Saturday, June 11, 2005

I was driving from the beach to Gainesville, and got into an argument with the voice navigation system in my new Toyota minivan. Hey it's a driving podcast. Been a while since I did one of those. It's fun.  

A picture of Kaye taking a picture of us, and some Florida road pics and the mandatory Florida road movie. 

One year ago today I did my first Morning Coffee Notes podcast. 

Checking in from Gainesville. We had a very spirited discussion, interesting stuff. I also did a podcast with a special guest -- the female voice of my car's navigation system! I don't have the cable to upload it, will have to wait till I get back to the beach. It's probably pretty funny.  

Kaye Trammel, superstar from LSU, was at the meetup in Gainesville.  

Philip Greenspun, getting ready for a plane trek from Boston to Alaska, compares the cargo-carrying capacity of a minivan and a small plane.  

James Fallows: "Search engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak." 

Harold Gilchrist's outline of New Jersey podcasters. 

Thanks to the NOAA feed, I know that the land-fall area for Arlene has narrowed; and that it is still a tropical storm, but they are (for some reason) issuing hurricane warnings. 

Two years ago today: "When asked for a show of hands of people who care what a blog is, three peoples' hands shot up: David Weinberger, Doc Searls and mine. I thought, what is it that we three have in common." 

Later today I'm driving to Gainesville, which is a little closer to the eye of the storm. Why am I doing this? I'm a podcaster, that's why.  

Wired: Radio sets eyes on podcast profit. 

I was sure I was about to die 

Three years ago today I couldn't sleep. My left arm felt like it had electric shocks running through it at random times every few minutes. I would bolt upright in bed in panic. At random times during the day it would feel like an elephant was standing on my chest. I tried to exercise, it had always worked before, but it didn't work this time. By this day three years ago I couldn't walk more than a block without being exhausted and in pain. Talking on the phone was extremely energy consuming. Yet I continued to smoke, and worked, and tried to put off the inevitable. Inside I was sure I was about to die, but on this day three years ago, in a life-affirming move, I made an appointment with a cardiologist. I talked with a friend who had had a heart attack. He urged me to go to the emergency room right away.I should have taken his advice, I didn't, but I got lucky.

People with erasers 

The Wikipedia history of podcasting has been carefully rewritten to eliminate any mention of my work. The open approach has the same problem that the proprietary one has, it can easily be manipulated by people with an axe to grind. It's nice that they give such prominent credit to Chris Lydon and Adam Curry, but the technical innovation in both cases was my work. And my podcasts were the inspiration for Curry's. How is WIkipedia going to prevent from this from happening again? That's a serious issue. It's not the first time it's happened. This is why I've never been a strong advocate of Wikipedia.

And the WIkipedia entry for RSS has been rewritten to be an ad for a competitive format. I don't dare even open my biographical page.

This is what makes innovating so damned unsafisfying. It's a total burnout to create new stuff and have other people take credit for it, over and over. Makes me want to put on the brakes and start taking out patents. This is the point I've been trying to make with the people who encourage programmers to give away all their IP. There are good reasons not to do it, there are no accolades, no incentive to be generous.

Barry Bowen sent a pointer to an Internet Archive page of an older version of the article on podcasting.