When we last opened the doors for new members of the production team at The Conversations Network, we got the usual flood of applications and quickly had to close the door. That was about two months ago, and we’re once again ready to hire. We’re now accepting applications for apprentice Website Editors, the people who write the show descriptions and bios, and track down and process the photos. To qualify, you must be capable of writing *good* English and have the ability and tools to crop and resize jpegs. After a two-show apprenticeship, you’ll receive $15-$30 per show, depending upon whether you’re getting the help of a Series Producer or not. For more info and to sign up for the program, go here.

Lot’s of discussion and debate surrounding Apple’s beta of Boot Camp, which allows dual booting of Windows and OS X on the new Intel-based Macs. There are many opinions from people way smarter than I am, but here’s a pragmatic and personal example. I need to buy a new laptop to run a specialized application that captures video through via a USB device. This particular application runs only on Windows, and I will only need to run it on rare occasions: perhaps once a month. I’d prefer not to travel with both my Power Book and a Windows laptop, so as Doc Searls suggests, Boot Camp and a new MacBook Pro might fit the bill just fine.

As Jon Udell pointed out, Amazon’s S3 service is filled with potential. But I’m looking for an enhancement, which if they implemented it would add instant scalability and reliability to hundreds of thousands of applications. I didn’t invent caching or CDNs, but I’ve been a huge fan of this architecure for many years, and I wish it was more common in the web-hosting industry. Here’s a copy of a post I just left on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection forum:

I wonder if there’s a way to use S3 as a cache or content-delivery network (CDN)?

We, like others, have an application containing a large number large objects. The challenge is that while each of them may be modified each day, relatively few of them are downloaded by the public on any given day. Pushing new versions of each object to S3 each day would be very wasteful of bandwidth, since most of the updated versions won’t be accessed.

This is why we like caching/CDN architectures, and it’s something I’d love to see S3 support. It’s an extraordinarily cool architecture that painlessly gives small-server apps large-server scalability. Here’s how I imagine it working:

• We (the S3 customer) upload an object using the APIs.
• Along with this upload, we specify an “Origin Server URL” on our own servers where we have stored the original copy of the object.
• We publish the S3 public URL of the object for external access by the public.
• When S3 receives a request for the registered object, it first sends an HTTP HEAD request to our origin server to see whether the object has changed.
• If the object has not changed since the most-recently uploaded version, or if the origin server doesn’t respond promptly for whatever reason, S3 delivers the object to the public requester.
• However, if the object on the origin server is newer than S3’s copy, S3 fetches the new copy from the origin server and, while doing so, delivers that version to the requester.

If you’ve ever used a CDN or even a standard cache (like Squid) you know how brilliant this architecture can be. As I mentioned above, it *instantly* adds scalability and reliability to a small-server application. (If S3’s HEAD request fails for whatever reason, it returns its most-recent version of the object to the requester.)

An app developer can then simply write new or modified objects to his local low-capacity, low-cost server then use the APIs to upload to S3. That’s it. Done. Got an update or new version? Just write it to the origin server. Your local server goes down? No problem. The S3 infrastructure keeps on ticking.

S3’s pricing of $0.20 (USD) per GB of traffic is actually very good. It’s extremely good as compared to commercial CDNs. If you have to upload all your objects every day, even if they’re not downloaded by your visitors, however, the economics rapidly deteriorate. Caching solves all of that.

Okay, so Dave Winer probably didn’t draw it on a napkin, but it’s fun to see my name on his podcasting growth curve and timeline. Yup, IT Conversations’ three-year anniversary is next month. The timeline with Bloggercon milestones is about right.

[My wife came up with that phrase, and I just haven’t been able to come up with a better title for this blog post, even though she pleaded with me to drop it. ]

One week from today, on April 11, we will start an auction on eBay for the sponsorship of the podcast edition of Tech Nation, featuring Dr. Moira Gunn. It’s a cool idea. The bidding will start at $12,000 when the auction opens at 1 PM PDT on April 11. The auction will run for 10 days, closing on April 21. Check here for details.

After running IT Conversations for nearly three years, it’s time for me to hand it over to a new Executive Producer as I focus my attention on growing The Conversations Network. Having worked with him on a variety of project, I knew who the best candidate for the EP role would be, and I’m thrilled to announce that he accepted my offer.

Effective today, Phil Windley is the new Executive Producer of IT Conversations. You probably know Phil through his blog, his program on IT Conversations (Technometria) and his articles for InfoWorld. Welcome to the team, Phil. It’s an honor to be working with you.

Phil will be publishing the IT Conversations Newsletter, and I will be starting a new one for The Conversations Network. The content of my weekly podcast (MP3) will focus more on the network and less on topics unique to The Conversations Network.

As presentations become increasingly visual, and as presenters learn to get away from just reading their bullet-point PowerPoint slides, The Conversations Network will be experimenting with video in addition to audio. We’ve just released our first such experiment: a video version of Michael Geohegan’s Podcast Academy class: Making Money Beyond Podcasting. The MPEG-4 video has been formatted for iPods and also plays well on desktops using the QuickTime player. We’re looking for any and all feedback. Just leave a comment here. (Special thanks go to Paul Figgiani for all the post-production video work that went into this one.)

One year ago today, we offically launched Team ITC, the amazing team of audio engineers, website editors and producers who bring you all the shows on IT Conversations and The Conversations Network. On April 1, 2005, we started distributing the proceeds of our old Tip Jar to the team every month. This has now been replaced by our optional paid membership. The active team is now about 45 people all over the world, and by the end of 2006 I expect our ranks to swell to 300 or more as we ramp up from 10-12 programs per week to a whopping 60 per week over 12 channels.

Ubiquity, a magazine and forum from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has just posted an interview with me conducted by John Gehl.

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

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Joe Paiva – A Warriors Guide to Business Architecture (2.8) When thinking about the technology and the Department of Defense, what generally comes to mind are the technologies involved with fighting a war; weaponry, information gathering, and transportation, for example. Less obvious but no less important is the role of information technology. In this session from the SOA Executive Forum in November 2005, Major Joe Paiva discusses the implmentation of a Services Oriented Architecture in the Armed Forces.
• Todd Cochrane – Building a Podcast Network (2.8) Creating or joining a podcast network is an important decision. There are benefits such as an increased listening audience, and more revenue. But there are also downsides: dealing with conflicts, sharing the workload and the revenue. Todd Cochrane shares his experiences in running a podcast show and creating a podcast network to help you in considering all the pros and cons that come with being involved in a podcast network. He also outlines network alternatives that may work for you, and what he would do differently in the future.
• Joshua Spanogle – Isolation Ward (3.8) On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Joshua Spanogle who tells us about his new thriller, "Isolation Ward." It’s a fully-formed biotech thriller — from the fudging of scientific data, to xenotransplantation, to bioethics and the lure of the big money in biotech.
• Can Open Source Stay Open? (3.9) Open source software and Web 2.O are changing computer and software economics. Tight, centralized control of intellectual property is under attack. Free, self- service access to code, content, and communities helps build new platforms, products, and services. Is rapid, free and open the future? Tim O’Reilly, Mitchell Baker, and Jonathan Schwartz discuss how open source innovation is changing the world.
• Suketu Mehta – Bombay (4.0) Award winning writer Suketu Mehta tells us that his home town of Bombay and other mega-cities foreshadow the future. Bombay juxtaposes hopeless poverty, crowding, and inequity with riches and a vitality that draws a flood of young immigrants from rural villages. Although Mehta paints a grim picture, he sees hope in the exercise of democracy by the poor and a culture where people help each other while expecting little from their government.
• Peter Cochrane – Emerging Telephony (4.3) As a major driver of global wealth, the advance of technology is paced by various forces including new discovery and human inertia. In this keynote, Peter Cochrane, the highly esteemed and engaging techno-futurist, delivers a fascinating analysis of change in our increasingly smart, networked world.
• Scott Anderson – Business Blogging (4.3) The blogosphere is changing how customers gather and consume information about the marketplace. Scott Anderson, Hewlett Packard’s Director of Enterprise Brand Communications took a huge step in bringing his company in line with the principles of open dialogue with its customers through the blogosphere. In this program Scott describes the experience and the challenges of evolving corporate communication beyond the static web and into the live web.
• Carol Dweck – The Psychology of Success (4.4) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, a recognized world leader in the study of personality, and author of Mindset — The New Psychology of Success."

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• Online Advertising – Gnomedex 4.0 (3.3) Audio from Gnomedex 4.0: The Future of Online Advertising. How to make money from blogs and more from a panel of experts: Dave McClure, Jeff Barr, Henry Copeland, Bill Flitter, Gokul Rajaram and Mark Pincus.