Blogarithms

Doc Searls has done a great job of pulling together many topics related to radio, iPods, audioblogs, RSS, the NAB and Ogg Vorbis.

PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.

Update: Dave Slusher is trying to set the record straight and make sure we’re using the terminology correctly. I think he’s got it right. It ain’t a PodCast (or even a PODcast) if it doesn’t flow automatically (automagically) from source to MP3 player.

Dave Slusher has discovered the power of the audience. Make a mistake and you’ll immediately be corrected. I learned this early on from Dave Winer and even more so from Dan Gillmor. Dan has long pointed out that his readers know more than he does, and that’s true for all of us. It’s like writing a book and having hundreds of pre-publication reviewers. The only problem is that in this case the reviews are post-publication. The answer is humility. Be prepared to be corrected, and if you’re bold enough to correct someone, be prepared to re re-corrected.

The problem with audioblogs is real-time playback. It’s not too bad…yet. I can listen to all of Adam’s shows, and Dave’s posts, but at 45-90 minutes a day, it already ain’t easy. There are audio blogs I want to listen to on a regular basis, but I just don’t have the time. (As it is, to produce IT Conversations I’ve got the headphones on for many hours a day.)

So what happens when we hit critical blog-mass? Are we already there? Like Scoble, I can use RSS to scan a whole lotta text blogs in a short period of time, but there’s no way (yet) to do that with audio. What’s the solution? Is it meta-blogging (bloggers who help us find the best-of other blogs)? Will excerpts help? I dunno.

Yahoo!, in association with Lockergnome.com, presents Gnomedex 4: Geeks Gone Wild! this week September 30th through October 2nd 2004, and IT Conversations will be there. Speaking this year will be Steve Wozniak (Woz), Robert Scoble, Chris DiBona, Jim Louderback, and Dan and Steve Gillmor. We will be streaming the audio all day Friday and Saturday including a special live edition of The Gillmor Gang. And for those who can’t be there or listen to the live broadcast, IT Conversations will PodCast all of the sessions beginning next week, so have your iPods linked to our RSS feeds. So head for www.itconversations.com and look for links to Gnomedex 4. And thanks for listening.

(The IT Conversations coverage of Gnomedex 4 is sponsored by Yahoo!, Limelight Networks, Magnatune Music and DecisionCast.)

Steve Gillmor answers the critics who have been writing that RSS isnt’ scalable. [Source: ZDNet]

What’s more powerful than all the broadcast and cable networks combined? Hundreds of moblogger/pollwatchers reporting live and on-the-scene from the polling places of America on Election Day, November 2, 2004. Interested in participating or have a suggestion? Check out the MoPollWatch wiki page.

According to this article in Business 2.0, there are nearly four million iPods out there and Apple has 54% of the MP3 player market. The rest of the article is about aftermarket hardware products.

Alex Williams of DecisionCast, who will be part of the IT Conversations broadcast from Gnomedex next week, would like your help. He’s conducting an online survey with Wainhouse Research. It only takes 10-15 minutes and there’s a chance you’ll win an Amazon.com gift certificate or an iPod.

I don’t know what took me so long. Listeners of IT Conversations have been telling me about .NET Rocks for a long time now. I finally went over there to check it out…very cool. Carl Franklin and Rory Blyth produce an entertaining two-hour show every week. You can stream it live or download on-demand in MP3 or Windows Media format in a variety of filesize/quality options. Broadcast-quality audio, interesting hosts and first-rate guests. They’ve been producing the show for more than two years, predating IT Converations by three months. According to their on-line stats, .NET Rocks gets about 5x our volume of listeners. Mostly about Microsoft, MSDN and .NET of course, with humor and music thrown in. Notifications (but no enclosures) via RSS. Check it out.

Mack, Andrew and Megan (three students at the University of Alberta in Edmonton) have launched a nice audio site at Blogosphere Radio. Just getting started, they’ve got an interview with Darren Barefoot, a 3-4 minute blog news show, and an informal interactive audioblog. Lots of IT Conversations-like features such as a ratings system, RSS feeds (but no enclosures), and a nice clean UI. [Source: Adam Curry]

Big news for the portable audio player world: Sony confirmed on Wednesday that it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players–a major strategy reversal that could help it compete more effectively with rivals such as Apple Computer. [Source: news.com via Dave Winer]

The Greenlees have launched a new blog-based web site for WebTalk Radio. Blog, comments and RSS. Congratulations, Rob & Dana. It looks great. And yes, you helped me get started with IT Conversations, both with my telephone hybrid problems and as a source of inspiration.

I picked up one of these little Airport Express cubes at the local Apple store last week. I set it up as a second wifi LAN in my home to give my second TiVo a stronger signal. (With two Series 2 TiVos I can now watch shows on one TiVo that are stored on the other.) It’s easy to setup an Airport Express to do something simple, but it can be maddening to set up something more complex. For some reason Apple supplies not one but two different applications to manage the device, and I can’t keep track of which app to use for which purpose. Plus you’ve got to run Internet Connect on your Mac to change your IP address during setup, so that make three apps required to do anything except the most basic configs. That having been said, it does work. The range is very short, however. Through wood-frame walls and sheetrock, the signal falls off after as little as 30 feet.

But this weekend I found out where the Airport Express really shines: as a wifi access point in a hotel room. I was at the Monterey Jazz Festival and stayed in a 2-room suite at the Embassy Suites. Normally I’d be tied to the 3-meter CAT5 cable they supply or at best a longer cable I’d have to bring myself. But this time I just plugged the little Airport Express cube into the wall outlet and attached the CAT5 cable from the hotel’s box. That was it. No installation, no nuthin’. I turned on the iBook and it just worked. The network in the hotel room had the same SSID as the network at home and the WEP and MAC Access List didn’t need to be changed either. I could take my iBook anywhere in the suite, totally wireless. Most cool.

I did discover something interesting. At one point I wanted to connect my iBook directly, without the Airport Express. I found I couldn’t because the $9.95 per day connection through the hotel was apparently dedicated to the MAC address of the Airport Express. Unless I wanted to pay another $9.95, I could only get out via the Airport Express. Not a problem, but something to be aware of.

Update: See the comments. Glenn Fleishman has a $10 eBook that probably answers most of my questions and yours, too. Certainly his other writing on WiFi has been awesome.

Ever wonder how things sound when you get your speaker wiring wrong? Take a listen to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code for September 19. Don’t listen on headphones…it will sound normal. Instead, listen on your desktop or laptop speakers–where the distance between the speakers is the same or less than the distance to your ears. Move your head a little from side to side and you’ll hear how very strange it is.

It turns out that Adam had a cable wired out of phase, and he’s corrected the problem in later editions of the Daily Source Code.

Welcome to the new home of Blogarithms. A new look, a new blogging package (WordPress), and all new content. You can find the old version and content here. Feedback, comments and trackbacks welcome. I’ll be setting up redirects for the HTML and RSS over the next few days, once I get this thing to look and work the way I want it.

Dave Winer and Adam Curry have just announced a daily (or whenever) on-demand audio program. “The name of the show is Trade Secrets. It’s an integrated app, a collaboration between myself and Adam Curry. We’re using AIM to do a weekly, and perhaps daily or as-necessary radio talk show with music clips and politics and software and guests and more, ranging far and wide.”

Update: Trade Secrets has its own web site.