Blogarithms

I’ve been researching, scratching my head and talking to people for the past two months or so, and I wasn’t planning on announcing my plans for the future of IT Conversations for another month or so. But I was being interviewed by Cameron Reilly for the G’Day World podcast, and I just couldn’t help myself. Cameron asked me point blank about the future, and I decided to spill the beans. Cameron gets the scoop.

I’ll have more details here in the blog over the next few days, and in the IT Conversations news podcast this weekend. But for a preview, listen to my interview on G’Day world. We start talking about the future of IT Conversations at 16:50 into the show.

I was just interviewed for BBC World Service, Greek edition. So if you’ve ever wanted to hear me discuss New Media in Greek (translated ) now’s your chance. Should be broadcast and on their web site in the next day or two.

Thanks to the new traffic from iTunes, Tueday was an all-time record day for IT Conversations traffic: 378.32GB. That adds up to more than 11 terrabytes/month. Thank you Limelight Networks for your awesome content-delivery network. We literally couldn’t do it without you.

Today was the launch of iTunes 4.9 with support for podcasting, and IT Conversations is proud to be among those included in the initial iTunes directory. The presentation is a bit of a mess, and over the next few days I hope to find time to add the iTunes-specific tags to our RSS feeds.

iTunes has been responsible for a 31% increase in our traffic today, and I can say that with a fair degree of confidence. The reason is that Apple chose to include our AAC/M4B feeds rather than our MP3 feeds. Normally — and it’s quite repeatable — AAC/M4B accounts for about 10% of our traffic, but today it looks like the AAC/M4B traffic will account for 38% of the total, which can only be attributable to iTunes.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Ken Berryman – Software Company Building Blocks (rated 2.6 by listeners) Ken Berryman’s presentation outlines the new factors affecting the industry and how companies can adapt to remain a force in the game. The belief that software companies can work under different rules than companies in other sectors no longer holds water. The world has changed and the demands of customers and the market have become more sophisticated.
• Allen Husband – BioTech Nation (3.1) On this week’s Biotech Nation segment, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Novogen Research Director, Dr. Allen Husband, who tells us how a dietary supplement which relieves menopause symptoms in women shows great promise as a cancer drug.
• John Hagel – "The Only Sustainable Edge" (3.3) Moira also speaks with John Hagel, who with co-author John Seely Brown, has written "The Only Sustainable Edge," a new perspective for business. (See also more with John Hagel.)
• Jim Griffith – eBay’s Dean of Education (3.3) "Griff" is the official dean of eBay education and eBay University instructor. Larry Magid speaks with him about how sellers make a profit by simply buying product X from Wal-Mart for $20 and selling it for $25, and what buyers should do before they get out their credit cards. It’s a must for all kind of eBay retailers. Fact: there are approximately 430,000 eBay sellers who either make a profit full time or part time in the US alone.
• Wil McCarthy – Voices in Your Head (3.4) We’ve all imagined teleporting from place to places and making clones or copies of ourselves. But have you ever wondered what might happen if we were actually able to do so? Host Dave Slusher speaks to renowned science fiction author Wil McCarthy about what these advancements might mean and about technology, science and us.
• Todd Cochrane – Geek News Central (3.5) On this week’s Web Talk, host Rob Greenlee speaks with Todd Cochrane, host of the Geek News Central Podcast and weblog, and the author of the first book on podcasting, "Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide". Todd also talks about topic-based podcast networks and how they might just be the wave of the future.
• Lawrence Lessig – Re: Mix Me (3.6) Culture is remix, and remix, culture. That’s the message from an IT Conversations favorite, Lawrence Lessig, at O’Reilly Media’s Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in March. After Larry’s presentation, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation engages him in a Q&A session.
• Tim O’Reilly – "Make" Magazine (3.7) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. Just to give you a new project or two to build over your next free weekend, we’ll hear about their new magazine "Make."
• Guido van Rossum – Open Source Projects & Community (3.9) From the SD Forum Distinguished Speaker Series, the creator of the Python programming language reflects on the early days of the Python community, describes its development into maturity, and explains why he is still having a good time after 13 years of herding cats. In an entertaining and informative talk, he also describes the origin of many of Python’s most characteristic features and compares Python to some of the other languages in widespread use today. In two parts.
• Peter Norvig – Web Search as a Force for Good (3.9) Web search as a Force for Good? No, we are not talking about a new beta service from Google! Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality and Research at Google, says that when web searches are not actually saving people’s lives they are improving them by saving time! He talks about how the 4 billion web pages Google indexes can be harnessed to actually make a difference in the everyday lives of people around the world with the innovative new services that Google is coming up with.
• Rob Curley – The World Company (4.9) Since the dot-com days, nearly every newspaper in the world has made use of the Internet and now has a website where readers can get their news faster than they can get the hardcopy paper. But just having a website is one thing. Doing it right — which is what Rob Curley is known for — is another. Hear Rob’s fascinating keynote presentation from the Integrated Media Association’s New Media Summit in which he gives examples of how he and his web-development team at the Lawrence Journal-World continue to do it right.

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Malcolm Gladwell – On Human Nature (4.2) From last year’s Pop!Tech conference, author and New Yorker Magazine journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has been a tremendous bestseller for over three years and counting. In this presentation he explores why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke’s market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.

Pop!Tech is one of the most awesome events, and this year it will be held in Camden, Maine, October 19-22. Last year’s Pop!Tech brought some of *the* most popular IT Conversations programs such as presentations by Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Barnett, Doug Rushkoff, and Spencer Wells. This year’s lineup looks at least as good.

Pop!Tech is all about the future. It’s an eclectic gathering of great minds from a diverse set of specializations. But it’s not just about the sessions. Like all great conferences, Pop!Tech is about being there and getting a chance to interact with a phenomenal group of people.

The good news is that thanks to our close association with Pop!Tech, I have been able to secure a special discount for IT Conversations listeners. The bad news is that it’s only good through the end of the month: another four days. That’s the end of their early-bird discount, which is $300, and for IT Conversations’ isteners they’ve agreed to give an additonal $200 discount, so that’s a full $500 off the July 1 registration price.

To take advantage of this discount, just go to www.itconversations.com/poptech. If you’d rather register by phone, call Jamie Griffin at 800.673.4855 and mention IT Conversations. Either way, I hope to see you at Pop!Tech 2005, sure to be one of the most talked-about events of the year.

To register with our special discount go to www.itconversations.com/poptech.

You can also peruse IT Conversations’ coverage of last year’s Pop!Tech.

If you can understand Danish — to me it sounds like English played backwards — you might enjoy an interview I did with Carsten Nielsen of Danish radio. You’ll have to understand English, too. He replaced his questions with Danish and left my answers in English. It’s like Jeopardy: I know my answers are correct; it’s the questions I wonder about.

During this morning’s break here at Supernova, John Furrier came up to congratulate me. “On what?” I asked. Turns out I’m among the Trendsetters selected for the AO/Technorati Open Media 100. Now the question is, do I get the full hardcopy article for free, or do even Trendsetters have to buy their own?

And yes, we’ll haved the best of Supernova 2005 on IT Conversations over the next few months.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Ana Marie Cox – Wonkette (rated 2.9 by listeners) Wonkette. If that does not bring a smile to your face, listening to her will. It could, alternatively, leave you frothing at the mouth, but that’s a risk you take with her. Ana Marie Cox, the Wonkette and editor of the political blog wonkette.com, talks about her life, work, blogs in general and life again in this keynote interview with Evan Smith at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
• Daniel Hillis – Remixing Technology (3.1) Do you think that working at Disney Imagineering might be fun? Try working for Applied Minds. In this High Order Bits session from the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Daniel Hillis talks about the work done by Applied Minds, the company he co-founded when he wasn’t having enough fun working for Imagineering.
• Kim Polese – Web 2.0 (3.2) Does IT really matter? Have we reached the end of innovation in the Software industry? Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, doesn’t think so and makes a convincing case that the software industry is undergoing a revolution, which will create even further innovations. This is known as Web 2.0 and it is changing that way software companies are executing their business strategy. The second generation of the Internet is forcing these companies to transform their development, delivery and licensing models and to re-examine their core competencies.
• S. Mahalingam – Tata Consulting (3.3) Outsourcing is an integral part of any IT strategy since it can significantly reduce the operational cost of the business. Join Quentin Hardy as he chats with Mr Mahalingam, CFO of Tata Consultancy Services, about the growth in the outsourcing industry and how it is positioned to tackle Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). TCS is one of the largest outsourcing companies in India, which has recorded 143 consecutive quarters of growth and was the first Indian company to reach $2 billion of revenue.
• Wayne Harris – Gene-Based Medicines (3.3) And on this week’s Biotech Nation segment, Moira interviews Dr. Wayne Harris, Dean of the School of Pharmacy, Xavier University about the challenges for patients taking the new gene-based medicines.
• Chris Anderson – Wired Magazine (3.4) On this week’s Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine about what’s the hot new thing! Chris joins Moira to review the latest technology coming up at NextFest 2005 in Chicago.
• Greg Raleigh – Airgo Networks (3.6) How would you like a 10x improvement in wireless bandwidths? Much higher range? Without using more spectrum or more power and available in stores today! You can get it now and it’s not magic but MIMO that makes it possible. MIMO is a new radio access standard pioneered by Dr. Greg Raleigh, the President and CEO of Airgo Networks. Larry Magid talks to Dr. Raleigh about this invention and how it is going to get used, on this week’s edition of Larry’s World.
• Tod Maffin – Podcasting and Public Radio in Canada (3.6) Web Talk’s Rob Greenlee speaks with Tod Maffin, host of a National Technology Column on CBC Radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Tod also hosts a technology series on CBC Television called "Canada Now". He is also creator of the weblog "ILoveRadio.org" and is also a Podcaster. Tod is considered "one of Canada’s most influential futurists". He discusses the present Podcasting landscape and about the future of Podcasting in Public Radio.
• Alexis Gerard and Bob Goldstein – Going Visual (3.8) Moira also speaks with Alexis Gerard and Bob Goldstein, co-authors of "Going Visual — Using Images to Enhance Productivity, Decision-Making and Profits," about the next generation of all our organizations. It’s more than just the gadgets themselves. It’s the fact they’ve become ubiquitous — from huge companies to the everyday worker.

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Steve Wozniak – Gnomedex 4.0 (4.4)
  Gnomedex 5.0 will be held this week in Seattle, and here’s one of Doug’s Favorites from last year’s event. The Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was glued to this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek’s geek. It started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he’d start a company, but HP turned down Woz’s offer for the rights to build what would become Apple’s first computer. Part 1 and Part 2.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• James Goodnight – SAS (2.7) Whereas the life expectancy of people is steadily increasing with time, today’s business life expectancy is actually decreasing. Join Dr. Jim Goodnight, founder and CEO of SAS, the largest privately owned software company, speak on growing and sustaining the long-term enterprise. SAS has been in business for three decades and has sustained a 10-15 percent growth during its lifetime. Listen to discover the SAS secret sauce.
• David Ewing Duncan (3.3) On last week’s Biotech Nation program, Dr. Moira Gunn spoke with biotech journalist David Ewing Duncan, the author of “The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with my DNA,” who shared the experience of submitting himself to just about every genetics test known to man.
• Rob Glaser – Real Networks (3.3) Time flies! Would you believe it’s been a full 10 years since Real first got content streaming going on the Internet? How has streaming fared over this period? How does this decade-old technology compete with the music-on-the-go iPods and its ilk? Larry Magid is back on this week’s edition of Larry’s World interviewing the man who started it all – Rob Glaser, founder and CEO of Real Networks.
• Hoffman and Lauer – Remixing Wikis in the Classroom (3.3) Schools need a system which is simple to use for the teachers as well as the students; one that is secure; which does not require dedicated tech support. And all this without using data servers because the powers-that-be frown on schools setting up servers by themselves. Tom Hoffman and Tim Lauer describe the challenges they have faced in doing this and how they have overcome them with SchoolTool, in their interesting talk at Etech 2005.
• Sean Carroll (3.5) Moira Gunn also spoke with Dr. Sean Carroll, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and author of “Endless Forms Most Beautiful — The New Science of Evo Devo.” It’s the nickname for Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Among other issues, they discussed whether evolution itself is evolving.
• Bob Cox – Media Bloggers Association (4.0) Bob Cox, Founder of the Media Bloggers Association and Blogger at TheNationalDebate.com and he discusses some of the important legal issues facing media bloggers. He shares his story about his battle with the New York Times that recently got national media attention. He discusses how audio and video is changing weblogs and why he created the Media Bloggers Association. Bob will also talk about the recent BlogNashville event and the hot topics that came out of that event.

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

Joel Spolsky – Joel on Software (3.9) IT Conversations’ producer Doug Kaye interviews Joel Spolsky, the author of Joel on Software. He worked on Microsoft’s Excel development team, still a strong influence on his opinions on software development. Topics include: extreme programming of which Joel has often been a critic, formal testing, particularly on large projects, why "customers don’t know what they want" and Microsoft (why some developers may not move to Avalon/XAML/WinFX, and what will happen to Win32).

Thom Bray just referred me to this discussion that I had somehow managed to miss. Apparently Marantz is offering a fix to folks like me that are disappointed in the noisy preamps in their early PMD660 recorders.

A few people have begun reviewing IT Conversations on at least an irregular basis. For example, check out Steve Richards’ reviews. (rss)

I need to figure out a way to link our shows to sites like Steve’s who are really adding a lot af value to what we do. We’ve got rating stars like Amazon, but we’re missing the written reviews, which are even more valuable. I had to turn off new trackbacks due to spam. Gotta come up with a replacement at least for reviewers.

After 12 days, IT Conversations has a huge lead in the BusinessWeek Online poll of a sample of podcasts.

To be fair, we’re probably the only one of the eight that is even close to business-focused, so this isn’t much of a surprise. Still, it’s nice to get the recognition. [more info]

Sort of fun to see the traffic to the old server die down as the DNS records pointing to the new server farm migrate around the world.

The peak at 2am yesterday was a batch (cron) job that kicked in. And while this move was underway, we had our highest-volume day ever: 254.21GB transferred, 203.37GB of which were delivered by our CDN partner, Limelight Networks. At the current rate, June will be a 7.7TB month for IT Conversations.

Frank Barnako over at Marketwatch.com has this scoop:

National Public Radio’s daily and weekly shows are no longer available from the Internet’s largest distributor of audio programming, Audible.com. “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition” and other NPR offerings have been removed from the company’s radio and TV programs page.

While the old-pro listeners to IT Conversations tend towards subscribing to our RSS feeds, newcomers often prefer to stream instead. Right now we have an admittedly baroque UI that offers too many choices: streaming in the Windows Media Player or from our ShoutCAST server, as well as two flavors of downloads: MP3 and AAC. I want to cut that back to just two choices: stream or download.

Downloads will be MP3 only, since I think we’ll soon have a solution for you iPod users who prefer bookmarkable AAC files. But for those who prefer to stream, I want to replace both Windows Media and ShoutCAST.

Instead, I’d like to have some simple embedded player with tape-drive style controls, and I need some advice from those of you who know more about that kinda stuff. What’s the best solution? A Flash player? Something else I don’t know about?

Is there a Flash guru out there that would be willing to volunteer some time to help us implement a Flash-based solution?

Update: Thanks to comments from a whole lotta folks out there, I just tested and installed the $19.95 Wimpy Button Flash player as a replacement for the more complex Windows Media Player an our ShoutCAST MP3 streams. You’ll find the Play Now button on all of our recent Detail pages. (It won’t play our older shows that were recorded at sample rates and bitrates not compatible with Flash.)

It’s Sunday night and we’ve just started moving IT Conversations to a new high-performance server farm. Although we had to rewrite a fair bit of code for the new system, the goal is for a bug-compatible port. That is, if everything goes smoothly the site will work as it always has — warts and all — only faster.

We’re moving audio and database files at this very moment and should make the DNS changes before midnight. Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the DNS changes to propogate. Then fix all the bugs that appear. Thanks for your patience.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• The Software 2005 CEO Panel (2.7)
  How does a five million dollar company become a fifty million dollar company and eventually a five hundred million dollar company in the high tech industry? Join a panel of CEO’s as they share their thoughts and experiences on building a business capable of sustaining long periods of growth. Along the way you will discover the social and technical challenges they faced and how they triumphed.

• Steve Iverson – Streamload (2.8) 50,000 Gigabytes of online storage. Send 2GB email attachments. Free! Store your entire media collection online: your MP3s, DVDs and eve DVR data. San Diego based Streamload offers a service which allows unlimited storage at no cost. On this week’s edition of Larry’s World, Larry Magid talks to Streamload’s CEO Steve Iverson about this service and their unique business model which makes it
  financially viable for them.
• Betsy Dresser (2.8) On last week’s Biotech Nation segment, Moira Gunn interviewed Dr. Betsy Dresser, Vice President for Research & Director of ACRES — The Audubon Canter for Research on Endangered Species. Betsy tells us about their frozen zoo.
• Dill Faulkes (3.3) Moira Gunn also speaks with British software entrepreneur Dill Faulkes who explains why he located his telescopes for the schoolchildren of Britain on the other side of Planet Earth.
• Meg Hourihan – megnut.com (3.5) If you have a blog, you must surely be aware of Blogger.com. But how did it all start? Did it actually ‘invent’ blogging? When did it rise? When did it fall? Where is it at the moment? Well, surely there’s no better person to answer these questions other than the co-founder of Blogger itself, titled "Young Innovator Who Will Create the Future" by MIT’s Technology Review magazine, Meg Hourihan, in this Memory Lane with Halley Suitt.
• Fred von Lohmann – EFF (3.7) Do you watch TV? Listen to music? Use a phone, camera, computer or the web? Then you should get to know Fred von Lohmann because in some sense, he’s "your" lawyer. As Senior Intellectual Property Attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fred’s work shapes the law and public policy of modern technology life. In his interview with Denise Howell, Fred reveals that in addition to being one of California’s most influential lawyers, he is smart, funny, and wields a mean light saber.
• Susan Krieger (3.8) Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Susan Krieger, a sociologist and writer who teaches in the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. She explains how the loss of her eyesight as an adult has guided her to new inner dimensions.
• Lawrence Lessig – Clearing the Air About Open Source (4.3)"Fight!" exhorts Professor Lawrence Lessig as he rallies the open source community in what he calls the war against monopolistic businesses. How is this war affecting the culture of innovation? How do you need to defend your right to innovate? Hear Professor Lessig lay bare with his powerful arguments the stories behind the defining milestones of this war starting with the historic 1976 Sony Betamax judgment, in his keynote talk from the Open Source Business Conference.

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Will Wright – Lessons from Game Design (4.2) This week’s Doug’s Favorite is from the awesome SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series. The creator of The Sims and SimCity considers the relationship between games and the computer industry. He designs the problems his players face so he can push the boundaries of graphics, user interface, AI, metrics and simulation. Hear what Will is learning about how the abilitites and psychology of his players will be used in the mainstream software of the future.

We had a terrific response to my request last week for more volunteer writer/editors. Nine people volunteered, but because we don’t have enough mentors available, five of those are still on the waiting list. Within a few weeks we should be able to add them to the Team. Now, however, the pendulum has swung the other way, and we’re a bit short of audio experts. The majority of the shows are being produced by only three or four engineers, and they could use some help.

If you’re interested, take a look at the wiki page. You may also want to take a look at our new Audio Workshop forum to see if the issues we deal with are within your range of expertise. If so, send me a message at doug@rds.com.

Lots of folks talking about the impending first anniversaries of their Internet-audio programs. But IT Conversations’ first program was released two years ago yesterday, and the official site launched 6/9/03. From my blog on 6/5/03:

IT Conversations. On Monday, June 9, RDS Strategies LLC will launch a new series of recorded audio interviews on the hottest topics in information technology. The MP3 files can be downloaded or streamed for free, and they’re supported by an online forum.

I’m posting this three days in advance in the hope that my technically adroit readers will visit the site, download and stream the files, leave feedback on the forums, and generally give us a the beta testing we can’t otherwise get.

For now there are just two conversations on the site:

* Tony Greenberg, CEO of Ramp^Rate, discusses the state of the web-hosting industry in light of this week’s announcement by Cable & Wireless (owner of both Exodus and Digital Island) that it’s getting out of the U.S. market.
* Phil Windley, former CIO of the State of Utah, covers a wide rage of topics on web services.

On Monday we’ll have two more conversations. By the following week, we should have a total of eight. And that’s just the kickoff!

Let me know what you think. And ask your friends to stop by and give it a test drive.

Perhaps none of us should refer our shows as podcasts until the points at which our MP3s were delivered as RSS 2.0 enclosures. IT Conversations began doing so on September 24, 2003.

IT Conversations now has 553 programs either published or at some stage of post-production and we’re releaseing 9-11 each week thanks to the amazing 42 members of Team ITC. (They’re not all on the public list yet.)

Happy Birthday, IT Conversations, and thanks to all of you for listening and your ongoing support.