Must be something in the stars. This week I’m in Boston attending the Integrated Media Association conference. My last presentation is in 90 minutes. All the greatest minds (and there are many) from public radio are here.

Coincidentally, tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be a guest on KQED-FM Forum (88.5 FM in San Francisco) during the 9am-10am show. The first half will be about the proposed merger in satellite radio. I’ll probably just be listening in then. At 9:30 or so, they’ll start a segment on the future of public radio. Listen in!

Robert Scoble stopped by Studio 2 a few weeks ago, and we talked about IT Conversations, GigaVox Media, The Levelator and more. [video]

Just got the official letter from the IRS that they have approved the tax-exempt status of The Conversations Network under regulation 501(c)(3). That means donations to The Conversations Network are deductible retroactively as we had hoped.

Phil Windley hosted a great — if you’ll allow me to say so — podcast all about Amazon’s web services. On the show was Phil’s special guest, Jeff Barr from Amazon, along with regulars Scott Lemon and Matt Assay. I was on, too, providing the perspective of an AWS customer.

On Wednesday SYS-CON published their final list of 150 all time technology heroes. Niels Makel, one of the folks who works behind the scenes at IT Conversations as a series producer, took the time to create a list of all the people on the SYS-CON list who’d been on IT Conversations and linking to the shows. There are 36 people on the list who have one or more shows on IT Conversations. [Thanks, Phil]

Phil Windley is doing some great things on IT Conversations, some of which I should have done long ago. Today, Phil automated and published a list of the ten most-listened-to shows for the month of January. Not necessarily the most highly rated, but the most downloaded.

The buzz is building around Amazon Web Services as an application platform. Don MacAskill has been using AWS’ S3 storage service for SmugMug, and according to Jeremy Zawodny, will be talking about it at this year’s ETech conference. Jeremy and others have been experimenting with S3 as storage backup for desktop and laptop systems. Even Dave Winer is experimenting with S3.

When designing GigaVox Audio Lite (currently in by-invitation-only alpha test) I decided to use not just S3 (storage) but essentially all of AWS’ services for our infrastructure. This graphic should give you some idea of what we’re doing:

In addition to S3 (storage) I’m using the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which allows us to instantiate servers on-demand. If we need a dozen extra servers for two hours of transcoding, we just fire them up for as long as we need them (perhaps a few hours) then shut them down. And that can be automated based on the load on the current servers. Dynamic computing power on demand. The dream has been realized.

To communicate among our servers and with the external systems we also make heavy use of the Simple Queue Service (SQS). There are actually many more queues than shown in the diagram which is somewhat out of date.

In asking around, it appears we have one of the most complex and sophisticated systems built to date using all three AWS services. It is infinitely scalable, extremely reliable and costs very little until we need it. And our system administrator doesn’t have to carry a pager. All those servers are someone else’s problem. No hardware or software to buy, maintain, upgrade, etc. It has been a lot of fun to actually make use of some of the asynchronous message-based architecture ideas in my book, Loosely Coupled. Hey…this stuff actually works! Sweet. Congratulations to Amazon for brilliant vision and execution.

If you want to see it in action for the production and publishing of your podcast, send me an email, tell me about your podcast, and I’ll send you back an invitation to the alpha test.

I’ve been running Windows Vista Beta 1 under Parallels on my Mac. Works great, and I was planning to buy Vista when it came out. But today, Vista B1 suddenly stopped working. I can boot in non-network Safe Mode, but not in Normal Mode and not in Safe Mode if networking is enabled.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but is it merely a coincidence that this happened on the day Vista (retail) was officially released? Could the system be hanging during a phone-home event, and without notice? (The boot screen just freezes at about the point the splash screen would normally appear.) Would Microsoft disable beta copies without notice and with no diagnostic messages on the day the final version shipped (ie, with no grace period)? I find it hard to believe they’d do something like that, but then what else explains this problem?

Update: 24 hours later, Vista now boots and runs under Parallels as before.

Paul Figgiani just posted an interview I did with Bruce Sharpe, the genius behind The Levelator, over on the Podcast Academy channel. If you want to know about the history of The Levelator, how it really works or how best to use it, listen in.

Now that the new edition of The Levelator has been released — you *did* download your free copy, didn’t you? — the GigaVox Media team is hard at work on the next free software for podcasters and we need your help.

We’ve just posted a (new) very short survey, and your answers will have a significant impact on our future development direction. This is a not a repeat of the survey we posted in November. This one is all new, so please complete it even if you helped us out before. It will take less than a minute. Promise!