You can watch the video of the Business and Monetization panel I shared with Richard Lucic, Tim Bourquin, John Federico and Michael Geoghegan at Duke University last week. Here are videos from all the sessions. A well-organized and valuable event.

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

News and Housekeeping

• Accelerating Change 2005 QuickCast: This was supposed to be the day that we delivered the QuickCast editions from the Accelerating Change 2005 conference. You may recall that QuickCast is an experiemnt in which you can download all of the recordings from a conference for a fee rather than wait for us to publishing them for free at the rate of one session per week. As I said, it’s an experiment, and we’ve had a few bumps along the way. First, we didn’t have all our permissions lined up in advance, so that put us on hold for a few days. Then we discovered that although we tried to plan ahead, we didn’t really have the post-production capacity to crank out 25 programs in a hurry in addition to our usual daily publishing, which is already at the rate of about 12 shows per week since we’re in the midst of conference season. It looks like it will be about another week before we have all the sessions from Accelerating Change 2005 ready for the QuickCast download, at which time you’ll be able to get the entire set for $24.99. The money will go to good purposes: Half will go to the non-profit Acceleration Studies Foundation, producers of the event, and the other half will go to pay some of our own infrastructure expenses. Use the link below to be notified immediately when the AC2005 QuickCast is available.

Upcoming Events

• EuroOSCON. O’Reilly Media’s EuroOSCON is 17-20 October in Amsterdam, and through our contacts there, we’ve arranged for a 25% discount. Go to the URL below and use the code "euos05itc."
• Pop!Tech 2005. And our most popular of all events from last year, Pop!Tech, will be held again this year in Camden, Maine, October 16-19. Talk about rubbing elbows with some of the most influential people on the planet — this is the place to be.
• Podcast and Portable Media Expo: This is turning out to be *the* major podcasting event of the year, and I along with many members of Team ITC will be there. I’ll be delivering a session on "Audio Production at IT Conversations" at 10:30am on Friday morning. We’ll also have a small booth in the exhibit hall, and we’ll be announcing some major new plans (some of which you’ve heard me discuss) during the event. November 11-12, Ontario, California. See you there!

New Programs Last Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Anne Thomas Manes – The Advent of Superplatforms (2.6) In this keynote speech at Burton Group’s 2005 Catalyst Conference, Anne Thomas Manes lays out the issues to consider when dealing with the rise of network- application platforms packed with features and functionality. More functions sounds good, right? Well, Anne looks at the benefits but also points out negative implications like vendor lock-in and high barriers to entry for new developers.
• Amit Sachdev (3.0) On Biotech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Amit Sachdev, the Executive VP for Health BIO, They talk about proposals for increased measures to ensure safety *after* a drug has been approved.
• Jeremy Zawodny – Open Source at Yahoo! (3.0) Jeremy talks about open source software scales at Yahoo!, and specifically how Yahoo! leverages open source software to scale its system. Yahoo! recently acquired Konfabulator and Flickr, and Zawodny explains how Yahoo! is changing internally to become a Web 2.0 company.
• Ernie Allen – Reuniting Families After Katrina (3.3) Larry Magid interviews Ernie Allen, President and CEO of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The Center’s usual mandate is to help find abducted or exploited children, but has now become involved in reuniting families separated by Hurricane Katrina.
• Natalie Jeremijenko – Social Robotics, Smocial Robotics! (3.3) Open-source robot dogs, rescued from eBay and reworked, to investigate environmental contamination. A robotic goose lets people interact with wild geese on their turf. Natalie Jeremijenko investigates how robots can be used to change the ways humans participate with the environment and the natural world in this entertaining session. From ETech 2005.
• David Temkin – Laszlo Systems (3.3) Before AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) had a name, there was Laszlo Systems, a software tools developer using AJAX-like methods along with with Macromedia’s Flash Player to deliver richer Web experiences. In this conversation with Laszlo founder/CTO David Temkin, learn why he chose the Flash Player as a platform and why Laszlo went open source choosing IBM’s Common Public License. What is planned for Laszlo Mail and Laszlo Calendar and how he plans to leverage rich client environments other than Flash Player.
• Attention – Supernova 2005 (3.5) In a world where information overload is common, attention is a very scarce resource and there is an increasing need to manage it efficiently. In this panel discussion, Steve Gillmor, Glenn Reid, Dorée Duncan Seligmann, David Sifry and Linda Stone talk about the problem of coping with more information than one can handle and the possible solutions.
• Dave Passmore – Converged Devices, Nets, Apps and Orgs (3.8) Convergence is one of the great buzzwords of our time, ususally referring to the connection between voice and data. But there’s a whole lot more to convergence, accoring to Burton Group Research Director David Passmore. Learn about five areas of convergence that will affect most enterprises in the next several years and how to prepare for the future of networking.
• Brad Matsen (4.0) Moira Gunn also interviews Brad Matsen, National Geographic producer and author of "Descent — The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss."
• Graham Hawkes (4.5) And Moira speaks with Graham Hawkes, an engineer and explorer, the solo ocean dive record holder, and president of Hawkes Ocean Technologies. They talk about his quest to drive a submersible to the very bottom of the ocean, some seven miles down, as well as the very different experience of his underwater flight school.

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:

• Bob Metcalfe on Memory Lane (3.5) Halley Suitt sat down with Bob Metcalfe to learn more about his early days at MIT, wiring up the ARPAnet when it was only 14 nodes old, Harvard, Xerox PARC, inventing Ethernet, founding 3Com, up to the present day and his work at Polaris Venture Partners as a VC.

I don’t know if “embargo” is quite the right word, but whetever you want to call it, we’re putting a temporary halt on accepting any new events or series for IT Conversations. The reason: Team ITC is just plain maxed out. We’re in the midst of conference season, and we’re producing an average of more than two programs per day, even though you’re not seeing that many on the public site yet. More volunteers won’t help at this point, as we’ve got people on the waiting list to join Team ITC. We just don’t have enough mentors with enough free time to help newbies get started. And all of this is due in part to our overtaxed and kludgy content-management systems.

I report this so that people who are writing and calling and saying, “Please publish our event,” will understand that it has nothing to do with them or their events. It’s just a sitewide capacity problem.

In the months to come, we’ll solve this in three ways:

1. We’re working to improve and automate the CMS;
2. We’ll be able to take on more volunteers; and
3. Conference season ends in about 60 days.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I’m at the Duke University Podcasting Symposium this week, and according to some sources, the event will be streamed live. I’m not convinced that’s true, but you might want to check it out for yourself. Go to http://isis.duke.edu/events/podcasting/casts.html. The event is 9/27 (8:30am-4:50pm Eastern) and 9/28 9:45am-3:pm). My session is one of the first, Tuesday, 9:15am010:35am Eastern.

At the very least, you’ll be able to get the timeshifted podcast edition.

Update: I’ve updated the above URL. Apparently you couldn’t get to the streaming servers on Tuesday from outside of Duke’s firewalls. We’ve been told this has been corrected and that you should now be able to listen.

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

News and Housekeeping

• Updates: The Way You Like ‘Em. Did you know that there are three ways you can receive these weekly announcements? This is the blog version, but you can also subscribe to email announcements, the IT Conversations ‘Everything’ or ‘Info-Only’ RSS feeds, or listen to the audio version.

Upcoming Events

• EuroOSCON. O’Reilly Media’s EuroOSCON is 17-20 October in Amsterdam, and through our contacts there, we’ve arranged for a 25% discount. Go to the URL below and use the code "euos05itc."
• Pop!Tech 2005. And our most popular of all events from last year, Pop!Tech, will be held again this year in Camden, Maine, October 16-19. Talk about rubbing elbows with some of the most influential people on the planet — this is the place to be.

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Suffragette Journalists at BlogHer 2005 (3.0). The discussion about whether bloggers are journalists is one that inspires heated opinions. In this conversation from BlogHer, several blogger/journalists discuss the relationship between blogging and so-called traditional journalism. Moderator Lisa Stone asks Anastasia Goodstein, Chris Nolan and Evelyn Rodriguez to share their experiences of the relationship between independent online publishing and traditional media.
• Jakob Nielsen on Larry’s World (3.1) Designing websites is different from traditional media such as print and television. In spite of the usability guidelines being fairly well known, some of the common mistakes recur even on popular sites. Designers need to be careful and follow these guidelines to improve a website’s interface. Web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen speaks with Larry Magid about designing websites that capture and sustain the user’s attention.
• Alan Ganek – Autonomic Computing Systems (3.4) In a new collaborative business climate, there need to be connections between technologies and between people. IBM is creating "autonomic computing systems" and IBM Vice President Alan Ganek discusses how to develop an ecosystem of technologies and relationships to support collaboration between applications and corporations. In this talk from Supernova 2005, learn about how to ensure that your company and its applications are ready to be part of something bigger.
• John Warfield Simpson (3.5) Dr. Moira Gunn spoke with John Warfield Simpson, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Natural Resources, Ohio State University, and the audhor of "Dam! — Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park." He related the technical — and political — tale which enabled the tiny city of San Francisco to dam an entire mountain valley some 200 miles away, a sister valley to the famous Yosemite — all in the name of progress.
• David Bornstein on Globeshakers (3.6) David Bornstein is a leading expert in the global rise of "social entrepreneurism." In this program, host Tim Zak asks how we would even know a social entrepreneur if we saw one on the street. More important, why should we even care? Who invests in social enterprise and what is at stake for our world if we don’t?
• James Powell (3.7) Moira Gunn also interviewed James Powell, Executive Director, National Physical Science Consortium, and the author of "Grand Canyon — Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle." He tells us about the controversy around the beginnings of the Grand Canyon, and the present and future of its now-aging Glen Canyon dam.
• Anders Zachrisson (3.8) And on Biotech Nation, Moira spoke with Anders Zachrisson, Senior Vice President, BioGaia, about the scientific studies testing "pro-biotics." He tells us about the scientific studies looking at probiotics, which are increasing in popularity today from Scandinavia to Asia.
• Tim O’Reilly – The Where 2.0 Application (3.8) The increasing availability of free map and imagery data and services comes at a time when GPS and other location sensors are becoming ubiquitous. This has brought geospatial applications programming within reach of a growing number of developers and the results, exciting in themselves, point the way to a fully network-enabled future. Tim O’Reilly’s talk identifies trends in mobile and location-based applications, while drawing parallels with other software markets.

 

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:

• A Dinner Conversation with Mark Cuban (3.7) From last year’s Web 2.0 Conference: After Mark Cuban made a billion or so selling his company to Yahoo! during the height of the Web 1.0 craze, he decided to buy a basketball team. Fortunately, he bought the Mavericks, a team whose name suits his style: brash, out there, and unconventional. Now he’s back in the media business with HDNet.

Don’t miss this year’s Web 2.0, October 5-7 in San Francisco.

Thanks to Podscope, we’ve added audio search to the IT Conversations archives. Check it out on the top of the left-hand column on any IT Conversations web page.

In next week’s Business Week (9/26/05) IT Conversations is listed as one of three Editor’s Picks for Best of the Web (Podcast). Cool!

If you really want to help kick-start our new project, ask your lawer friends if they or someone they know would be willing to help with our 501(c)3 not-for-profit status filing here in California. I’ve put this off for too long, and it’s now going to be something that slows our progress. I had a few “sure, I’d like to do that for you” promises, but none of them panned out.

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

News and Housekeeping

• Updates: The Way You Like ‘Em. Did you know that there are three ways you can receive these weekly announcements? This is the blog version, but you can also subscribe to email announcements, the IT Conversations ‘Everything’ or ‘Info-Only’ RSS feeds, or listen to the audio version.

Upcoming Events

• EuroOSCON. O’Reilly Media’s EuroOSCON is 17-20 October in Amsterdam, and through our contacts there, we’ve arranged for a 25% discount. Go to the URL below and use the code "euos05itc."
• Pop!Tech 2005. And our most popular of all events from last year, Pop!Tech, will be held again this year in Camden, Maine, October 16-19. Talk about rubbing elbows with some of the most influential people on the planet — this is the place to be.

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating.

• Stephen Lawler – Microsoft Virtual Earth (rated 2.5by IT Conversations listeners). Wouldn’t it be great if you could get information about the nearest and best restaurants and cafes when you find yourself in a new locality? It would be useful, too, if advertisers could use location-based services to target potential customers more accurately. Microsoft Virtual Earth provides APIs to do both of these things – and more. In this lively presentation, Stephen Lawler of Microsoft Corp. introduces us to the potential of MSN Virtual Earth.
• Daniel Liebowitz (2.6). On Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn intereviewed Dr. Daniel Liebowitz, author of "The Last Expedition: Stanley’s Mad Journey through the Congo." He talks about Henry Stanley, famous for his line "Dr. Livingston, I presume," and relates the story of Stanley’s Last and Questionable Expedition to Africa, what he calls his Mad Journey through the Congo.
• Marc Benioff at Supernova (2.9). Salesforce.com is well-known for its hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service, and its on-demand customer service offering, Supportforce.com. But Salesforce.com has set its sights higher than hosted CRM and Customer Service for small companies. In this conversation with Supernova host Kevin Werbach, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff outlines the company’s larger strategy.
• Lisa Williams and Ryanne Hodson at BlogHer 2005 (3.0). The time is right to explore your own Internet TV or radio station. Get ready to reach out to the world through podcasting and video blogging. Listen to Lisa Williams and Ryanne Hodson discussing "Get Your Word Out: Audio/Video-casting" at the BlogHer 2005 conference.
• George Gilder on Larry’s World (3.0). "Many people still have this nostalgic belief that China somehow continues to be Communist, when in fact, in their constitution in 2003 they incorporated a provision upholding the sanctity of private property." Gilder believes that China has become a consumer country by building 60 nuclear plants. The Chinese government uses science and technology in a realistic way because China is run by engineers, not lawyers. This is just one of the controversial subjects touched on by Magid and Gilder in this interview.
• Kim Polese – Do-It-Yourself IT (3.3). How is the open-source software world slowly moving from do-it-yourself (DIY) to do-it-together (DIT)? Which companies have identified the challenge, and why is testing a barrier to the growth of the software industry? Kim Polese answers these questions and talks about her new startup, SpikeSource, in this presentation from OSCON 2005.
• Asa Dotzler – Linux on the Desktop (3.4). Why isn’t Linux ready for the desktop, and what can the developer community do to increase adoption? (For that matter, can Linux ever make it big on the desktop or is it only an impossible pipe dream?) Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator for several Mozilla projects, tackles all these questions in this insightful talk from ETech 2005.
• Bob Wyman – Legalities of Syndication (3.4). Should websites and online businesses be liable for the actions of their users? Can syndication and reuse of content available via RSS and Atom feeds attract copyright-violation lawsuits? Why can’t the Creative Commons (CC) license be used as a basis for Digital Rights Management (DRM)? In this edition of Sound Policy with Denise Howell, Bob Wyman speaks about technical and legal aspects of syndication.
• Anders Zachrisson (3.8). On Biotech Nation, Moira Gunn spoke with Anders Zachrisson, senior vice president of BioGaia, on the science of "pro-biotics," the flip side to antibiotics.
• Sig Solares – Surviving Katrina with DirectNIC (3.9). With his team of brave and resourceful techies, Sig kept open a lifeline to their datra center, their customers and their city, all the way through Hurricane Katrina and its horrific aftermath. The crisis is far from over, and the smell of sewage, death and diesel generator fumes still fills the facility; but Sig kindly found time to talk with Doc Searls about a DIY-IT project which, for years to come, will serve as a crowning example of problem-solving in a real-life Worst Case Scenario.
• Andrew Fraknoi (4.3). Moira also spoke with Andrew Fraknoi, the chairman of the Astronomy Program at Foothill College, who explained why we’re finding all those new planets, and the big fight about what’s a planet and what isn’t.
• Jason Fried – Basecamp (4.3). Ride with Jason Fried of 37signals as he takes us through the lessons learned while building Basecamp, a hosted project management tool that is extremely popular among its thousands of users. Jason shares his experiences about what works and what doesn’t in web development and how the unconventional development methodologies followed by 37signals give it an edge. From the advantages of working as a team with members in different continents to getting the word about your product out effectively, Jason covers it all.

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:

• Scott Ambler – Are You Agile or Are You Fragile? (3.8). A presentation by Scott Ambler at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series in 2003 entitled "Are You Agile or Are You Fragile?" The software industry is shifting from large-scale, prescriptive processes that mandate rigorous procedures and policies to lighter, more agile methodologies. Are these agile processes appropriate for your organization? If so, which should you consider adopting?