Wednesday, June 29, 2005

A Scoble peptalk for Microsoft on new media and podcasts. He's right. Some may think podcasting is a fad. It's not a fad. 

Vadim Zaliva reviews iTunes podcasting. They strip links out of podcast descriptions. No linking off-site, to the nth degree.  

Om Malik's mini-review illustrates perhaps the best thing about Apple's implementation of podcasting. After seeing podcasting grow like a weed for the last year (it's been over a year since my first podcast, btw), we can see how Apple tends its garden. All of a sudden the pioneers are off on the side, we're the "indies." Heh. Look, Apple is educating the market, and for that we owe them a lot of gratitude. But they are also educating the users about Apple in a way developers never could. We know what it's like being in their company town, now many of the users are developers, and are getting a taste. Analysts like Michael Gartenberg sniff at details like user lock-in. It matters. Eventually dumb users learn, and ask why there's copy protection, why they're taking out links, why they can't switch.  

Doc Searls weighs in on FM transmitters for cars, just as I get ready to begin my July auto journey. I'm heading over to Radio Shack right now to get the extenda. Right on. (Postscript: Didn't have to go to Radio Shack, I had such a cable, and Doc is right, it works.) 

Sorry I missed this bit written by Marc Canter about my appearance at Gnomedex. It was a great event. Shows what can happen when the promoter lets people be themselves, and doesn't sell speaking slots to the highest bidder (or give them to companies he's invested in). Anyway thanks Marc. I hope to come to a Silicon Valley conference and wow them too sometime, when one of them decides it's okay to have me. In the meantime say hi to John Doerr.  

Brent Simmons: "I took a quick look at the iTunes podcast RSS extension, and it could be better. My guess is that it will end up getting revised: I doubt that the current spec is the one we’ll live with." That's how I parse it too. 

Totally unsolicited, Taegan Goddard sent me a link to his OPML subscription list. He calls this a feed but I think of it as a reading list. I'd like to be able to subscribe to this reading list, and when he unsubs from something, I'd automatically unsub too (but only if I got the subscription from him), and likewise when he subs to something I'm not sub'd to. Unfortunately, no aggregator (yet) has this feature. Now, be sure you're sitting down. Would you like to see the power of standards? Remember, I didn't ask him to do this. Here's the directory view of his reading list. Does that just blow you away? It does me.  

Robin at Podnova has an excellent summary of podcasting by Apple. Let's hope Microsoft and Real, and everyone else gives us a way to get our old subscription lists in, and our new subscription lists out. To celebrate Apple's offering, I'm adding import-export of subscription lists to the OPML Editor right now, as we speak. If it's true that Apple doesn't give you a way to get your data out, you should use it only for experimental purposes, plan your exodus, think different, starting now. (And to podcasting directory authors, I love you, and I will kick butt to make sure you have a home. I had dinner with Adam on Saturday, we talked about this. And I'm listening to my Archos right now.) 

Speaking of the Archos, I just finished listening to David McCullough's excellent new history of 1776. The last chapter made me break out in tears, sobbing because I love this country so much and the freedom that was so hard-won by the patriots that fought the war for independence. Did you know that we lost most of the battles of 1776? It's true. It wasn't until the decisive middle of the night surprise attack at Trenton, at the end of the year, that the tide turned, and we went against Hessian mercinaries, not the redcoats. As I said to Steve Gillmor the other day, it's always darkest just before dawn. We had to get the Apple product out of the way, now it's here, if it turns out to really be a locked trunk for users, we can have our tea party now, and look forward to hard and glorious fight, and victory, in 1783. It won't be quick, it won't be easy, but it will be worth it. 

Tim Jarret: Whose podcasting directory is this? 

BTW, could they possibly have found a worse picture of Curry? 

The National Hurricane Center is reporting on Bret, in RSS, natch. 

Rex Hammock quotes a WSJ article quoting Steve Jobs on a concession from the music industry about podcasting. Hmmm.  

Rogers Cadenhead: "A mission statement on Cohen's personal web site reveals that he developed BitTorrent to enable piracy." 

Register: "For Microsoft, it's much easier to go with something that's fixed. RSS 2.0 may not be an IETF standard, but it's a marketplace standard, and that's good enough." Thanks but, they got the sequence of formats wrong, RSS 2.0 came before Atom, and there never was an RSS 1.1. Where do they get these "facts." 

Dare is worried, but it seems to me he can ignore Apple's extensions when processing podcast feeds. Same with Yahoo's. He's concerned that Slashdot goes too far in its criticism of Microsoft, and I agree -- but he's gone too far in his criticism of Apple. Net-net, the bigco's should adopt the philosophy of interop and avoid funky extensions of RSS where ever possible. The same logic that applied when RSS was the exclusive domain of the little fry still works in the age of the 100-ton dinosaur.  

Enough 

I've been fighting a denial of service attack for weeks. Whoever it is has a domain name registered in Russia, it's directed against me. There are no hits for the domain in Google. Their IP address keeps changing, and the bandwidth bills are huge (thousands of dollars), coming out of my pocket, of course. Pretty soon it's going to be time to call the police, to find out what we can do about this.