Friday, June 17, 2005

Chicago Business: Motorola to start iRadio pilot. 

BadApple is an plug-in that lets you listen to podcasts in iTunes. Thanks to Xeni for the link.  

Rogers reports on Bill Clinton's interest in being Ms Clinton's Veep. 

The Times of London supports RSS. 

Steve Gillmor is in Tokyo with Woz. 

Rebecca MacKinnon set up an experimental blog on MSN/China, using all the prohibited words, to see what would happen. 

WNYC: "With a population that is 70 percent under age 25 (and a voting age of 15), Iran’s younger voters will play a big role in elections there on Friday. Many of them are turning to blogs to avoid the mullahs’ stifling grip on public discourse." 

BBC: "Live performances of Beethoven's first five symphonies, broadcast as part of The Beethoven Experience on BBC Radio 3, have amassed an incredible 657,399 download requests during a week long trial." 

Robert Scoble got my attention with this post about a two-man skunkworks-style project at Microsoft. "We have a philosphy that advertising shouldn't bug users." BTW, he lost his cell phone, so now when I want to ring him up I have to call his desk phone at Microsoft. He's been there over two years, they still haven't learned how to pronounce his last name.  

Interesting, you could almost do a blog in this format.  

Programming in Starbucks 

We got over the hump, it was a bit of a panic at first, but I had made a change on the server at 5AM yesterday and didn't test it properly, and when the 25 new users showed up early on the evening of the 16th, well, that's the condition that failed. And my Internet access at home has been really flaky during the day, so it was down when we hit the problem, so I had to quickly drive to Starbucks to get online.

The good news is that I am actually able to get work done this way, so when I it the road again on July 1, I will be able to continue to move forward on this software, by programming in hotel rooms, Starbucks, public libraries, etc. Internet access is really starting to get ubiquitous.

Reports from the field 

As I announced, we focused on people who are maintaining nodes in the distributed podcasting community directory in our current round of testing. Nick Starr who maintains the AudioBlogs category has already managed a successful conversion. For the most, people were editing their OPML by hand, now that they have an editor whose native format is OPML, the job gets easier and the quality of the output goes up.

I tend to cackle while I work at my computer. Nothing earth-shaking here. This is about as important as the observation that I'm more popular than Jesus. Sorry James, no smiley.