It’s one of those best-kept secrets, but in my spare time — and to pay some bills — I’m still writing a column for The Web Host Industry Review. Here’s my column on BitTorrent hosting in the March issue. If you’re interested in the web-hosting world, this is a great site and they’re now publishing a very nice (and free) hard-copy edition.

(Hear the MP3, which contains far more detail.)

New Shows

• Real-Time Filmmaking on OS X (rated 3.4)
• Mark Andressen and Dan Rosenzweig at Web 2.0 (3.4)
• Music is a Platform at Web 2.0 (3.5)
• Lawrence Lessig – The Comedy of the Commons (4.2 — Wow!)
• Simon Singh on Tech Nation (too late for rating)
• Brian Greene on Tech Nation (too late for rating)
• Geolocation: The Killer Map from Web 2.0 (too late for rating)
• And one of my favorite shows from the archives: Rick Chapman — In Search of Stupidity

Other Stuff

• IT Conversastions in The Boston Globe
• The Creative Commons Sampling License
• Podcast Alley: Self-Destructing or Is There Hope?
• My Favorite Podcasts
• A 200GB Day for IT Conversations
• Social Software for IT Conversations
• Personal Program Queues — Do you know about them?

A few minutes ago I was sitting here in the studio, taking a break, and listening to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” on NPR. I had the FM tuner playing through the studio monitors when the phone rang. My immediate reaction was to look for the Pause button. TiVo and podcasting: I’m converted.

My wife’s 10-year-old PC is dying again, and I’m tired of resuscitating it. The solution? She gets my little iBook G4 and I get a new 15″ PowerBook. That seems only fair, doesn’t it? But at the same time, I’ve decided to do what thousands before me have done: I”m moving my life (email, IM, word processing, etc.) from Windows to OS X. It’s both exciting and frightenting for a guy who’s lived on a PC for nearly 20 years and knows virtually nothing about Macintoshes. I’ve mostly used the iBook to make sure IT Conversations works okay for Mac owners, but when I took it on vacation recently, I decided to make the change.

What recources exist to help people with this migration? Any tips? Web sites? Books? And what are the must-have utilities and other apps on the Mac? So far, I’ve found the following:

• Launch Bar
• Mac Stumbler
• BBEdit

I get a lot of email from listeners who would like to have a way to discuss IT Conversations programs after they’ve heard them — something more than our trackbacks, particularly since most listeners don’t have their own weblogs. So what tool(s) would work best?

About 18 months ago I installed one of those discussion-forum packages and linked it to the database. There was one discussion-forum ‘topic’ for each program. But after a few months, there was virtually no traffic to the forum and a whole lotta spam. Of course there weren’t many IT Conversations listeners in those days.

Should we just create a ‘comments’ feature? Should we try the discussion-forum idea again? A wiki? A blog with comments? Something else I’m just not thinking of at the moment?

Wednesday was the first day IT Conversations delivered more than 200GB of audio files in one day. Yes, if sustained, that would be 6.0 terrabytes for a month. Thank you Limelight Networks for your awesome worldwide content-delivery network. About 85% of the ITC traffic goes through Limelight. The rest comes off servers somewhere in Texas.

I had a nice long chat with Chris McIntyre on the phone today. He really wants to do the right thing and he’s very open to advice from podcasters and the listening community. I pitched the idea of a ratings system like Amazon, Netflix or IT Conversations, but as he pointed out, that doesn’t work for his site. Chris can’t just publish an ‘average’ rating for each podcast, even with some minimum number of votes required. Why? Because a podcast with five votes of “five stars” each, would then be rated higher than one with one thousand five-star votes and just one four-star vote. It’s not a problem for IT Conversations and these other sites because ‘ranking’ isn’t as important as the how-good-is-it rating for each item.

For that matter, I wonder if Chris’ problem is only from his Top- lists. Maybe there’s a way he can provide almost as much value without the Top-10 and Top-50 lists and not have to spend all his time messing with this stuff.

What the podcasting world really needs is the equivalent of an Arbitron or Nielsen service. Can Chris build it? Will someone else figure out how to do it? Will it be a part of Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry’s Attention.xml concept?

People often (well, once in a while) ask me, “Doug, what podcasts do *you* listen to?” I was going to post my entire iPodder list, but I realized that would be misleading, since I listen to many podcasts just to keep up with the podcasting biz rather than because I enjoy them. So here’s the list (in no particular order) of the podcasts I actually listen to and enjoy.

• Coverville [feed]
• Reel Reviews [feed]
• Evil Genius Chronicles [feed]
• The Daily Source Code [feed]
• WGBH Morning Stories [feed]
• The Podcast Brothers [feed]

As others (including Dave Slusher and Michael Geoghegan) have blogged, Chris McIntyre’s Podcast Alley site is on a path towards self destruction. It began as a fun and amusing site within the podcasting community, but the recent spate of coverage in the mainstream press has elevated Podcast Alley to a position of supposed authority.

A few podcasters asked their listeners, somewhat innocently, to go to Podcast Alley to vote for them. Seeing that IT Conversations was down in the #29 spot (and knowing our shows were far more popular than our rating would suggest) I asked our listeners to vote for us. Hey…it was nothing more than honest campaigning.

But somewhere along the line, two things happed. From what I’ve been told, in order to make the system “fairer” to new podcasts, Podcast Alley allowed one vote per person per day, and some sites encouraged their supporters to “vote early, vote often.” And then some podcasters whom I would refer to as less than scrupulous, encouraged their listeners to actually cast negative votes against other podcasts, even for podcasts they’d never listened to.

So why am I wasting so many bytes on what appears to be so trivial? It’s because that due to that major-media coverage, Podcast Alley has been granted a franchise. Lacking any alternative, journalists and others are turning to Podcast Alley as an authority of podcast popularity. It’s the lazy thing for a reporter to do, and they can cover their butts by writing loophole copy such as, “According to web site Podcast Alley…” rather than survey users for themselves.

There’s only one solution, and that’s for Chris McIntyre to solve the problem. Don’t allow more than one vote (total) per person, and log the verified email and IP addresses. That won’t stop hardcore hackers, but if you don’t do something, Chris, the franchise you’ve been handled will slip through your fingers.