Thursday, July 27, 2006

A movie snapshot of Steve Wozniak at AlwaysOn. 

A movie snapshot of Paul Saffo's panel at AlwaysOn.  

Amyloo is maintaining a reading list of bloggers blogging BlogHer. 

Here's a movie of a panel. It's been so long since I've sat through one of these things. I keep thinking of things I'd like to add, or questions I'd like to hear them address. No way to do that. Basically they're all ads for companies. I assume they pay for the right to be part of the panel.  

Checking in live from AlwaysOn in Palo Alto. I was able to talk my way in w/o paying the money. Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm is talking now. The guy talks in a drone, and he's going to be on for 1/2 hour. Oy I can tell this is going to be hard work. The wifi here is awesomely fastttt. I uploaded the 2.9MB movie in a few seconds.  

They project the IRC discussion on the screen. It's off on the side, no one is watching it. 

From yesterday's Rocketboom, catsthatlooklikehitler.com. 

New header graphic. Milvia St in Berkeley. 

Nathan Myhrvold 

Podcast directory update 

I spent the first few days of the week working on static rendering for the podcast directory, and I almost had it done when I found a performance bug in the dynamic version, and now its running very smoothly, and I don't need the static rendering. Why does it always work this way?

So now I'm ready for the next step. Remember, I want to go slow on the organization of the directory, and make decisions I'm reasonably confident in, because the cost of making a bad decision is either: 1. Living with it, or 2. Linkrot.

I'm confident that a separate top-level section for mainstream media podcasts is a good idea. A bunch of news organizations are putting real effort in creating useful news, science, business and lifestyle podcasts.

There also appears to be a strong interest in geographic-based sub-directories, although I personally don't share the interest. Maybe at a micro level, it might be interesting to have a list of podcasts actively produced in, and about a smallish city, like Berkeley for example, because it could foster a community, provide a backbone for meetups. Or it could go the other way, it could be an activity for a group that already exists. An OPML directory of Berkman Center podcasts would be interesting. But a directory of podcasts from Holland or Canada, two hugely large and diverse places, seems an exercise without much purpose. However, because there is significant support for geography-based lists, I made a second top-level section for them.

I left copies in the New Branches section because I've added redirects. For example, if you click on the old link to CNN podcasts, it takes you to the new location. And the redirect nodes, while they are in the OPML, are not displayed in the directory rendering. (This is obviously technical stuff, mentioned here for people who are following OPML technology. I'll have to write this up in more detail, later.)

Also I see a little bit of commercialism in the directories. I'm not going to point to anyone, because I think it's innocent, but it's gotta go. If you find yourself wanting to promote one of your own sites in your directory, don't do it. I'm going to wait a few days, hopefully the commercialism will go away, if not, the directories that are doing it will be removed.

Let's fork now and stay friends 

As you might imagine this has spawned a vigorous discussion on the podcast-directory mail list. The usual stuff, which will get resolved, imho, the usual way -- by forking.

So let's fork now and stay friends.

The only way to have fun is to have lots of ways of organizing podcasts. In the early days of blogging, when I said that there would be a millions blogs, there were a lot of snickers. It was an audacious idea, but today there are millions. (I actually said billions, not millions.)

There will be millions of lists of favorite podcasts, organized in all the ways you can imagine. There's no point arguing about how The One True Podcast Directory For All Time will be organized, because it's something that can't last more than a nano-second before it gets forked.

So let's fork now and stay friends.