Thursday, August 11, 2005

I want a set of BitTorrent verbs that run in the OPML Editor. 

Ethan Zuckerman: Blown Away by Blogpulse. 

New header graphic. Near the source of the Gallatin River. 

Looks like MSN has discovered the power of RSS as a shopping application. More confirmation of RSS as an advertising medium.  

A new song: I've Been Workin' On My Outline. 

Pictures: Bozeman to Idaho Falls, via Yellowstone. 

I got an email from Sable Cantus, saying he's having problems subscribing to Morning Coffee Notes on Apple's iTunes. 

5:25PM Mountain: Arrived safely in Idaho Falls. 

Today I'm back on the road, driving to Idaho Falls.  

It's been fascinating to watch Jon Udell slowly dropping his objections to podcasting and becoming an enthusiast and now even an evangelist. I remember doing a Gillmor Gang last summer from the press room of the Democratic National Convention, my head buzzing with all the potential of podcasting. I kept wanting Jon to get it, but he kept harping on the no bookmarks or linking thing. Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. The great thing about podcasting is that you can take it with you, driving, running, walking, where ever, and just let your mind absorb ideas through your ears, which is a very nice way to get to know someone, very different from reading what they write. Where the written word only has the intonation the reader can infer (adding a lot of errors in doing so) and can be skimmed (lowers comprehension by orders of magnitude) the spoken word has great subtlety and subtext, and can seduce, cajole, wink, leer, lurk, and be lewd. Both forms of expression have their place.  

Last night I tuned into Aaron Brown on CNN, as I try to do every night at 10PM Eastern. It used to be the last remaining real news report on CNN, but at some point this year, I think, they changed the format to be like all the others. One sensational story, last night it was a jail break and a murder in Tennessee, in May it was a runaway bride in Georgia, and spend the whole hour with pictures and interviews wondering how such an apparently normal person could snap and hurt a few random people in some random place. But people run away every day, many murders happen every day, at the same time there's a stock market, weather, international politics, sports, and by the way, we're at war. All this is relegated to brief summaries from another reporter, usually an attractive young woman, who Brown, who is a real newsman, or was, sort-of flirts with, even though we know he's married and has at least one child, a daughter, who's now a teenager. CNN used to be about news, and when that changed, it had one last bastion of news, and now that's gone. No one seems to be talking about this.  

BBC: "Two-thirds of files being swapped on file-sharing networks are video, according to analysts." 

Om Malik: "The podcast start-ups of today are like Wine.com today, while Bit Torrent is Cisco of the digital content revolution."