Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Does Apple not read OPML subscription lists? If so, it's hard to say it's a podcasting client. Do they export subscription lists? If so, in what format? If not at all, that's lock-in, a Roach Motel.  

Mac Daily News has a FAQ with new data on Apple's podcasting stuff. 

Silicon Beat: Behold, the new Yahoo Mail. 

A rough recording of The Gillmor Gang at Gnomedex on Friday. (You may want to fast forward five minutes to the beginning of the show.) 

The ads are out at Taegan Goddard's most excellent Political Wire, so I'm re-sub'd. He says "They just weren't worth the trouble."  

From Bo Williams, who just heard his first Morning Coffee Notes (thanks Apple!). "After years of reading your blog, I would never imagine that you sound like a 21-year old surfer. Hang ten!" 

Very often when I tease, especially about other people's products, it's because I am not allowed to reveal more. For example, yesterday, I talked about previewing a new version of an old standby, I couldn't say which product it was or who the designer was because of such an embargo, which is now lifted. The product is Yahoo Mail, something few of us spend much time thinking about. But it's in the process of getting a major upgrade, by the developers from Oddpost, a company which Yahoo acquired 11 months ago. If you recall they shipped a stunning DHTML-based Outlook-clone-in-the-browser, which you heard about first here on Scripting News. They were also the team that developed the Halfbrain spreadsheet, the first DHTML marvel, in 1999, which I featured in a panel on web apps that I led at PC Forum the next year. Anyway, the cool thing is that at the very end, just before they were acquired, Ethan Diamond, the designer I spoke of, added a very simple RSS aggregator to Oddpost. When I saw it then, I thought it was kind of sad, like a mouse crying at the sight of a piece of stale cheese (inside joke, sorry), but no, it turns out Ethan was doing something brilliant (duh). They wanted to brief me on their new work so we could start an exchange of ideas. Right on. Let's go Yahoo. And this is not the only project that started with Yahoo in the last week. I can't not tease, it's in my jeans. (And I can't not pun, either.) 

My mailbox this morning is filled with news of iTunes 4.9, the release with podcast support.  

JY Stervinou sent screen shots from France.  

Apple has defined a namespace for podcast info. Just took a brief look. Net-net, it would have been a really good idea to get a community review, like Microsoft did, before shipping. We could have done a lot better. 

Edd Dumbill reviews the iTunes namespace. 

The discussion has started on the podcasters mail list.  

John Palfrey: "It is not clear that Grokster is a complete victory for the entertainment industry." 

Marshall Loeb: "Don't trust everything you read in blogs."