Good Reputation Sleeping

River on the Metro.

River on the Metro.
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

Dave Winer is brilliant!
He has a winning way, not because of his stellar personality or because of his movie star good looks, but because, unlike soooo many of his contemporaries in the tech world, he understands the concept of "simple".

He is the father of the "simple" web site (blog); the "simple" push technology (RSS); and now the "simple" mobile information terminal, a cell phone transformed by River of News.

While many of us in the news business keep building more and more complex ways for people to get our content (mobile.nytimes.com), Dave has figured out how to get the people what they want, painlessly.

Brilliant!

The Future, On Your iPod

Video Podcasts - New York Times

"Only a handful of the more than 2,000 Web sites that offer video by subscription right now are owned by TV stations, and part of the charm of the format in its infancy is that a professional video podcast about elections in Azerbaijan, made by a documentary filmmaker working for washingtonpost.com, can exist side by side in an iTunes playlist with homemade, autobiographical video podcasts that open small windows into more personal current events - like a college kid in Michigan playing drunken miniature golf, women in a Manhattan office bantering about Cheerios, a fan's-eye view of a rock show in Minneapolis or a man stuck in an airplane seat during a long delay trying to make sense of the items for sale in the SkyMall catalog he finds in the seat pocket in front of him." - Robert MaCay, The New York Times

(See also - TV Stardom on $20 a Day.)

Disruptive Technology, X3

1st commercial news outlet Podcast (I think)

KOMO 1000 News Podcast - By Stan Orchard SEATTLE - We are SO excited about this. For everyone who has an iPod, you can now download and play some of the more fascinating stories you hear on KOMO 1000 News. Download them and dump them to your iPod...automatically!

It's a new technology that seems to be sweeping the Net these days. It works like this: on your Mac or PC, you install a simple program that reads RSS feeds. If the feeds are set up properly, and ours certainly is, they will download audio and put it directly into iTunes. iTunes then synchs up with your iPod and boom. You have the story on your machine ready to listen.

Can you hear me now?

How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own)

“PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.” - Doc Searls

Nice overview of the "next big thing", podcasting. Think of it as TiVo for the multimedia web. Any site that publishes audio or video and has an RSS (XML) syndication feed that supports enclosures can set it up so that you can download multimedia in the background, and then play it at your convenience on your computer or after transferring it to a portable device, like an IPod.

The technology behind this is DIY; no advanced computer degree required. If you know the basics of a syndication feed, you can do this. And if it catches on, you can expect that most weblogging software will incorporate the ability to generate enclosure tags into the feeds they already publish. Currently available, mainly tech-talk from geeks; don't be surprised to see traditional content creators get on the band wagon soon though.

Pheed.com

Found this on Dave Winer's Scripting News site. An idea whose time has come?

Syndicated Photography Feeds
"Pheed.com is a database of information about photographs available on the web. We present the work of photographers who have made information about their images available as an RSS feed. RSS is a simple document format based on XML that is used to syndicate web-based content. A pheed is simply an rss feed that has been extended to include information about photographs; a photo feed."