Sunday, October 30, 2005

What if Scooter Libby were a guest on Law & Order? 

Scoble, before the XML geeks swoop down and start picking this to death, the point is that, as a non-technical user, you're right to insist that RSS work well for your users. You want to provide them with full feeds, you want to be able to view your feed, and have some idea of what's going on when you look. That's what I get from your message. Weird things like CDATA, while they're valid and definitely not funky (in a technical sense) are confusing. I support you in what you want, although other techies will say there's no reason for the technology to be transparent to you, I disagree. People don't use things they don't understand, and it's certainly possible to do it in a way that you can understand, without giving up any of the power and depth that geeks like so much. I'd also be happy to work with Matt to make you happy. I'm pretty sure I know what you want. Keep on truckin. Dave 

Pito Salas on his experience with the OPML Validator. 

Linux World: "Just as the inventor of the automobile doubtless had no intention of facilitating the one-night stand, neither did Dave Winer set out to foment Reckless, Stupid Syndication." 

We need a beautiful icon for valid OPML. 

Norm Augustinus has some good OPML badge material! 

Amyloo has an animated badge for OPML. Nice. 

Kosso's is the prettiest so far.  

Every once in a while I remind people that there's a PDA version of Scripting News.  

Nick Bradbury's comments on the OPML Validator. 

Mike Arrington's first podcast, recorded at TagCamp. 

I had trouble sleeping last night, so I stayed up to watch the clock go from 1:59AM to 1AM on my Mac. Maybe I couldn't sleep because I watched Monster's Ball, an excellent movie that started on death row, but in the end was a beautiful romance about redemption and forgiveness. Excellent acting by Halle Berry, believe it or not. Highly recommended.  

Okay, another thing I did while I couldn't sleep was buy a new toy at apple.com. A dual CPU, 2.3Ghz, 2GB RAM, 500GB drive, 23 inch cinema display. About $5K. It should be a pretty nice computer. And I deserve it.  

The people of the pod 

Cyrus Farivar (pronounced suh-roos far-ih-var), the author of the original NY Times podcasting piece, reminds us that Anne Eisenberg's From Your Living Room was the fourth NY Times piece on podcasting. True, but it's still a good thing that they ran it, because it's getting closer to the real story of podcasting, the people of the pod.

Look at who they wrote about. Not Tod Maffin, but his wife Kim who is podcasting about MS, and providing comfort and information to thousands of people who are afflicted with the disease. Lisa Williams, who did the kickass tutorial about podcasting, and does a weekly show about the meals she prepares for her Watertown family (Lisa is a regular at the Berkman Thursday group, we've worked together a bunch of times). Michael Geoghegan, a largely unsung hero of podcasting, who does an excellent movie review podcast, Reel Reviews.

Eisenberg set out to learn how people make media that was previously thought to only be accessible to corporations with millions of dollars to invest. While Cyrus wrote the initial milestone piece, announcing the exciting beginning of a new technology with potential to become a medium, which, in a very short period, has. Even so, next year, and the year after, we will have to take another look at where podcasting is, and let's hope the Times continues to run a string of insightful slices in time that give us a realistic look.

Even the Markoff puff piece about Silicon Valley's visions of podcasting profit, was worth it, in hindsight, if only to see the Times getting back on course with this piece about the people of podcasting. Emphatically, we are not a get-rich-quick scheme for serial entrepreneurs looking to flip their pre-IPO Web 2.0 Ajax web-app bubble-ware for the Long Tail. We are people with hearts, lives, families, aspirations, hope and something to say. That's by far the more interesting story, and it has legs, it's going somewhere, unlike the tail, which is a vestige of times gone by, when you could count on people to be idiotic couch potatoes, ready to be harvested by advertisers with their intrusive and mindless "messages."

The baby of the pod 

When I was in Toronto in July, I had dinner with Shannon and Ray Slakinski. Ray is co-author of iPodderX, one of the first podcasting clients for the Macintosh (and now Windows too). Shannon was visibly pregnant and due in November. Aidan McLaughlan Slakinski was born on Oct 23, a few weeks early. Here are some pictures of the baby and the proud family.