Friday, February 25, 2005

Steve Gillmor is the guest on Chris Pirillo's podcast.  

The local NPR station here in northeast Florida has a show I'd not heard before, it's really good stuff, but the host, Diane Rehm, has a voice that can be hard to listen to, but you get used to it. I just looked it up, she has spasmodic dysphonia. She's a great interviewer, highly intelligent, totally involved in the subject. The disease actually makes her show even better, you know it must take a lot of courage to do a radio show when you have a disease that effects your voice in such a profound way.  

Rex Hammock: Podcasting needs no eBay. 

I would be remiss if I didn't point to Slapcast, which does what Odeo does, without all the overhead. I also know the founder of that company, Roger Strickland, a sharp, eager-to-please, young go-getter, who aches to succeed. He was at the first-ever Scripting News brunch in Alexandria, proving that he not only is smart, but has good taste.  

Steven Cohen: Revenge of the Blog People? 

Danny Sullivan: "How would Google feel about programs that modified its search results?" 

Quick comment on Danny's article. No mention of integrity issues. The issue for authors and publishers is whether readers know they're reading text that's been modified. How far can Google go? Can they correct our spelling? If so, can they correct our thinking? And if it's okay for a toolbar, what if Google (as widely rumored) is building a browser?  

Mr Sun discovers Winer-rimmed glasses.  

Now the name-calling is coming from the president-elect of the American Library Association, Michael Gorman. An argument that depends on name-calling can't be a very strong one. It's funny how he disses search engines, but when I wanted to find out who he is, I entered his name into Google, and his home page came up as the first hit. Maybe he should do some more research before he rests on his laurels. Seems like the Web is doing pretty well. And it's not good that he got dealt a dose of name-calling from some bloggers, but he could view it another way, they're people who could be using his libraries. That is, assuming that libraries really do have a role in the 21st Century, something he, as a president of the association, should be trying to make sure we're convinced of.  

Don Park's story of two parrots. Sit down before reading it. 

Monkey Media Report: "Google-worship sucks." 

NY Times: "While still too much in its infancy to be considered an immediate threat to the radio industry, podcasting does present the prospect of a growing army of iPod-toting commuters who take programming decisions out of the hands of broadcasters and customize their own listening." 

Odeo, the company profiled in the Times piece above, was founded by Noah Glass and Evan Williams, both of whom I know. I urged Noah, a few years back, to take the steps necessary to be the first to do podcasting, but it didn't happen. Now it appears, from their blog, that they're doing an iPodder, a directory, and something like audio.weblogs.com. If Odeo somehow comes to dominate podcasting, this wouldn't be the first time Evan Williams "took over" an idea . Of course Evan now has to deal with the serial entrepreneur problem, how to recapture the energy of the first startup when you have enough money to avoid the burn-out.  

Read this if you need a kidney 

Boing Boing: "Alex Crionas needs a kidney, and his friend Patrick Garrity would like to give him one. But the transplant was recently blocked by a coordinating group because Crionas published an account of his need for the procedure on a personal website."

Good thing Dave Jacobs already got his kidney. And if I ever need one, I can't imagine not writing about it on my website. What happened to the First Amendment? And can you believe the argument that some people don't have access to the Internet? I don't. If you need a kidney, you'll find your way there. This is how the public gets educated on this stuff, by reading first-hand pleas from people in need.

A lot of people learned about that by reading Dave's plea here. And what if I wrote it, not him (which I did, btw). Could he be penalized for something a friend of his did? (And if you read that piece, Dave got his kidney. This week he took his first post-transplant vacation with his wife and four boys. He's healthy, happy, glad to be alive.)