Saturday, July 02, 2005

Today's MCN is about Audible, DRM, Apple, podcasting. 

Ha! I'm glad I put up that bit about Audible this morning, because the same idea is in a piece in tomorrow's NY Times by Randall Stross. "Apple's decision to add free podcast subscriptions to its store shelves creates potential problems for another supplier: Audible, Apple's exclusive supplier of more than 17,000 audio book titles for the iPod. At its own Web site, Audible sells the audio books, either a la carte or as part of a subscription bundle." Exactly. DRM-be-damned, if you won't provide the content the users want, the way we want it, then the users will create it for themselves. No wonder the big guy was so pissed! I love it. Then Stross predicts that podcast pioneers (that's gotta be me) will have our hackles raised. It's the other way around dude. The barriers came down. They ain't going back up. It doesn't work that way. (The ink-stainers always predict they'll put the genie back in the bottle.) 

Ethan Zuckerman: "Africa’s a continent. Not a crisis." 

The definition of too-good-to-be-true. Karl Rove was the source in the Valerie Plame leak? If only. 

Six years ago today: "Can we agree on a single content syndication format? I've spoken several times this week with people from Netscape on the next step with RSS and scriptingNews formats. I proposed that we agree on a single format, and a loose way of moving forward in the future." 

If you like the Beatles, and who doesn't, at some point you run out of new tunes, but maybe not so fast. After they broke up, they kept producing, John Lennon did Imagine and How Do You Sleep at Night, and of course there's lots of great Paul McCartney tunes, even the ones with Linda McCartney aren't all that bad, and George Harrison's career blossomed when he got out on his own. But did you know that there's a great Ringo Starr album, that's almost as much a Beatles album as Abbey Road or the White Album. Ringo is a great musician, but he had a gift for bringing people together, and his 1973 album has some great music. Try Sunshine Life for Me written by George Harrison. "Sail away Raymond, sail away." Other songs by John Lennon, Randy Newman and of course Paul McCartney. "You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine." Also appearing on the album: Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins, Steve Crooper, Harry Nilsson, Jim Keltner, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Marc Bolan, Klaus Voorman and Vini Poncia. 

Notes about the category router that was released to OPML Editor testers today, with screen shots. Note that there are already apps that feed off these elements, notably Technorati's tag routing system. Someday perhaps Apple's podcatcher will watch for these.  

DailySonic catches Apple caching our podcasts. Not cooool. 

One year later, Marlon Brando is still dead. :-( 

Here's some sexy RSS badges, Madge. 

My bleary eyes read this headline as "Podmaster General..." 

Doug Kaye's plan for IT Conversations.  

I've started driving. This is coming from a truck stop in Brunswick, Georgia. And already I'm having flashes of insight that I only get when driving. Try this one out. When the guy from Audible attacked me (no other word can capture the aggressiveness) was he missing that I was more than just a customer who got tired of DRM -- I had created a new way of distributing audio that was immune to DRM. I wonder if Steve Jobs has figured that out. Maybe he likes it. In any case, it's getting to be time for driving podcast. Haven't done one of those since podcasting hit the stratosphere. 

Also, I really need to get the community server component of the OPML Editor running on Unix. Talking with Rogers about this yesterday, I realized that it doesn't have to be a huge job, just port the Frontier kernel to Linux and you get the whole thing across with one codebase, and any improvements on Mac or Windows automatically port to Linux. Back in 1998 people were able to get the compiled binary to run under WINE, but now that Frontier is open source, that can be done much more reliably. I hope some Unix C coder decides to take this on.  

Speaking of bridges, now that I've read David McCullough's history of the Brooklyn Bridge (great book, highly recommended) I look forward to taking a walk across the bridge on my upcoming visit to NYC.  

I'm aiming to go as far as Charleston, South Carolina today. It'll be hell to find a hotel room there, but that's why I have a net connection.  

Scoble thinks I missed the power of OPML and my editor. I kind of doubt that. Last night I started working on the category router. Wait till you see that one. It's pretty cool.