Monday, December 20, 2004

7:24PM: Arrived at hotel in SF. Wiped out. 

I've only been in SF for a few hours and I already have an interesting rumor to spread. It turns out the nextgen iPod will hook up to satellite radio, for podcasting-like features, out of the box, from Apple. The rumor has it that this pod will be announced at MacWorld Expo, next month. Maybe it'll be called the xPod? 

The official BloggerCon audio streams are available from Stanford. We're going to have to convert these to MP3 of course. 

11:53AM: Checking email in Redding Starbucks. 

The story of Podcasting in a nutshell: "There's the reason why a radio neophyte like me can bust down walls in radio, and a software dabbler like Adam can get tired of waiting for developers to party with him and go ahead and do his own thing (and invent a new category of software in doing so). That's the story of podcasting." 

News.Com: "Downhill Battle, a file-sharing activist group from Worcester, Mass., has launched an Internet campaign to send lumps of coal to the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America." 

So much for high-speed Inkernet. I tried downloading today's DSC, no luck. 8K per sec. I'd be here till tomorrow. BTW, curse you Dawn. Not only have you reprogrammed my use of "Internet" but now every time I look at a chair I wonder if it's all assy. Somehow I got through 49+ years without that concept.  

Everyone's giving Scoble shit over his latest letter to Bill Gates. I think it was Robert Heinlein who said you should pay attention when everyone is screaming at or about one person. Usually that person has a pretty good idea. Most ordinary people want everything to stay constant. Scoble is a revolutionary. That's why I like him.  

Simon Waldman on Jon Udell's latest on RSS.  

Reminder: Late last night I posted a podcast, first in a while. 

Infoworld: Security hole found in Google desktop search. 

Adam continues to explore OPML programming.  

Steve Garfield sent a pointer to a Boston Globe article that credits me for writing the first iPodder. I suppose there's a way to twist it up so that's true, but not really. The irony is that Adam, who is 15 percent programmer, and 85 percent podcaster wrote the first iPodder. "Users and developers party together." The press is going for the humdrum hohum story (as usual) when there's something much more exciting actually happening. It's our job to continue to capture this, if not to convey it. We've got the means to tell the real story now, so it doesn't bother me so much that they routinely make up the facts to suit their idea of what should be true.  

Which reminds me. Several people sent me the full text of the Time articles about blogging for the Person of the Year issue. The gist of it is, now that bloggers have taken down Dan Rather, they respect bloggers. As Nero Wolfe used to say: Pfui. Would you respect the telephone only when it had been used to take down a reporter? It's just like those silly Wolf Blitzer interviews where he repeatedly asks the same dumb question hoping to get someone to trip up and admit that they changed their mind or that their shit actually smells pretty bad. It's just like the way they deleted Howard Dean's campaign because he got enthusiastic at a campaign rally. Come on you guys are imposters, admit it.  

John Robb asks a question that's been on my mind too. At some point Microsoft is going to re-staff the IE team in response to Firefox. When they do it, how will they explain the seven years during which they invested nothing in the user experience of the browser? 

Robert Scoble asks Bill Gates if they can do a portable music player that's better than the iPod. Yes, of course they can. The iPod is the best player today, but it's user interface is still totally klunky. It's impossible to use while driving, in fact it's impossible to use while walking. If I want to play something else it's a multi-step error-prone process. There has to be a better way. BTW, Phillip Torrone (Engadget) and I sketched out a design for an iPod, not sure if he's published it yet.