Year: 2006

Notes for 9/24/2006

Time for my weekly notes again!

  • We’re launching tonite! Yay!
  • Congratulations Chu and Michelle on your engagement! Here are some photos from our small get together the other day.
  • Andrea and Felicia are in London. They are travelling Europe for a month. I’m not jealous. No really.
  • Apple to trademark the word podcast? What a bunch of morons. I wonder if their PR department will do some damage control this week.
  • What a cool way to visualize the blogosphere!
  • I got a postcard in the mail from the fine folks producing the Jackass 2 movie a couple weeks ago. They wanted to know my shoe size, so I emailed it to them. And to my surprise, they sent me Jackass 2 shoes! Coolest swag ever! You can see them here.

Quick Update!

Wow, long time no post! I’ve been pretty busy getting Podcast Spot ready for launch, among other things, so my apologies. Things should return to normal on Monday. Though I might get around to posting some stuff later tonight or tomorrow.

You know the saying, “you learn something new every day”? Well it’s true. And over the last few days in particular, I have learned that Safari is an incredibly buggy browser.

Wired News gets Odeo all wrong

Post ImageI think the staff at Wired News must have missed the memo about Odeo. In a list of Web 2.0 Winners and Losers published today, they included Odeo on the winners list. They praised the service, saying that Odeo “breezed in and de-mystified the podcast.” Huh, is that really what happened?

Not according to Odeo co-founder Evan Williams, who when giving a talk last week said Odeo failed for five main reasons:

  • “Trying to build too much”
  • “Not building for people like ourselves”
  • “Not adjusting fast enough”
  • “Raising too much money too early”
  • “Not listening to my gut”

De-mystified the podcast? That would explain why the vast majority of the population doesn’t know what a podcast is. They certainly know what MySpace or YouTube is though, yet MySpace appears on Wired’s losers list.

In some ways, the list that was voted on by Wired News readers is much more accurate – Odeo doesn’t appear on either list. This is the wisdom of the crowd at work! I don’t think they can be described as winners or losers yet, because Odeo seems to be finding their way still. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, to wait and see if they can turn it around.

The funniest part of the Wired article is this:

In the interest of brevity, I’ve chosen five sites from each category. The web services industry certainly has more than five winners and five losers, so we’ve only highlighted the exemplars.

I’m not exactly sure what reporter Michael Calore considers the definition of “exemplary” to be, but I am quite certain it’s different from my definition. And probably different than the dictionary’s definition too. The first five that came to mind for me certainly didn’t include Writely or Odeo (mine would be Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, MySpace, and digg).

Read: Wired News

White and Nerdy

Post ImageWeird Al has done it again! If you haven’t seen the video for his new song, “White and Nerdy”, you must. It’s really that good! Well as long as you understand the jokes I suppose. You can watch it on YouTube.

Most of Weird Al’s stuff makes me laugh, but this one especially. I’m definitely not a trekkie or anything, but I still think he covered all the “nerd” bases, except possibly being a cultish Mac lover. Where was that one Al? Other than that, great song and video 🙂

Read: YouTube

Podcasting Professor Has Website Suspended

Post ImagePodcasting and education – I think it’s only a matter of time, once the issues that make educational institutions uneasy are worked out. And to be sure, educators are already experimenting with podcasting, like communication and technology professor Robert Schrag. The problem is that he decided to charge for his podcasts, and NC State University didn’t like that too much (via Podcasting News):

Schrag had made his lectures available to students and the general public online for a fee of $2.50. The University questioned whether this practice was ethical, referring to the inconsistencies in opinion concerning intellectual property and decided to ask Schrag to suspend the Web site until copyright-issue clarifications could be made.

Besides wanting to make a small profit, I don’t know why Schrag was charging for his podcast. I highly doubt he gave the money to the university to cover his (probably very small) bandwidth costs. Interestingly enough, when he asked his class about the situation, only four of them said the podcasts should be free, and no one said the site should have been taken down.

This situation brings up a bunch of questions. As a paying student, is recording what the professor says for my own consumption any different than frantically trying to write everything down? Does the university own the content that the professor delivers, or does the professor himself/herself retain ownership? Why should I as a student have to pay extra to get an audio file of the lecture?

And perhaps most important of all, is podcasting just something universities need to embrace in order to keep up with the times? I think it might be, kind of like replacing blackboards with whiteboards or overhead projectors with digital projectors and computers. Schrag has the right idea:

“I’m not sorry I made the choice and I hope I can get back to giving the information,” Schrag said.

After all, isn’t the primary function of a university to disseminate information? We call it teaching or learning, but really, a university is just a fancy way to spread information and knowledge to the population. Podcasting then should be viewed by universities as just another tool to help them spread information.

Read: Technician Online

NewsGator Desktop Sync Beta

Post ImageToday I started using a new aggregator for my web feeds. Well, sort of. I downloaded and installed the beta of NewsGator’s Desktop Sync, and now I can read all of my feeds inside IE7 RC1. It’s beautiful! Here’s the details on Desktop Sync:

Desktop Sync is a system tray application that keeps your feeds, folders and read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. This means that any application that uses the Windows RSS Platform will be automatically synchronized with your NewsGator Online account!

Yeah baby! That’s what I’m talking about!

The product is the evolution of a demo that NewsGator head honcho Greg Reinacker did back at Microsoft’s MIX06 conference.

I have now used NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox (formerly Outlook Edition), FeedDemon and Desktop Sync. As you can see, having the synchronization story that NewsGator provides is incredibly important. Of them all, I think I like Desktop Sync the best. It allows me to read my web feeds in IE7, which means I can take advantage of everything I have inside my browser like favelets and other tools, but without losing the sync capabilities of NewsGator Online.

The application seems really solid for a beta, give it a try!

Read: NewsGator

Apple Podcasting Site Broken!

Post ImageThe new nanos are great, Apple still rules digitial music with the iPod and all that, but they’ve broken podcasting. Well, they’ve broken their own podcasting site anyway. I went to look at the iTunes Podcasting spec, and noticed that the page can no longer be found! Seems the redesign for the new stuff broke the website. Well done Apple!

And it’s a shame too, because http://www.apple.com/podcasting was such a nice URL, wouldn’t you say?

A search for podcasting on the support site only gives the Podcasting FAQ. And the link on that page to the podcasting page remains broken. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue. You can see cached versions of the podcasting page and the tech specs.

Maybe they are going to be updating the spec?

Notes for 9/17/2006

Damn it’s cold outside! Here are my weekly notes:

  • Winter is definitely on the way. There’s too much yellow outside already!
  • Podcast Spot is looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself! It will be public late this week if all goes according to plan. Brad Gibson was kind enough to mention Podcast Spot in his latest Bradcast. Thanks Brad and welcome back to the podosphere!
  • Like Kyle, I attended the first Edmonton on Rails meeting on Thursday. Here’s a photo of our small get together.
  • Here in the best province in Canada (you know it’s true) we’ve experienced a 43% rise in GDP between 2002 and 2005. “That puts Alberta’s growth rate not far behind that of China’s.” Pretty crazy! China is of course far and away the fastest growing large economy in the world.
  • Cold weather means hockey! As I write this, the Oilers are beating Phoenix 3-0 at the start of the third period in tonight’s first pre-season game. They’ve got Torres, Peterson and Lupul on a line together.
  • It seems everyone is talking about the new iPod Nanos, which I admit, are pretty cool. Even more cool is that they have really good recording capabilities now!
  • You can find some very interesting stuff in China. Like this building, designed to look like a cell, complete with mitochondria and everything. Kinda creepy, no?

Great Canadian Inventions

Post ImageAs usual (well when he decides to post anyway), Dickson has an interesting post up on his blog, this time about the CBC’s poll of the greatest Canadian inventions. There are 50 different inventions on the list, and CBC wants you to cast your vote. A special two-hour show featuring the inventions and a bunch of famous Canadians will air on January 3rd, 2007.

Here are my top ten picks (in no particular order):

  • Bloody Ceasar – Seriously, where would we be without this fine drink?
  • Canadarm – Showing them how it’s done in Space, since 1975.
  • Zipper – It’s the one thing I can properly operate after all those Caesars!
  • Poutine – When made right, super yummy.
  • Electron Microscope – Don’t forget about the small stuff!
  • Snowblower – Nothing says Canadian like a huge machine to move the fluffy white stuff around.
  • Insulin – A very worthy invention. Until the next major breakthrough renders it obsolete.
  • Wonderbra – I feel very proud to be Canadian right now.
  • Instant Replay – Though less important now thanks to TiVo and other PVRs, this is still a pretty cool invention.
  • Java Programming Language – Java is important to me for two reasons: it’s initial success partially led to the creation of .NET, and it’s continued bloat/politics/other problems clearly demonstrate why .NET is so much better now 😉

There’s some really interesting inventions on the list, some really old, and some more modern. It will be interesting to see how they are compared on the show.

What are your favorites?

Read: CBC

Lonelygirl15 dances with Tucker Carlson!

Post ImageI was just watching The Tonight Show, and Jay Leno did a segment called “videos we found on YouTube”. Of course, he showed one of lonelygirl15’s videos (not sure who I am talking about? read this NYTimes article…it will bring you up to speed). And right after that, she came out on to the stage! She basically confessed everything we already knew (well if you have read the article linked above anyway). Then she said she wasn’t so lonely anymore, and Tucker Carlson (who Jay had made fun of earlier for getting kicked off “Dancing with the stars”) came on stage and they danced! It was pretty funny. Even though I really don’t like Tucker Carlson.

Lonelygirl15 is actually aspiring actress Jessica Rose (and she’s 19, not 15). Apparently she’s pretty amazed with the attention she is getting. There’s lots of commenters out there who just keep calling her “fake” and are angry that they were led on. I say, does it matter? Her and her three buddies have done something pretty amazing! I can’t wait to see what else is created now that they have “broken new ground” in a sense. You can’t be mad at them for being creative!

Here is lonelygirl15’s page on YouTube. I can’t seem to find a clip from tonight’s show, but by the time you read this, it’ll probably be up on YouTube somewhere.