I’m at the Duke University Podcasting Symposium this week, and according to some sources, the event will be streamed live. I’m not convinced that’s true, but you might want to check it out for yourself. Go to http://isis.duke.edu/events/podcasting/casts.html. The event is 9/27 (8:30am-4:50pm Eastern) and 9/28 9:45am-3:pm). My session is one of the first, Tuesday, 9:15am010:35am Eastern.

At the very least, you’ll be able to get the timeshifted podcast edition.

Update: I’ve updated the above URL. Apparently you couldn’t get to the streaming servers on Tuesday from outside of Duke’s firewalls. We’ve been told this has been corrected and that you should now be able to listen.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

News and Housekeeping

• Updates: The Way You Like ‘Em. Did you know that there are three ways you can receive these weekly announcements? This is the blog version, but you can also subscribe to email announcements, the IT Conversations ‘Everything’ or ‘Info-Only’ RSS feeds, or listen to the audio version.

Upcoming Events

• EuroOSCON. O’Reilly Media’s EuroOSCON is 17-20 October in Amsterdam, and through our contacts there, we’ve arranged for a 25% discount. Go to the URL below and use the code "euos05itc."
• Pop!Tech 2005. And our most popular of all events from last year, Pop!Tech, will be held again this year in Camden, Maine, October 16-19. Talk about rubbing elbows with some of the most influential people on the planet — this is the place to be.

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Suffragette Journalists at BlogHer 2005 (3.0). The discussion about whether bloggers are journalists is one that inspires heated opinions. In this conversation from BlogHer, several blogger/journalists discuss the relationship between blogging and so-called traditional journalism. Moderator Lisa Stone asks Anastasia Goodstein, Chris Nolan and Evelyn Rodriguez to share their experiences of the relationship between independent online publishing and traditional media.
• Jakob Nielsen on Larry’s World (3.1) Designing websites is different from traditional media such as print and television. In spite of the usability guidelines being fairly well known, some of the common mistakes recur even on popular sites. Designers need to be careful and follow these guidelines to improve a website’s interface. Web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen speaks with Larry Magid about designing websites that capture and sustain the user’s attention.
• Alan Ganek – Autonomic Computing Systems (3.4) In a new collaborative business climate, there need to be connections between technologies and between people. IBM is creating "autonomic computing systems" and IBM Vice President Alan Ganek discusses how to develop an ecosystem of technologies and relationships to support collaboration between applications and corporations. In this talk from Supernova 2005, learn about how to ensure that your company and its applications are ready to be part of something bigger.
• John Warfield Simpson (3.5) Dr. Moira Gunn spoke with John Warfield Simpson, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Natural Resources, Ohio State University, and the audhor of "Dam! — Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park." He related the technical — and political — tale which enabled the tiny city of San Francisco to dam an entire mountain valley some 200 miles away, a sister valley to the famous Yosemite — all in the name of progress.
• David Bornstein on Globeshakers (3.6) David Bornstein is a leading expert in the global rise of "social entrepreneurism." In this program, host Tim Zak asks how we would even know a social entrepreneur if we saw one on the street. More important, why should we even care? Who invests in social enterprise and what is at stake for our world if we don’t?
• James Powell (3.7) Moira Gunn also interviewed James Powell, Executive Director, National Physical Science Consortium, and the author of "Grand Canyon — Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle." He tells us about the controversy around the beginnings of the Grand Canyon, and the present and future of its now-aging Glen Canyon dam.
• Anders Zachrisson (3.8) And on Biotech Nation, Moira spoke with Anders Zachrisson, Senior Vice President, BioGaia, about the scientific studies testing "pro-biotics." He tells us about the scientific studies looking at probiotics, which are increasing in popularity today from Scandinavia to Asia.
• Tim O’Reilly – The Where 2.0 Application (3.8) The increasing availability of free map and imagery data and services comes at a time when GPS and other location sensors are becoming ubiquitous. This has brought geospatial applications programming within reach of a growing number of developers and the results, exciting in themselves, point the way to a fully network-enabled future. Tim O’Reilly’s talk identifies trends in mobile and location-based applications, while drawing parallels with other software markets.

 

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is a great program from our archives:

• A Dinner Conversation with Mark Cuban (3.7) From last year’s Web 2.0 Conference: After Mark Cuban made a billion or so selling his company to Yahoo! during the height of the Web 1.0 craze, he decided to buy a basketball team. Fortunately, he bought the Mavericks, a team whose name suits his style: brash, out there, and unconventional. Now he’s back in the media business with HDNet.

Don’t miss this year’s Web 2.0, October 5-7 in San Francisco.

Thanks to Podscope, we’ve added audio search to the IT Conversations archives. Check it out on the top of the left-hand column on any IT Conversations web page.

In next week’s Business Week (9/26/05) IT Conversations is listed as one of three Editor’s Picks for Best of the Web (Podcast). Cool!

If you really want to help kick-start our new project, ask your lawer friends if they or someone they know would be willing to help with our 501(c)3 not-for-profit status filing here in California. I’ve put this off for too long, and it’s now going to be something that slows our progress. I had a few “sure, I’d like to do that for you” promises, but none of them panned out.

(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

News and Housekeeping

• Updates: The Way You Like ‘Em. Did you know that there are three ways you can receive these weekly announcements? This is the blog version, but you can also subscribe to email announcements, the IT Conversations ‘Everything’ or ‘Info-Only’ RSS feeds, or listen to the audio version.

Upcoming Events

• EuroOSCON. O’Reilly Media’s EuroOSCON is 17-20 October in Amsterdam, and through our contacts there, we’ve arranged for a 25% discount. Go to the URL below and use the code "euos05itc."
• Pop!Tech 2005. And our most popular of all events from last year, Pop!Tech, will be held again this year in Camden, Maine, October 16-19. Talk about rubbing elbows with some of the most influential people on the planet — this is the place to be.

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Stephen Lawler – Microsoft Virtual Earth (rated 2.5by IT Conversations listeners). Wouldn’t it be great if you could get information about the nearest and best restaurants and cafes when you find yourself in a new locality? It would be useful, too, if advertisers could use location-based services to target potential customers more accurately. Microsoft Virtual Earth provides APIs to do both of these things – and more. In this lively presentation, Stephen Lawler of Microsoft Corp. introduces us to the potential of MSN Virtual Earth.
• Daniel Liebowitz (2.6). On Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn intereviewed Dr. Daniel Liebowitz, author of "The Last Expedition: Stanley’s Mad Journey through the Congo." He talks about Henry Stanley, famous for his line "Dr. Livingston, I presume," and relates the story of Stanley’s Last and Questionable Expedition to Africa, what he calls his Mad Journey through the Congo.
• Marc Benioff at Supernova (2.9). Salesforce.com is well-known for its hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service, and its on-demand customer service offering, Supportforce.com. But Salesforce.com has set its sights higher than hosted CRM and Customer Service for small companies. In this conversation with Supernova host Kevin Werbach, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff outlines the company’s larger strategy.
• Lisa Williams and Ryanne Hodson at BlogHer 2005 (3.0). The time is right to explore your own Internet TV or radio station. Get ready to reach out to the world through podcasting and video blogging. Listen to Lisa Williams and Ryanne Hodson discussing "Get Your Word Out: Audio/Video-casting" at the BlogHer 2005 conference.
• George Gilder on Larry’s World (3.0). "Many people still have this nostalgic belief that China somehow continues to be Communist, when in fact, in their constitution in 2003 they incorporated a provision upholding the sanctity of private property." Gilder believes that China has become a consumer country by building 60 nuclear plants. The Chinese government uses science and technology in a realistic way because China is run by engineers, not lawyers. This is just one of the controversial subjects touched on by Magid and Gilder in this interview.
• Kim Polese – Do-It-Yourself IT (3.3). How is the open-source software world slowly moving from do-it-yourself (DIY) to do-it-together (DIT)? Which companies have identified the challenge, and why is testing a barrier to the growth of the software industry? Kim Polese answers these questions and talks about her new startup, SpikeSource, in this presentation from OSCON 2005.
• Asa Dotzler – Linux on the Desktop (3.4). Why isn’t Linux ready for the desktop, and what can the developer community do to increase adoption? (For that matter, can Linux ever make it big on the desktop or is it only an impossible pipe dream?) Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator for several Mozilla projects, tackles all these questions in this insightful talk from ETech 2005.
• Bob Wyman – Legalities of Syndication (3.4). Should websites and online businesses be liable for the actions of their users? Can syndication and reuse of content available via RSS and Atom feeds attract copyright-violation lawsuits? Why can’t the Creative Commons (CC) license be used as a basis for Digital Rights Management (DRM)? In this edition of Sound Policy with Denise Howell, Bob Wyman speaks about technical and legal aspects of syndication.
• Anders Zachrisson (3.8). On Biotech Nation, Moira Gunn spoke with Anders Zachrisson, senior vice president of BioGaia, on the science of "pro-biotics," the flip side to antibiotics.
• Sig Solares – Surviving Katrina with DirectNIC (3.9). With his team of brave and resourceful techies, Sig kept open a lifeline to their datra center, their customers and their city, all the way through Hurricane Katrina and its horrific aftermath. The crisis is far from over, and the smell of sewage, death and diesel generator fumes still fills the facility; but Sig kindly found time to talk with Doc Searls about a DIY-IT project which, for years to come, will serve as a crowning example of problem-solving in a real-life Worst Case Scenario.
• Andrew Fraknoi (4.3). Moira also spoke with Andrew Fraknoi, the chairman of the Astronomy Program at Foothill College, who explained why we’re finding all those new planets, and the big fight about what’s a planet and what isn’t.
• Jason Fried – Basecamp (4.3). Ride with Jason Fried of 37signals as he takes us through the lessons learned while building Basecamp, a hosted project management tool that is extremely popular among its thousands of users. Jason shares his experiences about what works and what doesn’t in web development and how the unconventional development methodologies followed by 37signals give it an edge. From the advantages of working as a team with members in different continents to getting the word about your product out effectively, Jason covers it all.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is a great program from our archives:

• Scott Ambler – Are You Agile or Are You Fragile? (3.8). A presentation by Scott Ambler at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series in 2003 entitled "Are You Agile or Are You Fragile?" The software industry is shifting from large-scale, prescriptive processes that mandate rigorous procedures and policies to lighter, more agile methodologies. Are these agile processes appropriate for your organization? If so, which should you consider adopting?

Earlier today, I wandered over to Noonan’s Bar and Grill, about two miles from my home here in Marin County, California. The reason: to join the great Leo Laporte and the other folks who bring you This Week in Tech, without a doubt *the* most popular tech podcast, if not the most popular in all categories. Leo is a true pro in every way, and one of the nicest and most sincere guys you’ll ever meet. Since Leo has decided to do his show every week from Noonan’s, I think I’ll make a point of heading over there on Sundays at 4pm whenever I can, even if it’s just to heckle John C. Dvorak who unfortunately couldn’t make it for today’s show.

Update: The video is now avaialble as a .mov file. ButTorrent download only. Sorry that the audio mix is poor. The levels between the speakers vary greatly.

We’ve changed the content-delivery architecture for IT Conversations, and one unpleasant side effect is that the URLs for our audio files have changed. (Hey — we warned you not to link directly to the MP3s!) Unfortunately, this also means that you may receive duplicate files if you’re subscribing to our RSS feeds. It’s a one-time problem, and you won’t be receiving duplicates on an on-going basis, however. Only the most-recent 20 URLs exist in both the old and new forms in the feeds.

Pop!Tech 2004 was arguably the most-popular event ever published on IT Conversations, and this year’s event looks even better. But if you can’t make it to Camden, Maine, October 19-22 — the event is nearly sold out — have we got a deal for you:

Through the extraordinary cooperation of the folks at Pop!Tech and Limelight Networks, we’ll be broadcasting a free live audio stream of the entire event. That’s right, I’ll be geting up at 5am Pacific time each day and dragging myself into Studio 2 to host the program via the remote ISDN feed from the Camden opera house.

But wait — there’s more!

During the breaks, we’ll bring you the greatest music of all types from the Podsafe Music Network, hosted by the various musical hosts of the PodShow Music Shows inlcuding the host of Accident Hash and the Manager of the Podsafe Music Network, C.C. Chapman.

Mark those dates on your calendar, and check back here (or subscribe) for details.