I can't figure out how the new location-based Twitter works. Firefox can't figure out where I am. No surprise, My 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn't have GPS. Is there some place I can click on a map to say This Is Where I Am? Not at all obvious. Other people say they see it. Not on my machine.

Anyway, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with location stuff.

On Twitter, I posted a link to a Google Map asking if this was the location of the Fillmore East.

I got back an answer that it was close, but the supermarket next door is where the Fillmore was. I tweeted back that I had read somewhere that that was where the Ratner's was, next to the Fillmore, and if you go in there you can even see a giant R on the floor. Ratner's was a great Jewish dairy restaurant. Until I read the article (can't remember where it was) I only knew about the now-gone Ratner's on Delancey St. I once took a blonde shiksa VP-Marketing from California to Ratner's on Delancey, and the waiter yelled at me for bringing such a fine woman to such a lousy neighborhood. That was before it all got gentrified and yuppified.

Both Ratner's are gone now.

Anyway, the same guy dug up a picture of the old Fillmore just before a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert. My theory was correct. It's the site of the bank.

I went to the Fillmore a few times. The most memorable concert was a Grateful Dead show with a surprise toward the end. A bunch of dirty hippies with long hair and beards come out and jam with the Dead. The music sounds weirdly familiar but hard to place. They were being deliberately misleading. Then all of a sudden a rock and roll standard -- Good Vibrations. It was the all-new dope-smoking Beach Boys! Oh man those were the days. I also saw the Incredible String Band there. Ten Years After.

We're getting ready to do an East Village blog for the NY Times. Going down memory lane is my way of getting ready.

PS: I read about Ratner's on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, an intriguing blog with lots of great stories about the ever-changing and not-always-for-the-best New York Shitty. ">

 3/10/2010; 7:58:21 PM.   .

I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.

These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.

I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.

Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.

It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded it

http://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrent

If you have questions or comments, you can post them here.

PS: Another reason I like it is this is a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. We need more of those to protect this excellent distributed technology.

 3/10/2010; 7:36:19 AM.   .

Jay and I use WordPress to do the http://rebootnews.com/ site. 

It's a mixed bag. On the pro side, we both know how to use WordPress, and because Jay writes the show notes and I do the tech stuff, it's a good tool to put between us.

But WordPress doesn't do podcast feeds well.

And that's being generous.

Here's how the UI works currently. You edit your post and link to an MP3 or a movie or an AVI or some other media object. The first one that WP encounters as it parses your text, it will supposedly turn into an enclosure. If you happen to link to two MP3s but the second is the enclosure, you're out of luck. And for some reason if you store the MP3 on Amazon S3, as we do, it usually doesn't even find the enclosure. But this is variable. Today they've hacked up our link to point to some server on wordpress.com, totally without our permission. What a mess. And even so there's no enclosure in our feed for this week's show (which btw I think is one of our best, one I hope everyone listens to).

For the last three episodes of our podcast, it's failed to add an enclosure element to the feed. As a result none of our listeners get the podcast on time, and it always takes some fussing by the WordPress tech people to get it working, and for all I know a bunch of people never hear the podcast. I suppose it depends on whether or not the client sees an item as read if the guid doesn't change but all of a sudden the item has an enclosure. Imho a proper podcast client would just watch the guid, and therefore would miss the enclosure. Regardless, it's simply unacceptable that WordPress work this way and that Automattic doesn't do something to fix it.

This is how we did it in Radio 8, in 2002, eight years ago.

Here's a screen shot.

Click the screen shot for the full effect.

See the red arrow pointing to the box called Enclosure? That's where you paste the link to the enclosure. Anyone no matter how technical they are not, could be taught to do that correctly.

We never had the problem WordPress is having. Granted a lot fewer people did podcasts then than now. Maybe. I'd argue that the way WordPress works now is killing the art of podcasting because it's so unpredictable and it's virtually got the market cornered. Regardless, I'm a paying customer, and I'd like to continue to use WordPress, but eventually I'm going to have to switch because it's killing our product.

Please Matt and company, fix this!

PS: I wish Wordpress.com was more hackable, if there was a way for me to patch our feed I could fix this without their help. Alas it's not something I can fix myself and I don't have any interest in running my own installation or fussing around with PHP etc.

 3/10/2010; 6:01:06 AM.   .