Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Some great news! We got a $1000 donation today from The Associated Press. This is very welcome, both because we need the money, but also it's great that AP wants to help the bloggers. We have another $1000 donation in process from a big tech company, one which I think people will find surprising. I know I was surprised and pleased that old wounds are healing, and the blogosphere is uniting, in a very nice way. BloggerCon is that kind of event. It's so open, it makes people want to come in. Another cool thing is that we're getting these sponsorships without making editorial concessions. At the second BC, we went looking for financial help from the big tech companies (because we did away with the admission fee), and found that we would have to give them speaking slots, without telling the people they were paying for the slots. I wouldn't do these deals, although I had learned this is standard practice for tech industry conferences. These contributions are coming without any concessions. There will be people participating from AP, and other companies, and they participate like anyone else (no commercials, though), and they get our special thanks for helping the bloggers. That's the way it should work, imho. 

AP: "Boston blew away decades of defeat with four sweet swings." 

History was made tonight. The Boston Red Sox beat the NY Yankees in the seventh game of the ALCS. It's the first time the Yankees have lost a championship series. And the first time a team has come back from a 3-0 deficit in post-season play. And for Boston it's a major step in reversing the curse. Congrats to the Red Sox and their fans. 

Tim Madden has created podcast buttons for people to use.  

KGW, a television station in Portland, Oregon, has RSS feeds. 

And KPTV, the Fox affiliate in Portland also has RSS feeds. Amazing. 

WAGM, a television station in Presque Isle, Maine, has an RSS feed. 

Henry Earl is jail. How do I know? His RSS feed says so. 

MPR has a podcast feed of Jon Gordon's Future Tense. Bing! 

Marc Canter: "...I hated the idea of buying your way onto a panel." 

New feature: If you do a search on the Baltimore Sun website, you'll see a beautiful white-on-orange XML icon providing the search results in RSS. Subscribe to the feed to peform the search every time your aggregator updates. Don't you wish Google did this? 

Tonight is the season premiere of The West Wing, and the previews look good, but I won't be watching it. Game 7 of the ALCS is on at the same time, but I won't be watching that either. There's a political bloggers meetup at Pike Place Market tonight. I'll be drinking beer wondering what I'm missing as the Red Sox put the Yankees in the history books as the first team to ever lose a series after going up 3-0. And if you believe that, you don't know the Red Sox.  

NY Times: "The Yankees are one loss from sinking to an inglorious place in baseball history. Their fans beat them to it last night." 

EVP: Kerry 291, Bush 247. Deee-lish! 

Bob Stepno explains podcasting. 

Yesterday I tried an experiment, and included an enclosure that points to a QuickTime movie, to see what would happen. Mark Woods has a report. iTunes sort-of understands QuickTime, but iPods do not. 

Jeff Walsh writes, re Band of Citizens: "A lot of multimedia pros got together to create a positive site focusing on why they feel Kerry is the best candidate. The best thing is that anyone can send in a video, and it will appear on the site, just has to be positive about why someone is voting for Kerry, no Bush-bashing allowed."