Heading to Austin for SXSW and going to miss ETech in San Diego? Or maybe the other way around? Fear not! It’s no longer an either/or choice. Now you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Thanks to the incredible cooperation and goodwill of both O’Reilly Media and SXSW Inc., IT Conversations has secured the rights to bring you the keynote presentations of both of these top events of 2005. I’ll be rolling out the MP3s on a regular basis starting about April 1.

As for me, I’ll be at ETech — not that I wouldn’t have loved to be at SXSW just as much — so please come up and say Hello.

IT Conversations has been up pretty much non-stop for nearly two years, but earlier today the site was down for about three hours. My apoligies to our listeners. We haven’t diagnosed the cause yet, but the site is back up and stable. No hardware failures at least.

IT Conversations was mentioned briefly in today’s Washington Post in an introductory article by Leslie Walker.

Okay…Help! I thought I could keep up. I’ve cut back on my own interviews to produce our other hosts’ shows, but I was still keeping my head above water even cranking out a new show every day. (Nine shows a week if you count each of Moira Gunn’s three weekly TechNation segments.) And although I received many submissions from independent producers, most of them weren’t very good, so it was easy to say, “I’m sorry, but No.” But now I’m getting some great indepently recorded but raw programs that I’d like to bring to the IT Conversations audience, and I just don’t have time to do it.

So I’ve posted the Help-Wanted details on the IT Conversations wiki. As it says at the end, there are a few dollars available — thanks to the doations from the tip jar — but the compensation will be more like a Thank-You gift than real pay.

Particularly if you’re adept with audio editing and mastering, our listeners will appreciate your efforts. Help keep listener-supported IT Conversations alive!

It was hearing Christopher Lydon’s interviews online that gave me the idea for IT Conversations, and the day after I discovered Dave Winer had helpped post Chris’ interviews as RSS enclosures, I did the same. (I hand-copied the RSS tags to get the right syntax.) But like many, I’ve missed hearing Chris’ voice. I didn’t know it, but apparently he and his WBUR producer, Mary McGrath, had been fired by then GM Jane Christo. According to an article by Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix, “Christo resigned [last fall] during an investigation into whether she had mismanaged the Boston University–owned station’s finances.”

Dan’s article contains the blow-by-blow of Chris’ situation over the past four years, but the big news from Dan is that Chris will be back bigger and better than ever: both on radio and as a podcast.

Welcome back, Chris. We’ve missed you.

In answer to many queries I’ve received in the past few days, Yes, IT Conversations will publish the audio from O’Reilly Media’s Emerging Technology Conference this year, as we did last year. But no live strem this time around. It’s a lot of work to reach just a few hundred listeners, whereas the downloads/podcasts reach tens of thousands. Last year streaming was hot, this year it’s not.

Another benefit of not streaming is that I get to attend without spending all day ‘on the air.’ Instead I’ll have a chance to meet new people and say Hello to old friends.

Thanks again to the wonderful people at O’Reilly Media who allow IT Conversations to bring you their excellent events at no charge. And there are still two slots open for sponsors of our audio coverage of ETech 2005. If your company is interested in reaching 50,000-100,000 serious geeks, please email me at doug@itconversations.com.

It’s one of those best-kept secrets, but in my spare time — and to pay some bills — I’m still writing a column for The Web Host Industry Review. Here’s my column on BitTorrent hosting in the March issue. If you’re interested in the web-hosting world, this is a great site and they’re now publishing a very nice (and free) hard-copy edition.

(Hear the MP3, which contains far more detail.)

New Shows

• Real-Time Filmmaking on OS X (rated 3.4)
• Mark Andressen and Dan Rosenzweig at Web 2.0 (3.4)
• Music is a Platform at Web 2.0 (3.5)
• Lawrence Lessig – The Comedy of the Commons (4.2 — Wow!)
• Simon Singh on Tech Nation (too late for rating)
• Brian Greene on Tech Nation (too late for rating)
• Geolocation: The Killer Map from Web 2.0 (too late for rating)
• And one of my favorite shows from the archives: Rick Chapman — In Search of Stupidity

Other Stuff

• IT Conversastions in The Boston Globe
• The Creative Commons Sampling License
• Podcast Alley: Self-Destructing or Is There Hope?
• My Favorite Podcasts
• A 200GB Day for IT Conversations
• Social Software for IT Conversations
• Personal Program Queues — Do you know about them?

A few minutes ago I was sitting here in the studio, taking a break, and listening to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” on NPR. I had the FM tuner playing through the studio monitors when the phone rang. My immediate reaction was to look for the Pause button. TiVo and podcasting: I’m converted.

My wife’s 10-year-old PC is dying again, and I’m tired of resuscitating it. The solution? She gets my little iBook G4 and I get a new 15″ PowerBook. That seems only fair, doesn’t it? But at the same time, I’ve decided to do what thousands before me have done: I”m moving my life (email, IM, word processing, etc.) from Windows to OS X. It’s both exciting and frightenting for a guy who’s lived on a PC for nearly 20 years and knows virtually nothing about Macintoshes. I’ve mostly used the iBook to make sure IT Conversations works okay for Mac owners, but when I took it on vacation recently, I decided to make the change.

What recources exist to help people with this migration? Any tips? Web sites? Books? And what are the must-have utilities and other apps on the Mac? So far, I’ve found the following:

• Launch Bar
• Mac Stumbler
• BBEdit