Monday, November 14, 2005

A new Morning Coffee Notes for your listening pleasure.  

For background, read this post about when a podcast is a podcast. Very good question. I have an answer, on the cast.  

Marie Cares, i a email says ew Jersey goveror-elect Corzie looks a lot like me. She's the secod perso to say that, ad I really like Corzie ad fid that quite flatterig. For 10 poits guess which keys o my keoard are't workig.  

The next Flickr set are pictures from the first day of my cross-country drive in March 2003. 

231 people have signed on my Frappr map. 

Shelley Powers would like some money to go somewhere nice to take pictures. Where do I send the money? 

Here's a fun way to show progress to the OPML community. 

Netcraft: "Yahoo confirmed that it is developing a service to publish and host podcasts. The show was also awash with rumors that a similar project is in development at Google, and it seems logical that Microsoft's new push into web-based services will eventually include a podcasting component." 

Amyloo suggests an OPML game. I'll play but it'll take a bit of time to get it together. I've owned a lot of cars.  

Washington Post: "America Online and Warner Bros Entertainment are planning to put thousands of episodes of once-popular television shows like 'Welcome Back Kotter' and 'Chico and the Man' on the AOL.com Web site, where high-speed Internet users can view them for free." 

Meet the Press was infuriating, and great, as usual, this week. But this time not quite so infuriating. I had not heard Bush's Veteran's Day speech until yesterday. He should try picking a fight with the members of his own party who are deserting. Trying to make an issue of Kerry and Edwards, again, is as tired as Kerry and Edwards. The 2004 presidential campaign was a low in US political history, but a high in the history of President Bush, like the employee who leaves one company for a competitor and raises the average IQ of both. Sad, sad, sad. Nowhere but up from here. BTW, no ads on the podcast, I wouldn't mind if there were, but it's nice to go from one segment to the next without pause. Maybe they'll keep it that way? 

Thanks to Martin who offers a clue about the killer feature in Firefox that answers my prayers. Minimum Font Size. Ahh. 

Patrick Scoble: "If I ever get a Mac I'm switching to Firefox." 

A four-year bootup 

Greg Yardley presents the case for commercialization of audio with nothing extra added.

In response, there was no other format other than MP3 that could have worked. We could have labored long and hard to find a format that wouldn't have worked, or just gone with what was obvious. The charm of podcasting is that not very many people had to be convinced in order for it to bootstrap, and it required the kind of investment that two modestly cashed out entrepreneurs could afford without thinking too much about it.

Even so, it took four years to happen.

For an idea of how such things work, I refer you to the observations of Rex Hammock, social commentator. And thanks to Yardley for leaving out the character assassination. That's what made this discussion such a fiasco.

Let's discuss the technology, the application and the users, and leave it at that.

PS: Don't miss Ben Barren and Mike Arrington.

And then there's Keith and the Girl which is a mashup of Madge Weinstein, Dawn & Drew, and Howard Stern. Hadn't heard this show before.