This is my next mission. To get rid of the transmitter link to the FM radio and integrate the iPod into my X3.
Category: Technology
Wired News: Grokster May Haunt Podcasting
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’s podcast facility
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.
InfoWorld: Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I’m having IE4 flashbacks!
InfoWorld: Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I’m having IE4 flashbacks!
About time someone called RSS for what it truly is — ActiveDesktop redux. Just kidding. Back in the day, when Forbes.com was looking for Microsoft’s blessing, we built an active desktop CDF channel that pushed a "quote of the day" onto the user’s IE 4.0 enabled desktop. The thing was an utter kludge our CTO John Moschetto cooked up in a short amount of time.
What did it do for us? Not much, other than the right to say Forbes was baked into IE 4.0.
Me, I like to compare RSS to good old Pointcast.
Geeking Out — stuff I’m playing with
I must be in some geek bio-rhythm cycle where all I do is download stuff and mess around in php files. Here’s what I am playing with and why:
1. MySQL – why? Because it’s there, it’s the "M" in LAMP and any good web application around these days is written with it in mind. Although I operate in an LOAP (the "O" stands for Oracle) environment, LAMP is where it is at if you want to mess around stuff like MediaWiki (the opensource engine behind Wikipedia), vBulletin (threaded bulletin boards), and Drupal (community focused content management system).
2. phpMyadmin – a gui app for working with MySQL. An evil little critter to get installed, by the sysop at Cape.com, my ISP, says I can do it, so do it I shall. I needed it last week to recover a lost admin password for this blog, and I’ll need it before I can install ….
3. Drupal – a CMS that is also a very friendly blog platform, or so sayeth my colleagues elsewhere at IDG who are using it as the foundation of their community initiatives, some going so far as to trash forums in favor of Drupal blogs.
4. Odeo – a podcast aggregator/synchronizer. I’m off to Best Buy to snag a pair of iPods to start messing around with auto-synch streams with a future eye towards a CXO radio show. Beta but pretty useful.
5. Audacity – Dan Gillmor says this is the thing to use to cut a podcast, so download it and try it. It’s a nice alternative to good old SoundForge.
6. Adobe Premiere, Adobe Premier Elements – for messing with digital video.
The Supreme Court is Turning me into a Raving Libertarian
WSJ.com – High Court Rules With RIAA in File-Sharing Case
Okay, I’m generally an apolitical guy, but last week’s Supreme Court ruling that municipalities could extend eminent domain takings of private property for commercial economic development got me started and this morning’s ruling against Grokster has me foaming.
This latest is hands-down the biggest setback to technology policy in the history of the court. This is analgous to banning any implement, tool, or technology that has the potential for lawbreaking on the grounds that the potential is indeed the primary use.
Given the plaintiff list — all I can say is the vested interests got their day in court and came away happy. My recommendation is to innovate, don’t litigate, because the train has left the station on file sharing and these corporate IP retards are going to be playing whack-a-mole forever with users determined to pirate, share, manipulate and break their media free of its formats, locks, and copyright protection schemes.
Playing with video
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.
Does IT matter in Web Operations?
Does IT matter in web infrastructure? As I ponder a rebuild in a new era of commodity functions, the question is forced: “What should we build ourselves?”
To steal a meme from the Nicholas Carr article that rocked the IT world two years ago — does IT matter when it comes to organizing and operating an online publishing environment?
Carr’s thesis was that IT doesn’t matter, or at least doesn’t confer sustainable competitive advantage to an organization, and that while vital to business operations, should be managed as a utility on a cost basis. This pushes the question of what, if anything, a web publisher should build inhouse or seek outside from the market.
As I am in the throes of an infrastructure rebuild, I can point to some fundamental assumptions about what technology needs to be directly under the control of the publisher, and what can be sourced elsewhere.
Beginning at the bottom of the "stack" — the server environment — few, if any publishers have ever considered a self-hosted environment where the racks were housed on their premises and managed onsite by their sysadmins. Decisions about operating systems, application servers, backend databases, have depended on cost constraints, the existing skills of the technology management team, and vendor preferences. At Forbes.com we launched into a Microsoft IIS/ASP environment because it appeared to be well supported and offered some environmental conditions — particularly in database publishing — that were compelling. Inevitably we had to suck it up and migrate to an Apache/Java world, which caused our developers and tech team a world o’hurt. Today — the preferred environment for many sites is LAMP, by its opensourced nature a commodity environment that further commoditizes further application development by opening up a wide community of opensource third-party apps ranging from WordPress for blogs to MediaWiki for Wikis.
Above the OS lies the tricky part: the content management system, ad serving system, and third party apps.
As I look at CMS options I’m restricting my intial scan of the market to five choices. They are:
- The incumbent home-grown solution (custom CMS development is a viable option, and indeed, the end state, even for customers of off-the-shelf solutions that require a high-degree of customization to fit their particular environment and variables)
- An open source solution — Bricolage, etc.
- A commercial solution I have experience with (in this case, Interwoven Teamsite)
- A hosted solution. ie, Websidestory’s Atomz
- A player to be named later
Continuing with custom development for the CMS forces the question "Should we develop such a system?" All technology sourcing questions — which it can be argued come down to build vs. buy? — need to assess staff capabilities and capacity against those functions which confer strategic competitive advantage and those which are "lights on/table-stakes" for staying in the game. Does a CMS confer strategic advantage? Should it be purchased versus developed? Would purchasing technology free internal application developers to focus on those activities which do confer competitive differentiation?
A great deal of internally developed web publishing tools were a matter of survival and economics — we need it, we can’t afford it, so we’ll build it.
The net of this scenario is cheap economics, and indeed, tailored apps, the result can be undocumented software which is a bear to train on, get users to adapt to, etc.
More to say on this topic anon …