Saturday, October 09, 2004

Adam was recording a Daily Source Code, caught in traffic, a horn honks, he rolls down the window, it's Raymond and he's got an iPod and he's listening to the Daily Source Code. It's quite a moment.  

I've been watching Fox News today, and guess what, they're critical of Bush, and speaking favorably of Kerry. Could they smell a change, and now will start serving a new boss? 

NY Times: "What was that bulge in the back of President Bush's suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week?" 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution endorses Kerry. "It's time to give competence a chance." 

Adam Curry was interviewed today by Leo Laporte on KFI in LA.  

One of the ironies of the GG as they're recording talk about the downfall of Microsoft, in the background you hear the characteristic sound of Windows checking email. It's sweet. I laugh every time. Seems the revolution will have to wait for the email.  

Kim Polese is the guest on this week's Gillmor Gang. I listened to it on a walk on San Francisco Bay by the airport in Burlingame. Her new company, SpikeSource, in stealth mode for 16 months, will develop and distribute free "stacks" of open source applications, and offer validation, certification and support to corporations who are currently doing this for themselves.  

Jeremy Zawodny's writeup of her talk at the Web 2.0 conf this week. 

No matter what, the day after flying, I have a back ache. Yesterday's flight was full, at least I was in an exit row, so I had lots of room for my legs, but no room for my shoulders. I was squeezed into a very cramped position for two hours. Net result -- back ache. Arrrgh. 

I had breakfast today with a longtime friend, Alex Cohen, who's current passion is a clips site for this year's politics. He's a brilliant guy, I've brainstormed many technical projects with him between 2000 and 2002 or so, when we lost touch. Alex was a tech exec at Netscape at the time they were doing RSS, one of the unsung heroes, IMHO. We talked about podcasting, and tried to figure out, aside from the world being ready for it now, what's new about it, and I said it's XML, which allows a variety of processors acting as user agents. This had come up in the meeting at Microsoft earlier this week, I was singing the praises of RSS, and the lights didn't come on until they realized how much of the work of RSS was done on the client. It looks deceptively simple from the server or content p.o.v. until you realize that the client can run software, and not just a browser. I do my best thinking with smart people like Alex, and Adam, and some of the new people I've met at Microsoft. And don't forget Scoble. He says he's just marketing slime, to which I said, if you're marketing slime, well so am I.  

Yesterday at Stanford we talked about the rooms, AV, wifi, staffing and the wait list for BloggerCon on November 6. On Monday we'll have word on the wait list, so people who need to know can make travel plans. 

Dowbrigade pic of Mac users at BloggerCon I. 

Formats for podcasting 

Talked with Adam before the debate yesterday (it was 1AM in Europe) about formats for podcasting. I want to use OPML, as we do with non-audio RSS, for lists of podcasts.

The iPodder directory already is available in OPML, which means if you want, you can include the directory in yours. Please cache it for an hour, and expect more attributes on each feed as we work on the back-end.

Also, per Steve Kirks' request, I plan to do a weblogs.com ping center for podcasts. In other words, a simple infrastructure is needed to cope with the new flow, which is a great problem to have, and one we know how to deal with after experience with weblogs.

Developers and users party together!