Tomorrow (Thursday) through Sunday IT Conversations will be bringing you the free, live audio stream from Pop!Tech 2005 at the Camden, Maine, opera house. Even if you’ve got to work Thursday and Friday, make sure you tune on on the weekend. This is arguably the #1 event of the year.

Of course, we’ll publish the sessions for download over the next eight months, but if you can’t listen to the stream or can’t wait for teh free podcast, check out our new QuickCast™ service.

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

New Programs Last Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Peter Marcus – Online Gambling (rated 2.2 by listeners) To most of us, online gambling means email spam and other annoyances. But to Peter Marcus and his customers it’s a $6 billion/year legitimate business that represents more than 5% of the total gambling market worldwide. You may be surprised at the legitimacy of this operation. (Did you ever imagine that they might be audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers?)
• Highes and Keeler – Blog Design (2.5) You have started a blog and you’re writing great articles, but how do you attract and, more importantly, keep readers? According to Lynda Keeler and Gina Highes, a key aspect of your blog is its design. At BlogHer 2005, they share tips and tricks to take your blog from blah to bang!
• Daniel Blum – Managing Security (2.9) Every enterprise using information technology today needs to be concerned about security. As IT becomes more important to business, the number and severity of security threats also increase. Daniel Blum of Burton Group kicks off the Security stream of the Catalyst 2005 conference with this overview of topics in IT security.
• Wen Jiang (3.3) On Biotech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Wen Jiang, Professor of Surgery and Tumour Biology and the Head of the Metastasis & Angiogenesis Research Group at the Cardiff University in Wales. He tells us how he developed a new predictive test for those with the unfortunate diagnosis of breast cancer.
• Kartik Subbarao – Enterprise IT: Open Source Powerhouse (3.7) How can enterprise IT organizations embrace open source but still meet their critical individual business requirements? This presentation from Kartik Subbarao at HP provides a successful framework illustrated with numerous real- world examples in production at HP.
• Jacqueline Winspear (3.8) Moira Gunn speaks with Jacqueline Winspear, the author of "Maisie Dobbs" and "Pardonable Lies." They discuss the social impact of The Great War on Britain, and medical breakthroughs which shaped a generation.
• Robert Kaplan (4.1) Moira also interviews journalist and author Robert Kaplan, who wrote "Imperial Grunts" about the vast reach of American military presence worldwide.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is a new program from OSCON 2005:

• Larry Wall – State of the Onion 2005: The core design of Perl 6 is largely complete, to the extent that the language is now being implemented in earnest. In Larry Wall’s ninth annual State of the Onion address, he explains Perl 6’s Five Year Plan, how Perl programmers are like spies (or vice versa), and how open source can learn from the intelligence community.

Here’s the preliminary updated curriculum for the Podcast Academy on Thursday, November 10, in Ontario, California:

Registration is still open: Only $50 for the whole day, including refreshments and a box lunch.

If you missed the awesome Accelerating Change 2005 conference last month and don’t want to wait to hear it as we release it one session per week on IT Conversations, you can now get access to all 25 of our recorded sessions for just $24.99. It’s our new service: QuickCast.

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

New Programs Last Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Ramesh Jain – Experiential Computing (2.3) Most applications on the web today remain in thrall to the legacy of the written word: There remains a sense that everything on the web is really a document. Ramesh Jain believes that the new emphasis on ‘where’ is a first step to a radical change in perception which will lead to events becoming the most important aspect of what he calls Computing 3.0.
• David Gee (3.0) On Biotech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. David Gee, Commercial Director, MNL Pharma, Ltd., about how simple sugars might yield a therapeutic effect in the fight against everything from diabetes to cancer.
• Flame, Blame, Shame – BlogHer 2005 (3.0) Blogs are conversations, and like all discussions, sometimes the talk gets ugly. This panel discussion brings together mobile technology blogger mobile jones, computer science professor Ellen Spertus and journalist, novelist and blogger Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez with moderator Liza Sabater to discuss flames and how to deal with them.
• Peter Boatwright (3.1) Moira Gunn also interviews Peter Boatwright, professor, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, and the author of "The Design of Things to Come — How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products."
• Paula Le Dieu – Emerging Massive Media (3.3) The broadcasting media are competing with their audiences for attention. Every user is a potential broadcaster and content creator. Users are no longer watching content passively but are actively reusing and remixing content to fulfill their creative endeavors. Paula Le Dieu speaks on how the BBC is digitizing and making its archived content available online so that users can reuse, remix and share it under the creative commons license.
• Jonathan Schwartz at OSCON 2005 (3.4) Sun Microsystems’ COO Jonathan Schwartz is no stranger to controversy. At OSCON2005 we hear him answer some tough questions. Pulling no punches, he speaks about the value of free software being the answer to future and safe innovation and evolution.
• Ann Winblad and Laura Merling (3.5) Mora also speaks with Ann Winblad, co-founding partner of Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners and Laura Merling, CEO of SDForum. They discuss the global reality of both funding new software and then building it. Is it surprising? All roads lead to Silicon Valley.
• Tara Lemmey – National Security in the Information Age (3.7) In the post-9/11 world, security is a hot topic, and there’s no doubt that information technology has a significant role to play in security today. But exactly how does IT fit into security and how do we temper the need for security with the preservation of personal privacy? Tara Lemmey of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age discusses how a group of top analysts imagine what security in the information age could look like.
• Brian Capouch – Asterisk Open-Source VoIP PBX (4.1) Asterisk is the open source Voice-over-IP solution that everyone’s talking about, and at OSCON Scott Mace talked to Brian Capouch, the author of the forthcoming Addison-Wesley book about Asterisk. Capouch discusses why Asterisk is spreading like wildfire, has hooks for video and presence extensions and why Skype is "evil incarnate."

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:

• Alistair Cockburn – Agile Software Development (3.8) This week’s pick is from last year: In 2001 Alistair and 16 other software- development heavyweights met to discuss lightweight methodologies, resulting in the Agile Software Development Manifesto. In this interview with Doug Kaye, Alistair explains how he uses games as a model for software projects, and how he discovered that "software engineering" was created on a whim. He also discusses the American and European aversion to copying: the not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome.

Yahoo! Podcasts was turned on within the past 15 minutes.

We’re close to finalizing the curriculum for the first in-person Podcast Academy to be held November 10 in Ontario, California.

If you’re thinking of attending, please take a moment and complete this very short survey. It will help us decide which courses to include.

In less than two weeks we’ll be bringing you the free, live audio stream from Pop!Tech 2005 at the Camden, Maine, opera house. If you can’t listen in at that time, we’ll of course bring you all of the sessions (as we always do) at the rate of about one per week. That’s about 33 sessions and 33 weeks, so we should be done by about…July 1, 2006.

But if you can’t listen to the live stream, or if you can’t wait until July to hear everything that Pop!Tech has to offer, we’ve got a terrific offer for you.

Through our new QuickCast™ service you will be able to download the recordings from Pop!Tech 2005 approximately 2-3 weeks after the event (estimated: October 10, 2005) for the following fees:

• Individual Sessions: $5.00 each
• All sessions: $100.00

The proceeds are shared with the producers of Pop!Tech. Our portion is used to help pay some of the costs we incur in bringing you IT Conversations. It’s a good cause, don’t you think?

From the Conversations Network Uploader Project specs:

This is an open-source project to create a client-side application for encoding, normalizing and uploading audio files to the Conversations Network content-management system’s FTP server.

If you’d like to volunteer your time to help with this project let me know. Turns out, it’s a required piece in order to achieve our larger goals.

We have lots of details yet to work out, but as part of our new not-for-profit project, we’ll be launching the Podcast Academy at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in November. Most of the Podcast Academy’s activities will be online, but we’re taking advantage of this most-important podcasting event of the year to conduct a full day of face-to-face training.

The conference starts officially on Friday, November 11, but if you show up one day early on November 10th, you’ll learn tips, techniques, strategies and tactics from some of the world’s experts in podcasting. The full curriculum and list of instructors will be announced shortly. The cost of attending the all-day Podcast Academy is $50 per person, and includes refreshments and a box lunch. Attendance is limited to the first 100 people who register.

This first in-person session from the Podcast Academy will be held in conjunction with the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, November 11 & 12 in Ontario, California. The Podcast Academy’s all-day curriculum will be held the day before the Expo on Thursday. November 10th at the Ontario Marriott (across the street from the Convention Center). The Podcast Academy is a not-for-profit project of IT Conversations. This event is underwritten by IT Conversations and the producers of the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference.

Update: The curriculum is not yet full, so if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover or an intructor you think we should invite, please let me know.