is a must-read. If you need background, his FAQ-style introduction to the whole filibuster foofaraw is essential.