An IT Conversations user reports that he can’t stream to his PocketPC. Is anyone else either successful or unsuccessful trying this?

(Hear the MP3 version)

Housekeeping

• Back from Vacation.
  I’m finally back from a terrific vacation and trying desperately to catch up with email and other chores. I hope you enjoyed the programs I was able to prepare in advance and launch each day while I was gone.
• The Great IT Conversations Button Contest.
  A number of listeners sent in images for the contest, and I’ve posted the best of them. If you’d like to tell others about IT Conversations, please visit that page and copy a button to your own website or blog.
• PodcastAlley.com.
  Thanks to your votes, last week IT Conversations jumped again from #7 to #4 on PodcastAlley.com. It may seem trivial, but in these early days of podcasting, PodcastAlley.com is one of the few independent sources of comparative data, and our rating there is already helping attract sponsors and underwriters.
• The Gillmor Gang — Still on Hiatus.
  Once again we didn’t have a chance to put together a new edition of The Gillmor Gang this past week, but I hope we’ll be able to round up The Gang for another show as soon as possible.
• The Future of AAC/M4B Files.
  I want to alert IT Conversations listeners to a possible future change — one that I know won’t be particularly popular among iPod users. Last year I started encoding files in AAC (.m4b) format in addition to MP3. The primary advantage is that on Apple iPods (and only on iPods) you can pause an AAC file, listen to another, and when you return to the first one, you continue at the point you left off. This really ought to work for all file types on all players, but that isn’t the case.

  I spent many hours trying to find an encoder that would create the proper files on my Linux-based content-management system, but the only solution I could find turned out to be a very manual operation using iTunes on a Mac or PC.

  I’m currently working on the further automation of the IT Conversations web site, and it appears that I may have to eliminate this manual operation. So unless I can find a Linux-based encoder that creates iPod-compatible AAC files, I may have to eliminate the AAC option and deliver only MP3 files.

  The good news is that many of the podcatching clients such as Doppler and iPodderX can automatically convert downloaded files to AAC at the receiving end.

New Programs from the Past Two Weeks

Because of my time away from the studio, I’ve got two week’s worth of shows to cover. Here are the top five, ranked according to the votes cast by you, the listeners of IT Conversations:
• #5: Interface: Jaron Lanier v. Will Wright (3.6).
  As our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep them from dehumanizing us? Should we be concerned that U.S. youth have had forty years of declining math, science, and analytical reading skills? A debate from the Accelerating Change 2004 conference.
• #4: The Gillmor Gang (3.6).
  The Gang asks guest Dan Bricklin what innovations are on his radar. Dan’s answers include the trend to large amounts of storage that allow a store-now-think-later approach, mobility, cheap CPU power and IP connectivity everywhere. Dan also points out that “Google caught everyone by surprise,” by using the population to generate the connection database. The Gang digs into the benefits of pervasive devices that can share with others and considers whether evolution shows us how markets work.
• #3: Stewart Copeland (4.0).
  Since his early days with the Police, drummer Stewart has been heavily involved with technology. Today he’s a composer for film, TV, and opera, having scored more than 60 soundtracks. In this live fireside chat at the Mac OS X conference, Copeland reveals his innovative recording techniques, lays out his dreams for the ideal music software, and even recalls his skin-piercing sampler shootout with Sting.
• #2: Malcolm Gladwell on Tech Nation (4.2)
  Malcolm Gladwell is back to discuss his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Dr. Moira Gunn asks him, “Do you really think there’s a science of decision?” We have two kinds of thought, Malcolm says. The first is the rational, deliberate and conscious thought that we analyze and cherish. The other is the kind of thinking that occurs below the level of awareness, and it doesn’t happen slowly and deliberately, but really quickly. We tend to dismiss the latter in our society, but in the past few years psychologists have referred to this as the product of the adaptive unconscious. It’s a kind of a big computer that does all the background tasks. It’s powerful and fast, but because it’s not part of our consciousness, it’s rather mysterious. Join Moira for another great interview with an IT Conversations favorite.
• #1: Cory Ondrejka — Living the Dream (5.0)
  Over the next decade, visionary entrepreneurs will emerge from the digital melting pot of distributed and connected populations. Innovation and growth will allow digital worlds to capture an increasing share of the global economy. They will soon be in direct economic competition with real-world nations. Cory is the VP of Product Development, Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. (From Accelerating Change 2004)

And here are the other shows posted in the past two weeks:

• Andrew Conru at Web 2.0 (2.6). What can we learn from the adult industry?
• So, Is This a Bubble Yet? (2.6). Leading analysts Lanny Baker and Safa Rashtchy join top financier Bill Janeway and London-based Danny Rimer to address the state of the Internet’s finances.
• Keith Halper – Reality Games (3.2). At Accelerating Change 2004, Kuma CEO Keith Halper discussed the techniques and technology which make episodic games possible, their cultural and financial impact, and the process of introducing revolutionary change in the buzz-driven market for games.
• Dave Sifry at Web 2.0 (3.1). Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati presented the inside look at this explosive new medium at the Web 2.0 Conference.
• The Mobile Platform (3.3). At the Web 2.0 conference, mobile expert Rael Dornfest discusses the state of the mobile web with innovators Russell Beattie, Jory Bell, Juha Christensen and Trip Hawkins.
• James Currier – Tickle (3.0). Every great consumer business is built around the psychology and emotions of the individual. Come take a deep dive into consumer psychology and its implications for the future of online consumer services.

Greatest Hits from the Archives

Amd finally, here’s one of my personal favorite programs from the IT Conversations archives:
• Malcolm Gladwell: Human Nature (4.2).
  If you like this week’s interview of Malcolm Gladwell by Moira Gunn, make sure you listen to a presentation he gave last year at the Pop!Tech 2004 conference. It’s one of the most popular and highly rated programs on IT Conversations.

  Malcolm explores why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke’s market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.

There’s a lot of buzz about the updated ASCAP license that addresses podcasting, but be careful! An ASCAP license is only one piece of the puzzle. I first wrote about this six months ago, and I was going to write a detailed update, but Matt May beat me to it.

(Hear the MP3 version.)

Housekeping

• Underwriting Campaign. Last week’s plea to help find underwriters for IT Conversations was quite successful. I’ve received six inquiries and hope to turn one or two of them into real sponsors in the weeks to come. But my goal is for three full-fledged underwriters, so keep pinging that gray matter of yours, and when the perfect-fit underwriter comes to mind, either tell them or tell me.
• The Great IT Conversations Button Contest.
  You know those little buttons that people put on their web sites or blogs to highlight affiliations they have with things like Apache, Linux or PHP? A listener pointed out that we don’t have a button like that and she wanted a way to tell the world how much she loves IT Conversations. She’s right — we need a button. Being visually challenged as I am, and due to the wealth of talent among our listeners, I hereby announce the opening of The Great IT Conversations Button Contest.

  It’s simple: Design and send me a JPEG or GIF button that’s a maximum of 120 pixels wide by 85 pixels high. I’ll select the winner(s) and post them and the runners up along with the names and any URLs submitted by their creators. You can include any graphic or text. Say it in words or say it in graphics, but the idea is something like “I IT Conversations” or “I Listen to IT Conversations.”

• Podcast Alley.
  Last week I asked you to visit PodcastAlley.com and cast a vote for IT Conversations with a hope of getting us into the top ten. Well, more than 250 of you did just that, and IT Conversations jumped from #29 all the way up to #7. We don’t need to be any higher than that to get attention, but we do need to continue to get more votes just to keep ourselves there, so if you haven’t already voted and left a comment, please visit PodcastAlley.com.
• Forward to a Friend.
  Yes, the tip jar is still open — just look for the Donate button on any IT Conversations web page — but this week I have another non-monetary request. Ever since I stopped sending out daily email announcements, the growth of our traffic has slowed. So this week here’s what you can do to help. Please tell your friends. Just take a moment and send an email message or IM to three people who you think would enjoy IT Conversations and may not know about us yet. If each of you sends three messages, particularly if you send a link to your favorite IT Conversations program, we should see a significant bump in traffic, just as we saw our ranking jump on PodcastAlley.com.
• Vacation.
  And finally, I just want to let you know that I’ll be taking a vacation for the next two weeks. My wife and I are a bit burned out from all we’ve been doing for the past few months, so we’re taking some time off. But don’t worry — I’ve managed to get two weeks ahead in the production schedule, so you can expect to see and hear roughly one new program each day even while I’m gone. And if you’re sending me email — and please don’t stop; I love it — don’t be surprised if the response comes even more slowly than usual.

New Programs This Week

• The Gillmor Gang (3.2).
  Steve called in from the Integrated Media Association’s New Media Summit with his special guest, Stephen Hill. The talk was all about the convergence of public radio and new media such as podcasting. That convergence is due to digital technologies and the fact that it’s now possible for nearly anyone to create broadcast-quality audio with a very small investment in equipment. But what about the business models? And if there’s an explosion of content, how will we sort our way through it?
• Brewster Kahle at Web 2.0 (3.6).
  His goal is no less than “universal access to all knowledge.” It’s possible, but will we do it? The 26 million books in the Library of Congress? In Word format, that’s only about 26 terrabytes, small enough to fit on a single bookshelf. The entire collection could be scanned for only $260 million. Music? Only 2-3 million discs have ever been sold. Movies? Only 100,000-200,000. The question is, “What are we allowed to scan?”
• Distance Infrastructure Panel at Accelerating Change (3.3).
  Three presentations and a Q&A. Milton Chen of VSee Lab (Visual Communication and Collaboration Software for Afghanistan), Jeremy Bailenson of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (Collaborative Virtual Environments and Transformed Social Interaction) and Dewayne Hendricks, a wireless activist (One Gigabit or Bust Initiative — A Broadband Vision for California.)
• Scott Ambler – Are You Agile or Are You Fragile? (3.3).
  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? What challenges can you expect and how can you overcome them? Another in our special presentations from the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series.
• Tech Nation.
  On this week’s Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Andy Hertzfeld, the programmer of the Mac Toolbox, and author of “Revolution in the Valley: The Making of the Mac.”

  And in this week’s BioTech Nation segment, Moira speaks with Dr. Patricia Oseweijer, who discusses the difference between genetically modified foods and the technique of genomics.

From the Archives

• Craig Newmark: Craig’s List (3.3).
  Craig Newmark doesn’t know this, and I’ve never said it before, but he’s one of my heroes. I can’t think of anyone else who has been as sincerely altruistic and stuck to his principles and vision as successfully as Craig. In building IT Conversations, I often find myself thinking, “What would Craig do?” And it works.

  In 1995, he was sending his friends in San Francisco e-mail messages with lists of local events. With their encouragement, this became Craig’s List, which has now expanded to Boston, Seattle, New York and 19 other regions. Nine years later, Craig’s List now gets 500 million page views and 4 million unique visitors every month. The staff numbers 14, and the site runs on about 30 Linux boxes. Craig says his success is based on “a culture of trust.” When I asked about his business model, he just laughed.

That’s it for this week. Remember: Vote for IT Conversations at www.PodcastAlley.com, send those email messages to your favorite sponsors, and tell three friends about us. And thanks for listening.

We’re about to see an explosion in podcast syndication. Not only are the ranks of podcasters growing rapidly, but a number of sites and services that want to aggregate podcasts have appeared with many more to follow shortly. There are already at least three syndication channels through which I’d like to publish IT Conversations content.

The problem is that I’m releasing way too many programs to manually upload files and enter metadata into three or more web sites. It could easily take a few hours every day, and as the number of syndication deals, it just gets worse.

So I think we — the podcasting community — have a chance to create a standard for the syndication of podcasts. I don’t think RSS is the best way to do this because the large aggregators aren’t going to want to be polling all the producers all day long. Better would be something like OPML and the ipodder.org directory for which a publisher creates and XML file and then pings the recipient, asking that the file be retrieved. Either that or a REST-style HTTP POST to accomplish the same thing. Or XML-RPC?

How to pull this off? Perhaps the best starting point would be to try and get the aggregators/syndicators together. If you’re in that category and would like to participate in the discussion, send me a note (doug@itconversations.com). Let’s just see who replies for now.

Jon Udell found transom.org, a great site with tips for audio recording. Jeff Towne offers this excellent Minidisc Guide. Even with all their faults, I love MDs for remote recording. In fact, using the new 1GB HiMD disks and the new Sony HiMD recorder, I get nearly eight hours on a single disk. Using three HiMD recorders, I was able to record all three tracks of Bloggercon III by just starting recorders in each room and picking them up at the end of the day.

Jeff also reviews Audacity, which I use only in a pinch. Dave Slusher recently had the same type of catastrophic failure I’ve experienced as well. My first choice is Sound Forge.

There are many other interesting tips such as Barrett Golding’s Digital Editing Basics. In one example he shows (but doesn’t describe) an important sound-editing trick. In the example below, notice that he makes his cuts just before the beginning of the sound he’s removing and just before the next sound, not in the breath or even the silence between words. By making your cuts immediately before sound changes (e.g., the start of a new word), the new sound masks the abruptness of your edit. If you make your cuts earlier, you’ll hear them.

You can spend hours exploring this great site.

A fair number of listeners have been asking for a way to participate in dicussions about IT Conversations’ shows. What to do? We’ve got Trackbacks, so if you have a blog that sends out Trackback pings, they’ll be added to the program detail pages. And about a year ago I set up one of those discussion-forum packages for IT Conversations, but it was never very popular. Managing the spam wasn’t worth the hassle, so I turned it off. The IT Conversations wiki is working out, but I don’t think that’s a great format for open discussion.

What would you like to see (if anything) as a discussion tool in support of IT Conversations?

Of course you wouldn’t really want a Podcast for announcing Amber Alerts. Time-shifted delivery isn’t such a good idea when people need help. But here’s an interesting application of email (not RSS) and audio. I’ve subscribed to California’s Emergency Digital Information Service for a long time now. I get email announcements of everything from severe weather and west-coast tsunami alerts, to earthquake reports and Amber alerts. This week they started using MP3 audio in addition to text.

Just nine hours after the “campaign” began, IT Conversations has jumpped from #29 to #12 on PodcastAlley.com. Next stop: the Top Ten. Look out Dawn and Drew — here we come!

Adam Green has a new weekly podcast and his first show has an all-star cast of Hal Pawluk, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Jeffrey Tarter. If Adam can keep this up, it should be a great series. I’m trying to convince him to distribute the show under the IT Conversations umbrella to reach a wider audience, share in our evolving business model, etc., but I haven’t succeeded. Yet. 🙂 In the meantime, check out Adam Green’s Software Stories. Great stuff.