A few months ago I booked a UAL round-trip flight for my wife and myself from San Francisco to Maui and used Mileage Plus miles for First-Class upgrades. A while later we decided to extend the trip, but when we called United to change the return flight they told us we had to pay a $100 fee for each leg including the outbound flight, which we weren’t changing. $400 total, so I told them to forget it. Oh, and we would have lost the upgrades even for the flight we weren’t changing. I figured I’d just get to Maui and make the change after I arrived. No way, I assumed, they would charge me to change the inbound flight we’d already completed.

Today I called from Maui to make that change, and while they didn’t want to charge me to change the SFO-OGG leg, they told me I’d have to pay the $100 change fee plus the airfare difference ($424) for a total for the two of us of $1,048. Again, I told ’em to forget it. That’s more than I paid for the round trip to begin with.

But two hours later, on a whim, I called back and was quoted only $175 each ($350 total) for the two of us. Nearly $700 less expensive than earlier this afternoon and $50 cheaper than a few months ago. Needless to say, I took them up on the offer before the agent in India could discover she’d made a mistake or something. United is totally whacked

It was my pleasure once again to be a guest on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech. (Hopefully it wasn’t just because I wrote nice things about him. :-)) Towards the end of the show there were more than 3,000 people watching the live video stream on Stickam. I predict this will support “Doug’s 100-to-1” law in which I claim that the number of people attending or listening to a live event will grow by two orders of magnitude as an on-demand program. That means >300,000 listeners to the TWiT podcast, which I believe is in the ballpark for Leo’s show. (This link will be live when Leo post’s the show.)

This law stems from our very first podcasts of O’Reilly Media conferences back in 2004. With 400 attendees at the physical we almost always reached 40,000 unique individuals with the podcast editions. 1,000 physical attendees? …100,000 unique downloaders. I’ve long used this law as the basis for why events should be recorded, produced and distributors. Event producers are otherwise only reaching 1% of their potential audience. And the other 99% comes along almost for free.

The idea of LifeCasting (informal very-long format live video) probably started with Justin.tv and was then built on by Chris Pirillo. I found it particularly fascinating during last year’s iPhone launch, covered by Robert Scoble and others, but generally just a curious phenomenon. For a few years now, a number of people have wondered what would happen if you were to marry media professionals with this technology. That’s essentially what we’ve done with spoken-word audio on The Conversations Network, and the opportunity for a live, pro-quality video network is something I’ve wanted to see or do for a long time.

Now it’s here. At TWiTLive.com, Leo Laporte is streaming 25 hours per week via (for now) Stickam. Leo’s video is nothing more than letting us watch his many podcasts live in production: TWiT, Security Now, Net@Nite, etc. It’s still rough around the edges — only one camera is running so far — but it’s already very entertaining. They key is that Leo, as always, transcends the technology. He’s committed to the same broadcast quality he brings to audio podcasting. It’s not just his own professionalism, but the production values as well: excellent content and guests, good lighting, good video and (of course) excellent audio. The low-quality audio from most LifeCasters is irritating and tiring. I can leave Leo’s show running all day.

In fact, I already do leave Leo’s show running all day. I work in a home office, and until recently I’ve always had CNN or MSNBC on the TV while I work except when I’m recording or mixing audio. I’m not sure why. Maybe I just miss having other humans around the workplace. Well now I have Leo and his guests to keep me company, and it’s great. Just as TWiT will be remembered as an audio podcast milestone, TWiTLive is already a breakthrough in streaming video. It leverages everything Leo has done during his distinguished career. It’s not the rebirth of TechTV, it’s something much better.

We’ve just turned on a new page layout for IT Conversations. Lots of Ajax and widgets have helped us reduce the size of the pages and improve performance and at the same time increase the functionality. You may need to snoop around to find your favorite features, but they’re all there along with some new ones. New looks for our other channels will follow shortly.

Last week was the annual meeting of the Board of Directors of The Conversations Network at which we elected two new board members, Jon Udell and Zephyr Teachout. Along with our re-elected directors, Jake Shapiro and David Weinberger, I think you’ll agree it’s an extraordinary team. And then there’s our Board of Advisors. That’s a lot of talent!

I was chatting with David Marks of Loomia about the version 4 rewrite of The Conversations Network’s web sites, and he asked whether I’d blogged about it. Haven’t yet, so here’s part of it…

The new sites will be extremely dynamic with nearly everything loaded at runtime via Ajax widgets, some nested within other widgets, sometimes three-deep. Even with all the HTTP requests, the pages are so much simpler and built with so many fewer lines of code, the new site is noticeably faster.

Placing a widget on a page is about as simple as it gets. For example, the following HTML is all it takes to display the most-popular recently published shows for a channel:

My widgetLoader looks for

I was saddened to return home today after an east-coast trip to be greeted with the news that Tom LeVine had died from a brain tumor diagnosed only two months ago. Tom was the CEO of Pop!Tech, a marvelous annual event held in Maine every year. IT Conversations streamed live audio from Pop!Tech 2004 and 2005 thanks to Tom’s believe in our mutual missions.

I first met Tom about 13 years ago when he was working in venture capital. We worked together to start an online business, but it never happened. Years later, Tom and I were both happy the project never got off the ground for a variety of reasons. We remained friends and sometimes shared a meal when he was in the Bay Area. As the Pop!Tech announcement says, Tom was one of those incredibly healthy and active people we all figure would outlive the rest of us. Alas, he passed away at the age of 56. He is already missed, and will be for some time.

I’m thinking about switching from just using a text editor to an IDE, but I need some help. I went to the Zend web site and became thoroughly confused. So many versions. With and without Eclipse. (I’ve never used Eclipse, either.)

Help me out here. What package(s) do I want and why? Download Eclipse separately? Multiple versions of that, too. TIA.

Due to the split with GigaVox Media, we were forced to move the primary feed for IT Conversations. It appears that only two-thirds of the RSS clients are responding to the redirect. So if you haven’t received any IT Conversations programs for the past week, check your podcatcher. The new URL for the IT Conversations RSS feed is http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc.

And in case you missed it, check out our new Premium Edition RSS feeds — without the promos, pitches and music.

There’s nothing unusual about my experiences, but I wonder if people in other industries realize how fundamentally the Internet has changed how software is developed. In my case, it’s software for and on the Internet itself, so the development environment is also the distribution platform. (That wasn’t always the case. Yes, there was software before the Internet.) Just consider what happened this morning.

• We released a new feature, Slideshows.
• A few minutes later, Paul Figgiani reported a bug when using Safari. Instant QA.
• I used Twitter to ask “Are there any tools for debugging JavaScript and the DOM under Safari?”
• Phil Windley and Coty Rosenblath replied within three minutes.
• With their suggestions, I found the problem five minutes later.
• Not knowing why my code didn’t work on Safari, I asked The Google about “xml load in safari” and found an explanation seconds later.
• I coded a fix, tested it and published it via Subversion to our public servers a few minutes later.

Elapsed time from bug report to fix: less that 20 minutes. Okay, so that’s not unusual. We’ve all fixed bugs that quickly. But I never opened a book. I used a tool (Safari developer tools) I’d never even heard of. I learned and deployed a workaround to a browser-specific issue I knew nothing about. And I had support from three other people located in different timezones in near real time and for free. Without the Internet, this process would likely have taken weeks and a relatively formal QA process: test, document, research — and how would I have ever found the solution? — fix, test, release. Rapid development is an understatement.