Matt McAlister :: Goodbye IDG, Hello Yahoo!
"I’ve had the good fortune of working with a bunch of really smart people over the last several years at Macworld, The Industry Standard and InfoWorld. Now I have the good fortune of joining a new team of really smart people at Yahoo. IDG is a great place to work, and I’m sad to be leaving. But I’m also thrilled to be joining the Yahoo team and getting deeper into RSS and open media. Fun times ahead."
First a plug for Christopher Lydon’s new hour of talk radio on Public Radio International (PRI), OpenSource. Lydon is a fixture in Boston public broadcasting, a true Yankee voice in the clenched jaw tradition of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, who took to blogging and early experiments in podcasting thanks to Dave Winer during Winer’s Berkman fellowship at Harvard.
Lydon has relaunched his show with a focus on the Internet and all things web in the evenings on the local NPR affilates (WGBH). MP3s of the shows are archived on Lydon’s blog.
Last night (6.29), Lydon interviewed Michael Kinsley of Slate and Crossfire fame, now editorial page editor of the LA Times, on the infamous recent "failed" experiment in participatory journalism by permitting readers to edit an editorial via a Wiki-interface. The net result was a total trashing of the system by porno-vandals, so Kinsley pulled the plug and those "in-the-know" chuckled up their sleeves.
I thought it was a good experiment, a perfect example of the perils of open postings in an unmoderated world, and the need for a good collaborative community to coalesce and self-police itself.
Anyway, the best line of the night, was the last line of the night when Lydon asked Kinsley what he had learned from a decade of online journalism. Kinsley’s response: "What the heck. Let’s try it."
Wired News: Grokster May Haunt Podcasting
I don’t see the syllogism that iTunes is at risk if people submit podcasts through 4.9’s podcast subscription facility. Common carriage would appear to apply, but I’m not the legal mind to make that determination.
Sam Whitmore is blazing a lot of trails with Podcast IP issues through his work with ASCAP and the Grateful Dead to podcast music. He has a column on the situation at Forbes.com
iTunes 4.9 is out and is now my podcast aggregator and sychronizer of choice …
Well say goodbye to Odeo, the still-in-beta podcast subscription and synchronizer. I had it running for a week but just hit the uninstall button to purge it in favor of iTunes 4.9.
This latest version of Apple’s already excellent music player and music library organizer has the potential to really drive podcast dissemination to the 10% of the American public who own an iPod (I heard that stat recently and need to corroborate it somehow).
I’ve asked our IS department to get a paid of iPod minis with Belkin FM adaptors so we at CXO can begin to develop a podcast channel of our own. I’m moving my existing podcast subscriptions — Sam Whitmore’s Closet Deadhead, IT Conversations, and Christopher Lydon’s excellent OpenSource — over to iTunes now and will try to put together a strategy for CXO that would compile an IT channel’s worth of weekly IT news for our c-level audience and then make the case that instead of listening to NPR (why does Michelle Norris insist on pronouncing her name "Mee-chelle" and not "Muh-chelle") or the latest Grisham book-on-tape during their commute or daily slog on the Stairclimber, that they can get smart and entertained with geek talk.
Colin Crawford blogs on the release with pointers to indepth reviews and the news that some podcasters are beefing about the implementation requirements imposed by Apple. Chad Dickerson writes about getting dinged by iTunes when attempting to port his podcast feed over.
Messing around with Google Video
Recent experiments by me with a Sony digital video camera and Adobe Premiere have pushed me into an obsession with the production of web-ready video in the expectation that video will soon go the way of audio and follow an RSS-path towards something akin to podcasting called vidcasting.
With high hopes set for devices such as Sony’s PSP to finally build a platform for portable video, I give it a year before vidcasting begins to surface as a meme.
The question is one of gnarliness — podcasting can be as time-consuming as one wants to make it depending on relative degrees of obsessive compulsiveness and the complexity of the production tools, but I found the learning curve on opensource products such as Audacity signficantly reduce the turnaround time to about a four-to-one ratio of post-production to capture time.
Video is a different matter. Thanks to the speed of a firewire connection, D/V can be sucked off of the camera and into the PC very easily. Editing tools I’ve been playing with are Adobe Premiere — which is way too feature-laden for my uneducated tastes (this bed is too hard), the video editor that is bundled with Windows XP (this bed is too soft) and Adobe Premier Elements which fits the bill nicely thanks to its ability to output onto recordable DVDs (and this bed is just right).
I recorded some rowing races earlier in the month and due to the keen interest by the rowers and their parents have had to find some time on the last two weekends to edit the raw footage, title it, and encode it for web viewing off of Churbuck.com in .wmv format. This past weekend I encoded the files into one 25 minute flick, complete with a DVD menu system, and burned the results onto discs for distribution to parents.
It was, all in all, a good experience and Premier Elements was adequate for my purposes. I now need to read a good book on videography to teach myself the do’s and don’ts of over zooming, panning, using a monopod to cut down on handshaking, and what to do to override autofocus so the lense doesn’t autoseek on something in the foreground when I’m trying to capture the background. I’d put the production to capture ratio at roughly eight-to-one, mainly because I was trying to figure out hairy add-ons like scrolling credits that really aren’t necessary.
Battelle’s scoop last week that Google was launching in-browser video playback today, drove me to Google’s existing video submission service, where I opened an account under my gmail name and uploaded one of the rowing clips. It was an easy process and the file is currently under review before being posted. I was asked by Google if I wanted to charge users for viewing (which I did not), so evidently there is a market to be made. Now my concern is hosing my bandwidth allotment for Churbuck.com. Once the clip is approved I’ll be interested to see how it is tagged for search finds as there was no tagging facility offered in the upload process. Google, according to Om, is using an opensource player, VLC, which I will download and checkout as part of some webcasting due-diligence I’m now performing for CXO.
Key insight learned from these recent video experiments: the size of the image plays a huge role in helping the viewer assign sounds — conversation — with people. The smaller the image, the more disconnected the audio. Amazingly stupid insight, but nevertheless something I’ll keep in mind when building future web videos displaying in small apertures — keep the number of people to a minimum, the images are too small for the user to assign voices to faces.
Google Video either turns into America’s Dumbest Digital Videos or really gets some quality and makes some people some money. Wonder what Google’s cut of the action is? Google Video deserves some attention.
IAB Resources and Research would appear to the touchstone for compiling various predictions about year-to-year growth of online advertising.
Unfortunately — for me, since I need a solid prediction for ’06 now — the Internet Advertising Bureau is only showing estimates cooked up a year ago, and those include estimates for paid search, which by itself is arguably 25% of the category.
My worry working with expectations of growth in the high twenties and low thirty percent range, is two-fold:
1. Paid search shows no sign of slowing (save for some major click fraud discredit) and is, if one extrapolates Overture and Google Revenues, at least 20% of the spend and is not a space I play in).
2. The rapid rebound of spending between late 2003 and the present is widely predicted to flatten through the next four years and 2006, barring the development of a compellingly profitable new ad model accepted by marketers, could be the year that the CAGR starts to stagger.
"Jim Spanfeller, president-CEO of Forbes.com, responding to an audience question about when Forbes.com will surpass the print edition in terms of revenue, said, "probably in about 18 to 20 months." Forbes.com is run as a separate company within Forbes Inc. "I think blogs are an important environmental change on the Web, but I don’t know if it will be as disruptive as some people think for publishers," Spanfeller said. Forbes.com is "trying to endear ourselves to the blogging community with the creation of a blog on blogs," he added."
My baby has grown up. Damn. Ten years and boom, they’re like a teenager ready to beat up the old man.
Update: 6.24.05
Steve Forbes is quoted in Folio as disputing the Spanfeller cross-over remark. Looks like Steve is jerking the leash a bit.
Wired News: The New Old Journalism
Adam Penenberg on reforming the way journalism is taught, tossing aside "objectivity" and opening the profession to "transparent bias."
I’m indifferent, coming from a world where during an interview for my first newspaper job I was hired on the basis of two facts:
1. I could type fast.
2. I didn’t go to journalism school (the editor hated J-school grads).