Saturday, December 25, 2004

Went for a hike today on Fay Canyon Trail.  

AP: "Dad put the presents on eBay instead of under the tree." 

If you have your own great moments in podcasting, prepare a sound clip, upload it, post a description and send me a pointer. Let's get some flow for the really interesting or awkward moments in podcasting in 2004. Here's a brief podcast from the DNC with Rebecca Blood, myself, General John Shallikashvilli and a roaring convention crowd. It was quite a moment. I think god was casting that day too, or maybe it was the spirit of Hubert Humphrey. 

Last week's Gillmor Gang 

Yesterday I listened to the identity discussion on The Gillmor Gang. It was very good, as far as it went, but it couldn't go very far, because identity doesn't go very far. This is one of the big problems that refuses to get solved. Like Jon Udell, I expected us to have a global identity system a long time ago.

Doc Searls, bless his heart, offered RSS and podcasting as examples of technologies that were simple, therefore successful, and suggests that identity, if it were to be approached the same way, might have similar success. Bzzzt. Wrong. RSS was not easy, it was hard, for exactly the same reasons identity is hard. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Two ways to do identity is one too many.

Politics spoiled identity, and would have spoiled RSS had the major players not converged on RSS 2.0. The difference this time was that there was a Switzerland, me, to guide RSS through its gauntlet, and I clearly wasn't in bed with any of the major publishers or vendors. The Harvard connection didn't hurt because it's a highly respected university that hadn't been involved in tech standards. Had identity had that kind of champion-ship it might not be the mess it is today.

Instead, when Microsoft started moving behind the scenes in 1997, it was also busy losing the trust of the tech industry, the government, and probably to some extent, the public, by attacking Netscape and the Web. When we tell the history of this chapter of computing history, the costs of Microsoft's aggression will be seen to be very high, not just for them, but for all of us. Now we're stuck, we don't have a leader to turn to to settle the mess of identity.

Great moments in podcasting 

Yesterday while driving in Arizona, I tripped across a very short clip of an Adam Curry podcast that I wished every person who was interested in podcasting could hear, yet I am sure that only a very small number have actually heard it.

Adam was doing a podcast while driving in Holland. He's talking about how podcasting today is like college radio, everbody, when a guy pulls up next to him and flashes his iPod. They roll down their windows, have a brief conversation, in Dutch. I won't spoil the fun in case you haven't heard it, it seems that day the good lord was godcasting, and Adam and Raymond were just channeling.

An excerpt from Adam's October 7 podcast everbuddeh.