Friday, May 13, 2005

Julie Leung transcribed bits of yesterday's podcast. "It's an instant classic. It's a tune I'd be happy to play over and over until the ears ring. As all great hits do, it ends with the best part of the song, something to hum long after the music has ended." She's right. If you've never listened to a podcast of mine, this is the one. It explains it all. If you miss DaveNet, this podcast gets to a place no DaveNet ever did. If you want to know how it all ties together, how this story we're writing together ends, this is the one to listen to. You won't be sorry. Even my mother likes it. "I loved your podcast from Pisa," she wrote via email. It's only 25 minutes. Really, you can afford the time. Go listen now. 

A brief response to Chris Lydon's pilot for his Open Source radio program on Public Radio International. 

Best wishes and good luck to Adam Curry on his new Sirius satellite radio show, which debuts this evening at 6PM Eastern. Adam, please be sure people know they're tuned to a broadcast, not a podcast. Thanks. 

Scoble: "Bing, bing, bing! You win $10 million." Coooooooool. 

The WSJ has an RSS feed for its free articles, which is how I found this piece in today's paper about podcasting and big-city newspapers.  

Speaking of things I just found, there's what appears to be an excellent conference in NYC on Monday about politics and blogging. It's so weird I'm just finding out about this. Sigh. 

Ed Foster: It's Hard to Say Goodbye to AOL. 

Jeff Barr's apology for spamming Google for money. Jeff says he's never been the target of "a public attack" before, but he wasn't attacked, he did something that hurt the web, and that was made public, making it possible for him to fix it, which he did, apparently.  

In the meantime, yesterday Google took the Toolbar out of beta, and along with it released the AutoLink feature we were discussing in February and March. They made some minor mods, but still haven't allowed authors a way to opt-out on a feature that should be opt-in only. So, imho, Google is doing its own part to destroy the value of the searchable web, cashing our work out for a short-term benefit for their shareholders. That was my last attempt to try to coax Google back onto our side. We're now on their slippery slope, I fully expect that they will release more content-modifying technology soon. AutoLink was merely a precedent-setter for them, and for their competitors. I'm not going to do interviews on this, I've already said so much about it. It's time to move on. 

On the other hand, perhaps this is a good time for Google's competitors in toolbars, search and advertising to take a pledge to help build the integrity of the web instead of foreclosing on it. Yahoo? Microsoft? Anyone?