Thursday, December 09, 2004

Dan Gillmor is leaving the Merc for a citizen journalism venture.  

Financial Times report on Yahoo's desktop search tool. 

It's a good thing I'm done talking for the night. I have almost no voice left. 

Had dinner tonight with Trippi and Zack Rosen. I think we're all becoming friends. Trippi said he wants me to help him get a podcast together. Of course I said yes. We had a very interesting political discussion, not the kind of thing you hear on the cable networks. The goal is to get that onto your iPod in time for your Tuesday walk in the woods. Make sense? 

I'm in the Joe Trippi discussion at KSG now. Jay Rosen is speaking. Every time someone says Internet, my mind substitutes Inkernet. Curse you Dawn Miceli! 

Looking around the room it's like an all-star squad of east coast Inkernet punditry. Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Chris Lydon, Jay Rosen, Rebecca MacKinnon, John Palfrey, Britt Blaser, etc etc etc. It's nice to be in this nest again. Lots of Berkman faces scattered through the room. I've been gone long enough to miss the place. 

I don't usually read the Wall Street Journal, but today I did, on the flight from Seattle to Boston. There was a great op-ed piece written by David Gelertner, a computer science professor, on the IBM sale of their PC product line to the Chinese company. He said something that needed to be said. There's still a lot more work needed to do on PCs. Today's computers work like shit. I'm constantly fighting spyware and can't control what information is on what computer. Sure, we've made a lot of progress, but in some ways we're moving backwards. He said he's sure that these problems will be solved, but now he's pretty sure it won't be by an American company. If not IBM, who will do it? 

The Register upgrades its RSS feeds. 

Here's the Trade Secrets podcast I promised yesterday where we explain where Adam and I see podcasting going. Since it's a travel day (flying to Boston for the I&S conference) there won't be much to read here, so I'm asking for forty minutes of your time today to listen to this cast. I don't think you'll regret it. We're at a moment when this new activity is starting to make sense in a broader way, and the next set of problems are evident. The problems are industry-size, that is, it will take an industry to solve them. Hope you enjoy the story! 

Seattle Times RSS feeds.