BoatingSF.com has posted an animation showing the Cosco Busan as it leaves the Port of Oakland on November 7, 2007, and hits the Bay Bridge at 8:30 am on its way to the Golden Gate. The display is based on receipt of signals from the ship’s AIS transponder as received in Tiburon and processed by BoatingSF.com’s custom software.

I recently discovered that Creative Commons has retired the Sampling License we’ve long used for podcasts at The Conversations Network. Apparently there weren’t enough people using the license for CC to support it. Too bad, since after a great deal of discussion and experimentation, it was a great license for us.

We now have a few options, and I’m looking for feedback. We can…

• Continue to use the license, even without ongoing support from Creative Commons.
• Use a different CC license.
• Adopt NPR’s permission policy.
• Roll our own.

Some considerations…

• The reason we don’t use one of the more common CC licenses is that we don’t want people to simply copy and re-host our audio files:
  • We invest a great deal in our Detail Pages, and we want to encourage others to link to our site so that listeners get the full value of our biographies, resource lists, etc.
  • Like other podcasters, we want to keep track of the traffic so that we can justify our funding. (Non-profit underwriters in our case.)
• We like sampling because it encourages excerpts, mashups and remixes.
• We can’t always get permission from our content sources such as conferences and speakers to allow others to re-use entire programs, and we’d like to have a consistent licensing policy.

What do you think would be the best license for The Conversations Network?

Update: See our decision here.

Breakfast tea in Barcelona.

So it turns out that Horniman’s Tea was founded by John Horniman in 1826 and was later taken over by his son, Frederick. It’s an old, established UK company.

So here I am in Luso, outside of Mealhada, outside of Coimbra in Portugal, and I finally get some WiFi connectivity after a week of none in Lisbon. (Great GPRS and mobile roaming, but very little free WiFi.) I go to The Google, and it thinks I speak/read Portuguese based on my IP address. Reasonable. I open Preferences looking for English — should have been Ingles — and I stumbled across Elmer Fudd as a language option. I don’t know — maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s my wife, laughing over my shoulder — but it cracked me up. Now I have choices like Hungawian, Awabic, Cwoatian and Fwench. The rest of The Google’s are that way, too.

Whether you’re already a podcaster, videoblogger or maybe just a wanabe, check out the spreading worldwide phenomenon of PodCamps created by our friends, Christopher S. Penn and Chris Brogan. The Conversations Network will be “represented” through postcards, buttons and other handouts at many of these over the next few months:

• PodCampCapeTown – October 20th 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa
• PodCamp Perth – October 27 – 28, 2007 @ Perth, Australia
• PodCamp Boston 2 – October 26 – 28, 2007 before VON Boston
• PodCamp AZ – November 3, 2007 – UAT, Tempe, AZ | podcampaz.org
• PodCamp EDU Washington, DC – November 10, 2007 – Washington,DC – Focus on Educational Podcasting
• PodCamp Seattle – Novemberish, 2007 (in planning) – Seattle

It was a pleasure to again be invited to appear on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech. I filled in at the last minute for Patrick Norton, who’s wife was about to give birth. I wish I’d had more time to ramp up on this week’s topics. Still, it was an honor and a lot of fun.

Today we’re launching a new channel, Media Conversations. The first series is Future Talks, an interview-style program with experts Gerd Leonard and Glen Hiemstra. And a big first for The Conversations Network: Video!

http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmediaconversations%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F419092&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf
Today we’ve published two long-format (55-minute) programs. Starting next week (10/16/09) we’ll publish a short-format (12-minute) program each Tuesday for nine weeks. Great stuff!

Special thanks to Paul Figgiani (editing, titles and a lot of video help), Steven Ng (production audio) and Dorothy Yamamoto (channel website graphics).

Day one of the Podcast and New Media Expo is done. Lots of fun; cool stuff; great people. But of all the things I’ve seen so far, my favorite is a small kit that Susan Kitchens brought by our booth. In one little waterproof case, she’s get everything she needs to record high-quality 1:1 podcast interviews. I went to the soundprofessionals.com website — their name was on the bottom of the case– but couldn’t find more details on this specific setup. Luckily, Susan has everything on her website.

As Michael Geoghegan (co-founder with me of GigaVox) reported earlier this week, we have sold GigaVox Audio Lite — the technology and the website/service — to Podango. The official press release is here (PDF). Tonight at the speakers/exhibitors reception for the Podcast and New Media Expo, lots of people came up to me and asked what was going on. Okay, I admit that it’s confusing. It’s confusing even to me and to Michael! Hopefully this will be sufficient, although I agree that a roadmap might be helpful.

• Podango now owns and operates GigaVox Audio Lite.
• Podango has announced plans to both operate the existing GVAL service as well as integrate it into their future plans. You can expect to see changes in branding (graphics, logos, etc.), but the service will be fundamentally the same for some time. I spent most of last week with their development team in Utah, and I came away very impressed with their knowledge, expertise, and dedication to delivering the best podcasting platform and tools.
• As previously announced, IT Conversations and The Levelator are now part of The Conversations Network, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that I created two years ago.
• Rather than being split 50/50 between GigaVox and The Conversations Network, my full-time and only commitment (other than serving as an advisor to Podango and on the Board of Directors of a few other companies) is as Executive Director of The Conversations Network.
• And to complete the picture, here’s a reminder of what The Conversations Network actually does:
  • We produce three channels: IT Conversations, Social Innovation Conversations, and (launching shortly) Media Conversations.
  • We distribute and support The Levelator for the podcasting community.
  • We run PodCorps.org for podcast and videoblogger “stringers” including an exciting new tape-sync locator service.

Yes, it’s been an incredibly busy summer, between contract negotiations, re-integrating IT Conversations with The Conversations Network — you wouldn’t believe the technical complexities of that one! — and now migrating GVAL to Podango. I think it’s time for another vacation. I think I’ll head to Portugal and Spain in mid October. Yeah…ending up with a week in Barcelona should be just the ticket!

We’ve just posted release 1.2.1 of The Levelator for OS X and Windows. The Linux versions will follow shortly. User’s won’t notice any significant difference over version 1.1.0 other than the change in logos and graphics. The Levelator is now supported and distributed (for free, of course) exclusively by The Conversations Network. And you can expect another bug-fix release within the next few weeks.