About once a week I get a request for IT Conversations audio encoded using Ogg Vorbis. These requests come in via the anonymous survey mechanism, so I don’t get a chance to ask…Why? What is it about Ogg Vorbis that people want?

• Compatibility? Don’t MP3s play just about everywhere?
• Quality? At the same bit rate, I don’t think Ogg encoding of IT Conversations sound any better than MP3.
• Legality? My MP3 encoder is fully licensed and paid for, and there’s no restriction on the rights to play encoded IT Conversations shows.

Something else? What’s the allure of Ogg Vorbis?

Here’s the latest news from IT Conversations…

(Hear the MP3 version.)

More on Email Announcements

• Yes, this week everyone is receiving a text-only version of the IT Conversations announcements, even those who normally get the HTML version. Is it good enough? I produce the text version anyway (in addition to an HTML version), so if this is good enough for eveyone, I can put the extra time into something more worthwhile. Let me know: just Reply to this message. Thanks. …doug

  I received 53 email responses, which is about 1% of the mailing list; not a bad sample. The ratio was more than 2:1 in favor of weekly versus per-program announcements, but it’s clear that those of you who prefer to receive a message for each individual program feel strongly, and I’d like to find a way to accommodate everyone. The challenge is that it’s a lot of work to produce either version, and doing both just takes more time than I have available. So I’m still pursuing other options, particularly those that would do a decent job of generating a weekly announcement automatically from the individual-show announcements without just appending the files into one big ugly message.

  At the moment, I produce three different versions of each message: a pretty one in HTML, and two plain-text versions, one for AOL subscribers and the other for everyone else. Among the possibilities are dropping all but a single text version, and perhaps switching to a more self-managed email system like Yahoo Groups or the new Google Groups.

  For now, I’ll stick with the weekly messages, but there are more changes yet to come, but I welcome your further feedback. It’s extremely helpful.

New Programs This Week

• The Gillmor Gang: The Gillmor Gang included guests Sam Whitmore and Robert Scoble. While the old-guard media talks about the latest gadgets premiering at CES, The Gang explores what’s going on behind the scenes. Will Robert defend Bill Gate’s Communism remark? Is HP hedging its bets by supporting both Microsoft and Linux-based entertainment systems? What about the architecture: Will there be PCs in our living rooms, or will they just be entertainment peripherals? And will anyone buy this media-center stuff or is it really too expensive?
• Douglas Rushkoff — Renaissance Prospects: Douglas Rushkoff analyzes, writes and speaks about the way people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He sees “media” as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and “literacy” as the ability to participate consciously in it. This excellent presentation from Pop!Tech 2004 has been rated higher than 3.9 by IT Conversations listeners.
• Wiley Hodges – Xcode: This was Macworld Expo week, and I started with a presentation from the O’Reilly Mac OS X conferencey by Wiley Hodges, Senior Product Line Manager for Developer Products at Apple Computer, in which he looks at how Xcode 2 has evolved with Mac OS X Tiger, and how Xcode can help you take advantage of some of Tiger’s unique new features.
• Leander Kahney — Cult of Mac: Continuing on the Mac theme, I posted a show from Dr. Moira Gunn’s Tech Nation archives in which Moira speaks with cyber-journalist Leander Kahney, who writes the Wired News column: Cult of Mac. They talk about everything Apple — and just how devoted their followers are.
• Andy Hertzfeld – Macintosh Folklore: And finally, in the Mac theme, is a terrific presentation by Andy Hertzfeld, who joined the original Macintosh team in February 1981, as the second programmer on the project. He wrote much of the original operating system and user interface toolbox in 68000 assembly language. Even after leaving Apple in March 1984, he continued to make major contributions to the Macintosh platform as a third party developer by writing programs like Thunderscan, Switcher and Servant. And fortunately for us, he has a terrific memory. A very entertaining presentation from the Mac OS X conference.
• Shai Agassi – Achieving Enterprise Agility: Shai Agassi, executive board member of SAP, delivered a presentation on ‘Achieving Enterprise Agility’ at Acceelrating Change 2004. It’s too early to report any listener feedback, but Shai’s a smart guy who always has something interesting to say.
• Frans Johansson – The Medici Effect: Frans Johansson, the author of The Medici Effect, is Moira’s first guess on Tech Nation this week. He shares his perspective
  on innovation today, a spark not unlike the remarkable developments the world witnessed at the time of the Medici.
• Eckart Wintzen – Environmental Entrepreneur: Moira also interviews environmental entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen, who tells us how companies might change and how the interactions between people might evolve with the new technology.
• Alison Murdock – Starting Your Own Stem-Cell Line: And finally, Moira interviews Dr. Alison Murdock, a gynecologist and Professor of Reporductive Medicine at Newcastle University, who tells you how to start your own stem-cell line — just in case.
• Malcolm Gladwell – Blink: Malcolm Gladwell’s long-awaited new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, is now available. Buy it from Amazon.com by clicking here, and add a few pennies to the IT Conversations coffers. And make sure you listen to Malcolm’s presentation at Pop!Tech 2004 — one of our most popular recordings.

Other Items

• Phone-In Comments: Got comments about IT Conversations or a particular program? Call our voicemail line at 206.202.TALK (206.202.8255). I may put your comments into a future program.

If you’re trying to use Skype for Podcast interviews — or for anything else, for that matter — you must read this post by security guru Mark O’Neill. I learned about Skype’s super nodes during Niklas Zennstrom’s phoned-in presentation at Supernova, but I forgot all about it. It will be interesting to see if accepting inbound TCP and/or UDP ports makes Skype less susceptible to dropouts and therefore more suitable for recorded interviews and discussions.

ZDNet’s executive editor David Berlind has launched a new IT-industry podcast called IT Matters. Two in-depth interviews so far: one with Gytis Barzdukas, director of product management in Microsoft’s Security Business and Technology Unit; the other with THINKStrategies founder and managing director Jeff Kaplan to get his insights into utility computing, managed services, outsourcing, and the IT research sectors in 2005.

John Solomon did a great 11-minute piece on NPR called Pulling Back the Curtain, about the fact that their shows are heavily edited. (Hear it [Real Audio] or read it.) Once in a while I’m asked about how much editing goes on at IT Conversations.

• Live-to-tape programs like The Gillmor Gang have very little editing. For most shows, even the intros and outos are done live-to-tape and unedited. The only edits I typically make are when someone enters or leaves the conference call and I want to eliminate the clicks and beeps. Steve will typically ask whoever was talking at the time to repeat what they were saying. Occasionally I’ll also edit other behind-the-scenes talk, but there’s very little of that once we start the show.
• Interview shows such as Dave Slusher’s Voices in Your Head and Halley Suitt’s Memory Lane are only slightly more edited. Dave records his audio on his own computer and sends me that file. I replace the telco-quality audio of him I’ve recorded here in the studio with the one from Dave so he gets that ‘studio’ sound. I typically remove a few pauses, and depending on the guest, I may take out a few ‘umm’s and ‘ahh’s, but typically no more than a dozen edits in each program.
• Conference presentations aren’t edited for content, but I sometimes spend a great deal of time with noise reduction, equalization and level normalization. When some impatient person has asked a question without waiting for a microphone, I’ll try to pull his level up out of the background noise, but often I’ll delete the question and perhaps the answer. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to listen to the pauses in the audio from a long-winded questioner that you couldn’t hear.
• My own interviews, on the other hand, are the most-heavily edited programs on IT Conversations. I’ve been known to edit a 90-minute interview down to 45 minutes, re-order the questions and answers, and make over 200 edits. Call it ego if you like, but to me it’s just insecurity at the sound of my own voice. I also want to make my guests sound as confident and erudite as possible, and I want to make the interviews flow at a good pace to keep the listeners’ interest.

I need some advice: I want to travel with my iBook instead of a Windows-based notebook. I need two programs, which I either have on my OS X iBook and don’t know are there — I’m new to Macs — or I have to download or buy.

• An HTML editor. I’m using some old rev of Dreamweaver on the PC to maintain IT Conversations, so I could buy Dreamweaver for the Mac, or I could switch to something like BBEdit, which I’ve never used but hear is good. (I do most of my editing in HTML mode, so I can live without GUI-based coding but I need an easy-preview capability.)
• A GUI-based FTP client. This might already be on my disk, but where?

Scott Loftesness wonders about the podcasting phenomenon and suggests, “I can see IT professionals deciding its worthwhile for them to listen to his podcasts at work — not at home, not in the car or the airplane but in the office.”

My sense (anecdotally) is that more IT Conversations fans listen during their commutes or while exercising than at work. I should probably add this to my survey questions.

As for who’s going to become the Arbitron of podcasting, I’d say that so far it’s the blogosphere and through analysis of links first by Google, then Technorati.

As with radio, podcatching (listening) is anonymous. But unlike radio, it’s not cost effective to penetrate the anonymity of the listenership through sampling. The podcast audience is miles wide but very thin. By virtue of the scarcity of spectrum, the radio and TV listener pools are smaller and deeper, making them more economical to sample using Arbitron-like methods.

The client-side podcast-authoring tools are starting to appear. I just watched a cool video demo of one called MixCast Live developed by James Prudente. I haven’t downloaded a demo, but it looks like a pretty nice app for Windows given the limitations of the Windows Mixer.

(Hear the MP3 version.)

During the past week on IT Conversations:

New Programs

• Bill Gross announces his new search-engine company, snap, at the Web 2.0 Conference.
• The Gillmor Gang becomes The Gillmor Gaggle as nine of the world’s experts in digital identity discuss the technologies. It may start slow, but stick with this one through the second half when Dave Winer and Kim Cameron debate Microsoft’s past and future DID strategies.
• Johanna Rothman, an expert in project management, is interviewed by Roy Osherove.
• Jerry Fiddler, the founder of Wind River, offers a glimpse to his vision of the future and how this “world system” will evolve through the convergence of multiple technologies resulting in one, giant interoperable system. Part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series.
• James P. Hogan and host Dave Slusher discuss how the film 2001 started Hogan on a career as an author, on his relationship with Marvin Minsky and the world of artificial intelligence, on writing about space and space travel, whether there is a feedback loop between scientists and science fiction writers, the post-scarcity economics of distributing entertainment online and much more.
• From Accelerating Change 2004, Gee Rittenhouse, the VP of Wireless Research for Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs presents the evolution from 2G to 3G standards, the migration from circuit to packet applications, the procession of voice to data, and the industry incorporating new access technologies such as WiFi and WiMAX. All of this is occuring in a market place where voice subscriber penatration levels in many parts of the world are saturating and there is incredible pressure to reduce network capital and operating costs.
• This week Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker, the chair of The Webby Awards and co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts andSciences. They talk about trends and counter-trends on the World Wide Web.
• Moira also speaks with journalist Douglas Mulhall. His new book The Calcium Bomb deals with the controversial subject of nanobacteria.
• And in the BioTech Nation segment, Dame Julia Polak shares her experience as one of Britain’s longest surviving heart/lung transplant recipients, and how it has affected her scientific research in tissue engineering.

Other News

• iPodder.org: All of the IT Conversations RSS feeds now appear within a special category in this OPML-based directory of Podcasts.
• MP3 Stereo: There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about the overhead for stereo in MP3s. Don’t believe it! Check out my essay on MP3 stereo on the IT Conversations wiki.
• Phone-In Comments: Got comments about IT Conversations or a particular program? Call our voicemail line at 206.202.TALK (206.202.8255). I may put your comments into a future program.
• Where’s My Email? If you subscribe to IT Conversations announcements by email, you may have noticed how empty your inbox is this week. With more than one new program per day, some people complained of receiving too many announcements. So this is my experiment of batching the announcements for a full week together into a single message. Let me know which you like better. Comments on the blog, email to doug@itconversations.com, or call the comment line at 206.202.TALK.

Happy New Year, and thanks for listening.

This has been floating around the ‘Net for a long time, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. I laughed out loud when I read it again, so I thought you might enjoy it.

Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times! as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.