Sunday, March 20, 2005

Rebecca MacKinnon: Chinese protest BBS crackdown. 

I'm going to be in NYC starting Friday, for a week. 3/25 through 4/1. 

New header graphic. Vegetables at Pike Street Market in Seattle. 

NY Times: "IAC/Interactive Corp, the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc, the nation's fourth-largest search engine company." 

Congrats to Flickr who got bought by Yahoo. Except it should have been the other way around.  

Interesting that Google News doesn't have this bit yet. By 5:50PM Eastern, almost an hour later, they have a one-line report from Blogcritics. I wonder how long before a non-blog source gets the story. And they would have had it sooner if they deigned to scan Scripting News. 

On this day three years ago, we announced a deal to distribute NY Times headlines through Radio UserLand. It was a first step toward the Times support of RSS, which they now have. 

My email got more interesting today since Instapundit pointed to my positive male imagery piece. 

Blueberry Girl: "White men of the world, you are truely more lost than I thought!" 

Kosso: "No one actually *reads* this... do they?" 

Rex Hammock: "As those who fly first class between technology conferences take over the podcasting story, the focus will be more about the business of podcasting (and, thus, the inevitable boom and bust) and not on the more important issue: the transformational nature of what happens when everyone who has an internet connection can truly add their literal voice to a worldwide conversation." 

It's a bright, cloudless, totally comfortable day at the beach. Lovin it. 

Stand in the surf, with your shoes off, wearing jeans that get wet up to the knees. Point the camera down, click to start the movie. Waves in, waves out, in, out, in, out. Click to stop the movie. 

Scoble: "Dave, keep after me to stop listening to only the insiders. I appreciate that very much." 

GoDaddy support 

Yesterday I registered two new domains, and instead of going through my usual registrar, who charges $35 per year for registration and DNS, I went to GoDaddy, and got it for $9. But apparently, unless you're also hosting with GoDaddy, that does not include DNS.

I've hunted all over the site looking for a way to map domains to an IP address, and while they will "forward" the doman (not what I want) they won't map it. I then called their tech support line, was told the wait would be two minutes, and hung up after fifteen (and the ads, these guys are always pushing stuff at you).

First question -- is there a way to get GoDaddy to map a domain? How?

Second question -- I've got four Windows 2000 servers and one Windows Server 2003. Do they have a domain name server built in? I think they must. Somewhere. Where? How? Arrrgh, I didn't really want to learn how to do this.

Anyway, I've cross-posted here, comments welcome.

PS: The domains are independentpodcasters.com and indiepodcasters.com. Yeah, isn't it a shame that a medium that was supposed to be all-indie-all-the-time will probably need to distinguish between people who sign with MSM and those who do it for love.

Later, when the drugs wear off 

Doc Searls responds to my essay posted here yesterday.

Also on Doc's site, Lloyd Davis, like Doc, believes in the insiders.

Okay, let me explain why I don't.

First, I don't have a podcasting product, so when you think of me as a competitor of Evan's that's not correct. I'm working on other stuff, not podcasting tools. I may even be a user of Odeo's product, but right now I'm not inclined to, because they are going over my head to sell me, or that's what they think they're doing. All I've heard about Odeo has been second or third-hand, demos at exclusive insider conferences. Frankly, I'd rather use the open source tools, even if they're not quite as good as Evan's, because I get them without the arrogance and bluster. And hey, they actually exist. I have no direct evidence that Evan's software is anything but vaporware.

I used to go to those insider conferences myself, and I realized that they weren't doing anything other than talking about themselves, while, quite independently, the market was booming. They confused their talk with the boom in the market, created an image of cause-and-effect where there was none. Then when the boom went away it all looked silly. Then it happened again, and more conferences with people dropping hints that they really got the boom, so the boom had something to do with themselves, and they could make you rich if you bought their stock. Then the boom collapsed, but the self-proclamations continued, and again started to look silly.

Nowadays it's gotten to the height of ridiculousness. There isn't even a boom, just a bunch of insiders who think it's cool they're inside. No one has made one cent off podcasting and already the NY Times says there's a business model and tries to give the market to their friends (who haven't shipped anything), and people at TED are ooohing and ahhing, and wondering how they can get in on the IPO. These are the exact same people that got so many to think they were the brains behind the last booms. No wonder they want to do it again. It's really profitable, for some.

This time there's a chance for everyone to see how silly it is because centralized radio is being routed around and the playing field has been leveled in word publishing. So the new business models propose to install a new group of centralizers. Hmmm. Why won't that work? Well, because the economics shifted, and we don't need them anymore. Doc and the rest of the Gillmor Gang came really close to getting this and saying it out loud in the last episode. But when you get into the reality distortion field of one of these insider conferences, well, if you take the drugs you start to believe that the old guys are kaput, and you're one of the new guys! Start shopping for the big house and the fast car. But later, when the drugs wear off, you see that the new media isn't going to be owned by anyone, not you, and not your insider friends.

Anway, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say that all the vendors have to prove themselves in the market, and doing that means understanding the users, and to really understand the users, you have to be one of them. Ross, you don't have to do a podcast, and neither do I, but the people who make products for podcasters do, if they don't will have failed products. That's where it all gets very practical, again, after the drugs wear off.