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The Podcasting Revolution

I have not really written much about this podcasting thing, and believe me, I could write volumes… I’ve been experimenting with the concept for years and years now. It’s nice that the tools to make it easy are starting to show up…

Adam has got iPodder.org as sort of a hub for this “iPodder platform” and podcasting stuff, which is really starting to catch on. Many of my old scripts to automagically download content are no longer needed as RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures are starting to appear.

This is all just the beginning. Sure, I’ve got my “little” stuff over in the Audio section, but I’m not really pushing it, I’m more of a kickstarter, and things have been sufficiently kicked…

Just today I was discussing VoIP with someone and they said that their office phone system, which uses VoIP, sends you your voicemail as an email with a wav file attached. Sounds nice, but why not provide an RSS feed of your voicemail with enclosures, so you could sync your iPod as you run out the door, and listen to all of your voicemail on the go. Crazy idea? Maybe…. The point is, there are many applications we might not have thought of yet.

There’s getting to be more daily shows/audioblogs now, and my time is being stretched. (I currently drive about 90 minutes a day and really don’t want that to increase!) I wonder how this will work. Will there be just a few well known shows? Will people shorten their shows? I mean, in 1997 there were a handful of weblogs, and you could read them all during your lunch break, but now we use aggregators to subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and we always have new content, and we rely on being pointed to the good stuff. Perhaps as more people listen we’ll just get into the mode of hitting the episodes that interest us. It’s an interesting problem. I won’t get into the audio/search/metadata thingy right now, as that’s something for another time.

Thank you, and goodnight…

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Own Your Data

A while back we asked Who Owns Your Data? and since then DataLibre has appeared to tell you that you should own your data.

As I revisited the Groundspeak forum on Buxley’s use of Geocaching.com’s data, I started to notice that people were concerned about the ownership of their data, and there are a few interesting ideas, and the discussion of the Waypoint Licensing Agreement we discussed recently comes to the surface as well.

My quick take away is this: Always read those agreements, as you really should know what you are agreeing to. (And for the agreement makers, create a way to provide feedback on these agreements if people are uncomfortable with them or have questions.) Second, publish your data first. Get a web site, post your data there before you post it elsewhere, even if you don’t promote it or make it public, put it out there, so that when the data you gave away turns sour, you still have your original copy with a permanent home on the web that you control…

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Frontier under GPL

Wow! Dave really did it… Frontier 10.0a1 has been released under the GNU General Public License.

Yes, I said the GPL. Woo!

That makes Frontier “free” software, and not “free” like Dave made it 10 years ago, but totally free, within the limits of the GPL of course…

This should be interesting…

(Excuse me while I dig through my backups from the late 1990’s for all my UserTalk code!)

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Kicking the Audio

After I kicked drew into doing the audio thing, he kicked me back into proper distribution, or at least some attempt at making things clearer. So here’s RasterWeb! Audio in 3 easy steps…

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Furl Gets Bought

Gosh, look at that: Looksmart Acquires Furl.net (See Also: Why del.icio.us is neat, and Bootstrapping out into open space.)

[Sometimes I hate being a smart hacker type with no business sense…]

One thing I found interesting in the article is this bit:

“Every person who furls a page is casting a vote for it,” said Krim. “We’ll be taking the masses’ votes instead of just the webmasters’ votes.”

They even mention Google’s PageRank, which is interesting, because I see it having one of the same problems, context. Is someone ‘furling’ a URL a vote for… how authoritative the page is? Maybe. I mean, I stick plenty of things into del.icio.us just because I want to read it later. It might be a link to something that totally sucks and is wrong in every way, but I won’t know that until later, when I read it. Just like Google’s PageRank, which is a measure of popularity, not quality.

Hmmm, perhaps we need to solve that problem!

Oh, and as for the whole ‘masses’ versus the ‘webmasters’ – well, I guess us weblog types are ‘webmasters’ eh? Shouldn’t all the masses become webmasters eventually?

Ok, back to testing…