Candidate MP3s progress 

Progress to report on the MP3s of candidate conference calls.

The Washington bureau of McClatchy has produced an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for some of the calls.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/250/index.xml

We still need a feed with all the calls. We're missing some of the most important ones. But we're making progress, and thanks to the folks at McClatchy for pitching in.

Now bloggers have a chance to listen to the campaign spinners in their own words, without interpretation.

Update: USA Today posts 2 minutes of a Clinton conference call today saying: "we want to make sure you get the full context." No. Wrong. Incorrect. To get the context we'd need the MP3 of the full conference call. Come on guys, let's get over this gatekeeping. We'll all do better if thousands of bloggers can listen to these calls.

McClatchy has the full conference call.

2/20/08: "Where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters."

2/21/08: "Four years from now we'll look back at this in amazement that there was a day when campaigns hid their words and ideas behind the filters of the press."

FriendFeed gets interesting 

After opening to the public a week ago, a lot more people are showing up on FriendFeed, and it's got features the others don't have. The others? Yeah -- it's competitive with things like: Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku and Pownce. And it's simple and minimalist like Twitter, yet it fully embraces everything else out there that has a feed. Can you post to FF? Yes, and you won't see those posts on Twitter. Not sure about the other places.

http://friendfeed.com/davew

Network apps are getting really interesting, and it's all different variants on the River of News aggregator and RSS, going back to My.UserLand in 1999, almost 10 years ago.

I love to see this stuff finally take root so virally.

Now I gotta get Kawasaki to see the light on RofN.

Obama for President 

Bluetooth headset for Mac? 

I've been doing my interviews with a new USB headset I bought on Saturday at Fry's. It's pretty good, except there's a hum, and the volume is pretty low, so the person I'm interviewing comes through louder than I do.

I'd like to nail the quality issue, so I've been looking into other choices for USB headsets.

Then I wondered if the Bluetooth headsets for cell phones work with Macs?

I read some of the product descriptions on Amazon, and it's not clear. They say they work with Skype, so that must mean they work with laptops and desktops, right?

So the question -- is anyone using a Bluetooth headset with a Mac? If you use a USB headset is there one you recommend or don't?

Update #1: Based on advice from early commenters I ordered a Sennheiser USB headset from Amazon. I figure if any of them are high quality this one is, I'm definitely going to buy a Bluetooth headset, I've never owned one, I figure I should try it out, they're not very expensive. I do have Bluetooth headphones from Motorola, courtesy of Sprint. So I'll try those out with the Mac now that I know they're supposed to work.

Update #2: Here's the Bluetooth headset I'm getting.

Update #3: Chuck Shotton got the Bluetooth headset I'm getting.

TWiT follow-up 

I was a guest on Leo LaPorte's TWiT a couple of Sundays ago. It was fun, we had an interesting discussion about a lot of things, including the ideal podcast player device.

I've gotten a bunch of email from people who use Nokia cell phones and their N800 and N810, and say they do what I was asking about.

Could be so.

I bought a N800 but never got it working in any meaningful way. I think it's a really poorly designed product. Does it have a podcatcher? Never found it. Never even got it to connect to my wifi reliably. After putting in a bunch of hours I gave up -- I wasn't getting anywhere. The Nokia guys told me they were going to send me a phone with a podcatcher built-in but they never did. It's a little too expensive for me to buy one just to find out what the software does. And as I said the N800 was a real bad experience. And I'm not going to shell out $400-plus just to find out if the N810 is more usable than the N800. If they want to send a review unit I'll try it out (I've already told this to their rep).

To their credit, Nokia actually does coordinate with bloggers, almost none of the other device and hardware manufacturers do, so my ability to review stuff is limited by what I'd pay money for. Not a bad limit btw, there's an implied endorsement of products I had to pay for to review.