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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.