(Hear the MP3 version)

Housekeeping

• Google Groups – Maybe Not. As those of you on the email list can see, I didn’t try the Google Groups experiment after all. Only two people asked me not to use their email addresses there, but I just ran out of time to get ready for the test. And it turns out that this system (handled by iPost) does a lot better job of formatting text than Google Groups, so I’d have to re-format the text messages to make the look decent there. I’ll be sticking with iPost for now.
• RSS Feeds. As I also mentioned last week, I was testing running the RSS feeds through FeedBurner, but it turned out there was a problem for a significant number of subscribers. It’s not a FeedBurner bug, but rather a bug in the current version of iPodder, and it also turns out that nearly a quarter of you who subscribe to the MP3 and AAC feeds are using that software. So I won’t be using FeedBurner until version 2.0 of iPodder is released and it’s had some time to be widely adopted. Thanks for all your feedback on the RSS feeds.
• It’s Pledge Week! Here in the Bay Area at least, it’s pledge week on public radio, and that got me thinking: How important is IT Conversations to you as compared to public radio? Do you contribute to your local NPR station (or some equivalent for non-U.S. listeners)? Don’t you think IT Conversations deserves a contribution of at least as much?

  Well, once again by popular demand the IT Conversations tip jar is open. You’ll find the Donate button on every web page.

• But Wait! Rather than send me a few dollars by PayPal or Amazon, there’s a way you can do much more to help me continue to build IT Conversations, and it won’t cost you a penny. Here’s what would help me more than anything:

  I’d like you to think of what companies should be underwriting IT Conversations, and I’d like you to tell them that you think so. It could be the company you work for. It could be a vendor (such as Apple or other MP3-player manufacturers) who would obviously benefit from a presence on IT Conversations. It could be Microsoft or IBM or Google or Yahoo! It could be any company that you or your own company does business with that you think should be associated with IT Conversations and would like to get that message out to tens of thousands of listeners. All you have to do is email that company and CC me at doug@itconversations.com.

  Your message should be short and sweet. Tell them about IT Conversations, why IT Conversations is important to you, personally, and tell them why being an IT Conversations underwriter would be good for their business. Oh, and don’t forget to include my email address so that they know how to take the next step.

  If you know someone that buys advertising for the company, that’s great. But even if you just have a friend that works in the mailroom, get in touch with him or her and ask that they move your suggestion up the org chart to the right person. You might want to refer them to a few of the reviews and testimonials I’ve posted on the site. You’ll find them at www.itconversations.com/reviews.html. You may even find your own comments there, if they’re available on your blog or elsewhere online. (I haven’t posted many of the hundreds of email comments I get because I want prospective underwriters to be able to verify that the comments are legitimate and independent.)

  I’ve never tried this before, but I have a feeling that if the thousands of IT Conversations listeners each send one email message to a prospective underwriter, some of them will get to the right person in the right companies, and IT Conversations will soon have its first real underwriters. Again, please CC me, so I know how many such messages are being sent out.

  You’ll begin hearing brief thank-you messages to those who support IT Conversations programs. These messages won’t be in the middle of the programs, just briefly at the beginning and end.

• Just one more request during our own version of NPR’s Pledge Week. There’s a web site called www.PodcastAlley.com that rates various podcasts based on user votes. As of Thursday night, IT Conversations is #29 and slipping in the ratings. It turns out that many of the other podcasts are, now like me, asking their listeners to vote for them.

  Well, since it is Pledge Week after all, and I’m not above begging, please go to PodcastAlley.com and put in a vote for IT Conversations. In fact, while you’re there, leave a comment, too. I really think we should be in the Top Ten list, don’t you?

New Programs This Week

• The Gillmor Gang (3.3). Last week’s show was again highly rated. It’s all about blogging and RSS with The Gang’s special guests, Rafat Ali and Stephen O’Grady. Does Bloglines represent the tipping point for blogs? What about blogs in the corporate world? Is there a role for blogs in business processes? And do blogs make companies more transparent? Blogs are simple and valuable, so why aren’t they part of IBM or Micorosoft’s plans for their collaborative-software products?
• Pervasive Computing from Accelerating Change (2.6). Once again it looks like panel discussions just aren’t the favorite format for IT Conversations listeners even though this one has some very good speakers. “The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT” included panelists Dana Blankenhorn (writer and consultant), Joachim Schaper (SAP Research Labs) and Andreas Olligschlaeger (TruNorth Data Systems).
• Ken Schwaber at the SDForum Agile Summit (3.7). Here’s a program that’s very specialized but also the highest-rated show of the week: The benefits of Agile are many, the implementation is easy, and the problems are daunting. In this presentation entitled, “You Thought it was Easy: Wrestling Gold from Today’s Software Projects,” Ken Schwaber, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium & Chairman of the Agile Alliance, discusses the obstacles to wresting that gold. If you’re a programmer or an IT manager, this is one you should hear.
• Joe Kraus Introduces JotSpot (2.5). And clearly, vendor announcements are rated even lower than panel discussions. Sean Bonner wrote, “[JotSpot] is a cool wiki-ish app that does the standard wiki stuff but also allows you to e-mail pages around and rank users (giving them specific access based on that). Additionally it lets you use forms and include structured info on the page. One thing that looks really cool is the ability to integrate RSS feeds and Google searches and all kinds of feeds like that.”
• Innovation Managers Panel (2.6). Even though panels aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, I do want to bring you all the sessions from the events we cover, because each session — even a panels — is valuable to at least part of the audience. “IT, Nanotech, and Venture Capital” with Cynthia Breazeale (Intel), Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), and Christine Peterson, Co-Founder and Vice President of the Foresight Institute. From Accelerating Change 2004.
• Clint Bajakian – Game Audio Production (too late for review). We’ve still got a few sessions from the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference to bring you. This one is rather specialized. For many top composers and sound designers, the Macintosh is the tool of choice for videogame music and audio production. Clint Bajakian, recipient of the 2003 Game Audio Network Guild awards for Best Interactive Score and Music, walks you through his production process and demonstrates the possibilities of interactive audio. Clint also lays out his vision for the next-generation software tools that could make the Mac an even better platform for audio production.
• Tech Nation – January 27, 2005 (too late for review). On this week’s Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Barbara Kellerman, Research Director, Center for Public Leadership, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and the author of Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters about what makes for bad leaders. Just so you know, Dr. Kellerman names names.

  Moira also speaks with futurist and forecaster Mary O’Hara-Devereaux, a forecaster, the CEO of Global Foresight, and author of Navigating the Badlands: Thriving in the Decade of Radical Transformation. She believes we’ve entered a period of disruptive innovation, and the next two decades will be a wild ride – she calls them “The Badlands.”

  And in this week’s BioTech Nation segment, Dr. Sunil Maulik, chairman and CEO of GeneEd, Inc., explains how you can learn the basics of biotech — online. You won’t be a scientist, but you might have a new career.

From the Archives

Here’s one of my personal favorite programs from the IT Conversations archives:

• Tim O’Reilly: The Software Paradigm Shift (4.3). Not only is this one of my favorites, it’s also one of yours. In fact, this is the highest rated show of the more than 400 in the IT Conversations archives. It’s an interview I did with Tim O’Reilly nearly a year and a half ago — back in the days of more primitive audio hardware — and it’s encoded at only half the bitrate that I’m using now. Still, if you haven’t heard it, I think you’ll enjoy it.

  “We’re at the end of the personal-computing era. We’re at the beginning of something profoundly different.” Ask most people what software they use, and you’re not likely to hear Linux. Yet many of the most popular web sites are based on Linux and other open-source tools. Tim says the operating system no longer matters — no more than the browser or the CPU matters. Applications now live above the level of a single device or operating system. The “paradigm failure” is that people don’t understand the importance of sites like Amazon.com, eBay, and Google, because they are so locked into the PC application model. “We’re commoditizing software in the same way as hardware was commoditized in the ’80s,” he says, “and value is being driven up the stack to next-generation information services and applications.”

  I encourage you to get to know the man behind the animal-woodcut covers that fill our shelves. His mission: “Technology transfer — helping important technologies become more widespread” and to “create more value than we capture.”

This isn’t a new idea, but I’ve been getting status reports via RSS of temporary performance problems, outages (none), updates, etc., from the gang at FeedBurner. This is awesome. I want an RSS feed for every product and service I use: my computer hardware, my software, my car, my refrigerator. And I want a way to tell my aggregator(s) to check some of these feeds only once a day or whatever. (Using a web-based aggregator like NewsGator Online makes this a bit less important.) Many people have suggested this before, but I never realized how great it is to get this information proactively and not in email.

Because of a bug in iPodder (lemon) I have turned off the use of FeedBurner for the IT Conversations Everything feeds. The bug will be corrected in iPodder 2.0, which just entered beta test. Once that client is widely distributed, I plan to redirect to FeedBurner again. This explains the slight drop in traffic since 25% or so of the IT Conversations RSS traffic comes from iPodder.

IT Conversations has outgrown my homebrew content-management system and I’m looking for a replacement, preferably one written in PHP. Any recommendations?

During my research I’ve discovered that the term “content-manatement system,” which meant one thing in the pre-Web days, now usually refers to a web-site creation, management and runtime tool, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want a good behind-the-scenes package for managing the content on the input side of the database.

The IT Conversations site is rendered dynamically and statically from a MySQL database using PHP, Smarty (templates) and a fair amount of custom code. I’m happy with the rendering side of things. But I’ve also got a web-based admin system for adding and editing the data from which the site is rendered, and that’s the piece I want to replace. For example, the current system has no concepts of users or groups, so I can’t safely invite others to manage portions of the content.

As I look (superficially) at packages luke Drupal and Mambo, it doesn’t appear that they can be used to manage an arbitrary schema. Rather you’ve got to use their schemas, and I’d prefer not to have to convert the entire site, since I like the way it’s organized internally.

If we’re going to attracts advertisers, sponsors and undewriters to our podcasts, we’re going to have to give them statistics, preferably audited. And if we all use the same metrics we’ll be able to educate media buyers more quickly and accelerate their decision making.

Just to get the discussion moving, I’ve posted some thoughts on how podcasters might measure and report their listenership on the IT Conversations wiki. Feel free to add your ideas or comment on mine.

In his story You Can’t Be Too Thin for Slate, Paul Boutin describes aacPlus (AAC+SBR) as a potential successor to MP3 for low-bitrate audio. A proprietary variation of standard AAC (without SBR) is used in iPods and iTunes and is somewhat better than MP3 for some applications. AAC is also used by some radio stations and IT Conversations for studio-to-studio links over ISDN lines. Another variation, AAC-LD (for low-delay) is great for audio over POTS lines. The popular presentation at Pop!Tech 2004 by Malcolm Gladwell was streamed from Maine to IT Conversations this way, then re-encoded into MP3 for downloading. aacPlus does indeed sound good at 48kbps and remarkably good at 64kbps. (The 18-month-old reporty cited by Paul wasn’t able to test 64kbps at that time.)

But for the hard-core audio geeks out there, a few clarifications: The basic AAC and MP3 algorithms are in the same family known as perceptual codecs. The “plus” is Spectral Band Replication which is also available with MP3s as MP3Pro. Also, Paul describes aacPlus’ handling of stereo as L+R and L-R signals. This isn’t all that new, since most modern codecs use this scheme and some go even further. (The EBU’s test document doesn’t say which stereo scheme was used for their tests.)

Paul writes that “Webcasters spend most of their money paying for network traffic,” and refers to a $4,000 monthly bill to support 1,000 listeners. I did that math, and he’s in the ballpark. If those listeners were tuned into a 64kbps stream 24 hours a day for the entire month, the cost would indeed be between $5,000 and $8,000 each month and somewhat less at 48kbps. Of course, with BitTorrent the costs drop dramatically, but BT only helps with downloads, not streams. There are, however, P2P technologies for streaming and others are on the way.

But is Paul correct that “Future digital music players will support the format just as surely as they do MP3?” I’m not as optimistic. Sony, for example, is just now coming around to supporting MP3, and Apple has a lot invested in its proprietary version of standard AAC. My sense is that it will take a long time. Don’t hold your breath.

(Hear the MP3 version.)

Housekeeping

• Email Announcements. As those of you on the email list can see, I’m sticking with the weekly announcements for now, and I’m using simple text-only messages rather than HTML. The feedback on that issue was overwhelmingly one sided. I received nearly 200 email messages this time, and virtually everyone said that they either preferred text to HTML or that it didn’t matter one way or another. So text it will be. And I’m sorry I can’t reply to all your great messages with words of support and encouragement. There are just too many. What a great problem to have!
• Google Groups – An Experiment. I’m about to try another experiment with the email list. I want to see if Google Groups, which is now in beta, works as well as or better than the current system. If it does, I think Google Groups will be much simpler to maintain since it’s easier for users to manage their own options. So for next week I plan to upload the entire email list to Google. According to their claims, the email addresses should remain confidential and you shouldn’t receive any spam from Google or its partners. But before I run the test I want to find out if anyone out there knows of a reason I shouldn’t do this. If you think it’s a bad idea, send email to me at doug@itconversations.com. Don’t send a message if it’s okay with you; I’ll take silence as consent to run the test in this case. But if you see a problem with using Google Groups for email announcements — particularly a privacy problem — let me know.
• RSS Feeds. And still on the topic of email, many listeners have pointed out that RSS is a superior alternative to email. This makes me wonder whether they realize that IT Conversations has over 100 different RSS feeds. I agree that RSS is better in many ways than email, so if you don’t already know about the feeds and all the variations including enclosures and topic-based feeds, take a look at the Podcast/RSS page.
• Feedburner. And while I’m on the subject of RSS, I’m trying yet another experiment. If you currently subscribe to one of the site-wide “Everything” feeds, you may have noticed that your feed now comes through Feedburner. This is a new service that helps track RSS subscriptions so that I can attract sponsors and underwriters by giving them independently compiled statistics. I’m about to switch all of the IT Conversations feeds to Feedburner, so please let me know immediately if you’ve had any RSS problems in the past week.

New Programs This Week

• The Gillmor Gang (rated 3.3). Now Google’s VP of Engineering, Adam Bosworth joined The Gang last Friday with his vision for the future of search architecture. Adam points out that today’s databases are built on the relational model, but most of today’s queries are not. They’re looking for keyword precision, location and semantic context — not a textual or numeric match. The relational model works when both the data and the queries can be anticipated, but in today’s world, neither are typically known in advance. This is one of the more popular Gillmor Gang shows, and I recommend it for anyone interested in the future and technology of databases and the Internet.
• Andy Ihnatko – Tales from the Crypt (rated 3.2). A regular columnist for Macintosh magazines, Andy describes himself as America’s 42nd Most-Beloved Industry Figure. In this session from the Mac OS X Conference, Andy presents unique examples of creative genius from the past. He then turns his sights to the future and look at collaboration technologies that are flowing our way. Because as we all know, business health requires that you always drink upstream from the herd. A good program for those interested in the Macintosh world.
• John Doerr at at Web 2.0 (rated 2.9). John is one of the most prolific venture capitalists in the world, and his most recent — and most spectacular — success is Google, which he backed in 1999 despite significant skepticism among other VCs. Asked at the time why he would back a search company with no proven business model, John responded: “With this kind of traffic, we’ll figure it out.” Seems they did. In conversation with John Heilemann, who has been jousting onstage with Doerr for nearly a decade now. John is always an interesting guy, even if you’re not into the VC world.
• Gian Fulgoni – Broadband Internet & Consumer Behavior (rated 2.8) Ever wondered what the research companies know that you don’t? Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of comScore Networks, presents “Research Examining the Impact of Broadband and Internet Tenure on Consumer Behavior.” From the Web 2.0 Conference. In general, the new-company announcements like this one are rated below average by our listeners.
• A Dinner Conversations with Mark Cuban (rated 4.0). On the other hand, although he’s a serial entrepreneur, Mark Cuban’s conversation with John Heilemann at Web 2.0 is very entertaining. After Mark 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.
• Dan Gillmor on Memory Lane (to new to rate). It’s too early to quote the stats on this one, but Dan is always popular on IT Conversations. In this edition of Memory Lane, Halley Suitt interviews Dan, the nationally known columnist for The San Jose Mercury News who recently left the paper to pursue a new venture in citizen journalism. Dan is the author of the book We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People, which was published in 2004 by O’Reilly. His new venture, Grassroots Media, has everyone talking and visiting his new blog, where he’s got a great discussion going on about blogging and journalism.
• Evan Ratliff. This week on Tech Nation Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Evan Ratliff, author of SAFE: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World. They talk about making America safe — or at least the issues which underlie it.
• Moira also speaks with with geographer and social scientist Barbara Heinzen. With a background in geography and cultural dynamics, her focus is uncertainty – how do we make decisions when we can’t possibly know the answers we need.
• In the BioTech Nation segment, Moira interviews Dr. Wim Jongen, professor and researcher, at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, about the design of new foods and food products – the goals and the challenges.
• And from the archives, here’s one of my personal favorite programs from the IT Conversations archives: Dan Geer: The Shrinking Security Perimeter (rated 3.8). Dan has a long-term view of information security, and has codified some of his thinking in a white paper entitled The Shrinking Perimeter — Making the Case for Data Level Risk Management. Dan is best known as the guy who was fired for co-authoring a report, Cyber Insecurity, suggesting the security risks posed by the monoculture caused by Microsoft’s dominance of the software industry. I recommend this one for everyone; it’s truly one of my favorite interviews with an absolutely brilliant guy.

David Berlind, Dan Gillmor and Dan Bricklin have written about the practice of linking to on-line audio recordings as source material for journalists and others. Dan G also mentioned the value of transcripts.

I learned a few lessons about recordings and transcripts 30 years ago when I covered the Senate Watergate Hearings for NBC International. Beyond my day job, I was also one of those Watergate junkies who hurried home after a long day working and flying between New York and Washington to catch the re-runs on PBS. After John Dean spilled the beans about the White House tapes, I was one of the first in line at the Federal Building to get a printed copy of the transcripts. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, but it wasn’t until I actually had a chance to hear portions of the tapes that I really understood the depth of the evil at work in the White House. Not only were the transcripts filled with errors that almost anyone could have detected (some of substance), but they never came close to capturing the temprament of the Oval Office. Only the audio could do that.

Three decades later I recorded and transcribed the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In for IT Conversations. We didn’t know it would happen until the last minute, but Joe Trippi showed up and became the main attraction of the event. I believe it was his first public appearance after leaving the Howard Dean campaign a few days before. In addition to streaming the event live, I was able to post the audio of Joe’s presentation within a few hours and the transcript two days later. What surprised and humbled me was that the transcript quickly became the ‘official’ record of Joe’s speech, and it was quoted frequently in the press. How do I know? Not because most journalists linked to my transcript, which would have led readers to the primary-source audio, but because I subsequently proofread and corrected the transcripts once again, and found that the mainstream press had quoted my transcripts verbatim, warts and all. (Why not? It’s a whole lot easier for a reporter than making his or her own transcription.)

The lessons learned? Yes, transcripts are great, but even more important is to have the original audio available like a chain of evidence so that the transcripts themselves can be transparent and that ‘downstream’ journalists and others have the opportunity to review the source.

This is one reason why, with the help of Jon Udell, I created the clip facility for IT Conversations: to make it easy for others to place audio excerpts directly in their blogs so that readers can experience the source material in its most-transparent format. In fact, this is why I created IT Conversations in the first place. I was interviewing experts as source material for a book I was writing, and I realized that if I could turn readers of my written interpretation into listeners of the experts’ own voices, I could take myself out of the loop and provide a more transparent path from guru to student. In the role of author, I was just getting in the way. In the role of interviewer and editor, I was abe to clarify. Better writers can do that in print, but I feel more confident in audio, particularly if I’m not the one who’s suppsoed to be the expert!

This is a topic I’ve discussed with a number of high-end podcasters in the past two weeks. Many of us are ready to get serious about sponsorship and underwriting of our programs. The problem is that we’re not ad-sales people — we’re hosts and producers — and none of us have enough traffic to support a salesperson. We need the same level of professionalism in ad sales that exists for more traditional web advertising and sponsorship, and we need that help from someone who can explain to prospective sponsors the unique opportunities (and challenges) of podcasting. For example, unlike display-ad sites, we don’t get explicit click-throughs since most of our listeners are anonymous, retrieving their content via RSS and podcatcher software.

I doubt that any single podcast will achieve the levels of traffic sufficient to support a full-time ad-sales person this year. But if an independent sales rep or organization were to build a portfolio containing today’s best podcasters, I’m confident there’s enough revenue potential to justify at least one dedicated person.

The opportunity is there with the existing high-end podcasts. All it takes is for a qualified person or company to step up and take it on.

Update: See a post by Brad Gibson.

My latest book, Loosely Coupled – The Missing Pieces of Web Services, is now live in a new service called Google Print. There are two interesting benefits of Google Print. First, you can explicitly search the contents of the book, and if you find what you’re looking for, you can order the book from a variety of sources. Second, the contents of all the books scanned by Google are now within the scope of the Google search engine.