I need some advice: I want to travel with my iBook instead of a Windows-based notebook. I need two programs, which I either have on my OS X iBook and don’t know are there — I’m new to Macs — or I have to download or buy.

• An HTML editor. I’m using some old rev of Dreamweaver on the PC to maintain IT Conversations, so I could buy Dreamweaver for the Mac, or I could switch to something like BBEdit, which I’ve never used but hear is good. (I do most of my editing in HTML mode, so I can live without GUI-based coding but I need an easy-preview capability.)
• A GUI-based FTP client. This might already be on my disk, but where?

Scott Loftesness wonders about the podcasting phenomenon and suggests, “I can see IT professionals deciding its worthwhile for them to listen to his podcasts at work — not at home, not in the car or the airplane but in the office.”

My sense (anecdotally) is that more IT Conversations fans listen during their commutes or while exercising than at work. I should probably add this to my survey questions.

As for who’s going to become the Arbitron of podcasting, I’d say that so far it’s the blogosphere and through analysis of links first by Google, then Technorati.

As with radio, podcatching (listening) is anonymous. But unlike radio, it’s not cost effective to penetrate the anonymity of the listenership through sampling. The podcast audience is miles wide but very thin. By virtue of the scarcity of spectrum, the radio and TV listener pools are smaller and deeper, making them more economical to sample using Arbitron-like methods.

The client-side podcast-authoring tools are starting to appear. I just watched a cool video demo of one called MixCast Live developed by James Prudente. I haven’t downloaded a demo, but it looks like a pretty nice app for Windows given the limitations of the Windows Mixer.

(Hear the MP3 version.)

During the past week on IT Conversations:

New Programs

• Bill Gross announces his new search-engine company, snap, at the Web 2.0 Conference.
• The Gillmor Gang becomes The Gillmor Gaggle as nine of the world’s experts in digital identity discuss the technologies. It may start slow, but stick with this one through the second half when Dave Winer and Kim Cameron debate Microsoft’s past and future DID strategies.
• Johanna Rothman, an expert in project management, is interviewed by Roy Osherove.
• Jerry Fiddler, the founder of Wind River, offers a glimpse to his vision of the future and how this “world system” will evolve through the convergence of multiple technologies resulting in one, giant interoperable system. Part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series.
• James P. Hogan and host Dave Slusher discuss how the film 2001 started Hogan on a career as an author, on his relationship with Marvin Minsky and the world of artificial intelligence, on writing about space and space travel, whether there is a feedback loop between scientists and science fiction writers, the post-scarcity economics of distributing entertainment online and much more.
• From Accelerating Change 2004, Gee Rittenhouse, the VP of Wireless Research for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs presents the evolution from 2G to 3G standards, the migration from circuit to packet applications, the procession of voice to data, and the industry incorporating new access technologies such as WiFi and WiMAX. All of this is occuring in a market place where voice subscriber penatration levels in many parts of the world are saturating and there is incredible pressure to reduce network capital and operating costs.
• This week Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker, the chair of The Webby Awards and co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts andSciences. They talk about trends and counter-trends on the World Wide Web.
• Moira also speaks with journalist Douglas Mulhall. His new book The Calcium Bomb deals with the controversial subject of nanobacteria.
• And in the BioTech Nation segment, Dame Julia Polak shares her experience as one of Britain’s longest surviving heart/lung transplant recipients, and how it has affected her scientific research in tissue engineering.

Other News

• iPodder.org: All of the IT Conversations RSS feeds now appear within a special category in this OPML-based directory of Podcasts.
• MP3 Stereo: There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about the overhead for stereo in MP3s. Don’t believe it! Check out my essay on MP3 stereo on the IT Conversations wiki.
• Phone-In Comments: Got comments about IT Conversations or a particular program? Call our voicemail line at 206.202.TALK (206.202.8255). I may put your comments into a future program.
• Where’s My Email? If you subscribe to IT Conversations announcements by email, you may have noticed how empty your inbox is this week. With more than one new program per day, some people complained of receiving too many announcements. So this is my experiment of batching the announcements for a full week together into a single message. Let me know which you like better. Comments on the blog, email to doug@itconversations.com, or call the comment line at 206.202.TALK.

Happy New Year, and thanks for listening.

This has been floating around the ‘Net for a long time, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. I laughed out loud when I read it again, so I thought you might enjoy it.

Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times! as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

I had a nice chat earlier today with Eli Ingraham, the director of the WGBH Forum Network, an online archive of live an on-demand lectures given by Boston’s leading academic and cultural institutions.

WGBH Forum has over 600 lectues in their archive and are in the process of rolling the project out nationally with other public broadcasting stations who will curate local content in their cities and contribute it to a central national archive, which WGBH ‘controls.’ So far their audio and video are only available for streaming (not download) and only in RealNetworks formats. They started RSS feeds in November and are now in the process of clearing rights to podcast some of the material.

The movement towards free and worldwide access to great presentations continues!

Russell Beattie blogged:

I drove down to work this morning and listened to Adam Curry on my new MuVo and was quite entertained for most of the ride down (he’s actually a great morning DJ) and then coming back I listened to most of Jerry Fiddler’s talk over at IT Conversations. WOW! What a difference it made to my hour long commute! I almost didn’t want to get out of the car tonight. No searching for a station, no frustration in the topics that NPR is talking about tonight and though I love her dearly, no Terri Gross. Awesome!

Russ’ post is a great explanation of the Podcatching experience.

I’ve collected just a fraction of the kudos for IT Conversations, but it’s nice to hear that Russ has caught the Podcasting bug.