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Congratulations West Coast Eagles.

Damn, it was a nerve racking match.

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Funniest thing I’ve seen today.

“If you want to buy a song individually it’ll cost you 79 Microsoft Points (or 99 cents).”

From Zune Insider.

Looks like Microsoft are creating their own currency.

If ever there was a time to stick to a standard, the US dollar was it :).

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I just dropped my daughter at my mum’s house. They’ll hang out for the day, and probably watch a lot of dumbo.

On the way back I listened to a TED presentation by Nicholas Negroponte.

I owe a lot to Negroponte. He inspired my recent career moves with his Being Digital book, and articles in Wired. So when I noticed the TED presentation I had to make the time to listen.

What Negroponte, and the OLPC team are doing is amazing.

OLPC, One Laptop per Child is an organisation dedicated to getting a laptop into the hands over every child. Why does this matter? Well, in their words, “Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration.”

In the TED presentation Negroponte explains that in some houses with the laptop there is no electricity, and the brightest source of light becomes the laptop. He also says that some children’s first english words are Google. Truancy has dropped to zero in schools with the laptops, and the servers have to be shut down because students are emailing their teachers so much.

This isn’t just about putting technology in everybody’s reach, it’s much more than that. This is building a true open communications platform for the world’s children to teach themselves and each other.

On the site is a world map. It shows the countries planning to pilot, the countries who have expressed interest at the Ministry-of-Education level or higher, and those that are currently seeking government support. I realise that Australian isn’t in as much need as many other countries, but what in the world is wrong with us. WE SHOULD ALREADY HAVE OUR GOVERNMENT’S SUPPORT.

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I love movies. Escaping to a cinema with a tub of popcorn or packet of Maltesers is a favourite pass-time. And, by now, readers will know I love community built projects. So when I found A Swarm of Angels I fell in love.

A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community–The Swarm–the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film.

I can be involved in a movie making project, from my armchair if I desire. Not only that, it’s all open: DRM free, P2P friendly, using Creative Commons, and remix friendly.

Matt Hanson is the man behind the project. He’s an award-winning filmmaker, and responsible for some short films, among other things. Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing fame, is also onboard, as well as cult comic book creator Warren Ellis, Tommy Pallotta the producer of A Scanner Darkly, and…awww hell…just check out the team.

Now the question is, will he get 50,000 supporters willing to cough up the cash. Well, there is always the 53651 (now over 121,000), proving there are a bunch of early adopters for this type of thing. So, I’ve no doubt it’ll happen. I’ve signed up, and all too easy step to take with a PayPal account.

Now I’m looking forward to being involved in making the movie. Bring it on.

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A friend of mine, and ex-Sun employee, sent me a link a few weeks back and asked me to have a look at a personal project he’d been working on. It’s one of those things that you realise you have to throw your support behind, because it’s such a great cause.

A couple of months ago he started thinking about the sad state of affairs the world is in, and how he might help. Not an easy thing to do for anyone, but he came up with a novel idea. One of those wonderfully passive methods that you think might just make for a huge meme, and hence raise a boat load of awareness world wide.

After watching the late night news, and yet another war, Phil spent his nights (till 2am) hacking together a new site to promote peace, by displaying “a single flower to show the world that you are concerned about the needless death and violence that is taking place around us.”

It was on Tuesday night, 18th of July when I was watching the late night news. There were images of children in a hospital. There was this one little girl who had blood on her clothes and this blank look on her face as she stared into the camera. Her eyes appeared so wide and I tried to imagine what this type of event has on a mind that is so young and innocent and free of hatred. She was so small in relation to what was happening around her yet her eyes, it seemed, were taking in the severity even if she did not understand the why or how. If she survived the conflict, how would this event change the rest of her life? I had to turn the television off. That night I lay in bed thinking about what was happening. I was thankful that my children were safe from this but it did not make me feel any better. I had hardly any sleep.

…

Please visit the web site www.asingleflower.com and register your name to show your support. Think about how you can spread the word and help make the world a better place, even if it is just for a single day. If through the combined support we save some lives then we have made a start.

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At a recent presentation I was asked what the next big thing was. I covered a few areas, like virtual reality, the death of linear television, citizen media, locality, and mobility.

Today, after a few of Nokia’s announcements, I’m reminded that these aren’t nearly as far away as I thought. As pointed out on GigaOm, the new N95 mobile wraps up almost all of these (bar VR) into one tiny bundle.

The N95 is a slider phone with a 2.6 inch QVGA screen, five megapixel camera, embedded GPS and the ability to automatically geo-tag photos for easy uploading to Flickr. It also has video-out to your television and will be connected via all types of networks, including HSDPA.

In other words, this pocketable device can download television shows from the Internet to view on the move, or plugged into your television.

It can record video with a quality at least as good as an everyday video recorder (some report as good as DVD, but it’s not quite).

It knows where on the planet it is located, using GPS, which currently means you take a photo and it can display it on a map (see Flickr’s new maps feature), but soon there will be a bunch of services providing information specific to your location; imagine a map of your current area with restaurant reviews, or movie times.

It can take photos that are of a better quality than the majority of cameras owned by people worldwide.

So in one fell swoop Nokia has knocked over four of my five predictions, which we’ll see emerging next year.

I know many of these features are already available. However, devices like the N95 will only make these features more mainstream. No doubt the device will be adopted mostly by the cyber-elite, but it won’t take long for these features to flow down to the rest of the world.

Update: And VR in a small form factor isn’t far away.

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Robert Scoble (the Scobelizer), ex-Microsoft, has literally just launched his new video podcast: ScobleShow. He showed a teaser the other day, which looked like it had some great material.

What will be interesting to see–I’m still downloading as I’m sure the demand is already high–is how Scoble uses the medium. In many cases video podcasts fall down because there isn’t much visually. I’ve seen a bunch that can be released as audio only, and lose nothing at all.

One of the first interviews is with Jonathan Schwartz, who I interviewed a year ago for the I/O Podcast. I’ll be interested to see what’s new in his world.

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A What-Cast?

The actual term podcast wasn’t used to describe the audio shows that many of the early adopters recorded. There were many discussions on Internet forums and weblogs about what the technology should be called, including “asynchronous bundles of passion” by Dave Slusher. It wasn’t until September 2004; a month after Adam Curry had released his iPodder software, that the term was used in today’s context.

Now that Curry had the ball rolling he aimed to have professional developers working on the task. He set up an iPodder developer discussion list on Yahoo! Groups (called ipodder-dev). It was a place for developers to discuss the coding of the iPodder software.
On September 16, Dannie Gregoire a developer from Louisville, Kentucky, was commenting in the group about how the application could manage historical episodes. At a loss for what to call the creator of the audio he made up the word podcaster. It stuck, and is now used by millions, daily.

It should also be noted that Ben Hammersley, a journalist and adventurer (he’s mad enough to compete in a six day marathon across the Sahara and plans to ski 600 miles to the North Pole, alone, in 2006), used the term podcasting in February 2004 to describe online radio in an article for The Guardian newspaper, many months before Curry’s released his iPodder platform.

When I asked Ben how he came up with the word, he said, “It was probably something to do with too much coffee, rather than any genius-like inspiration.”

Citizen’s Band (CB) and Ham Radio

Most people remember CB radio from the cinema. Raise the topic at a party and you’ll hear people spouting phrases from seventies trucker movies like, “Ten-four rubber ducky,” or “breaker, breaker.”

The reality is that CB was legalized for short-distance radio communication, and truckers were just one of the industries that took advantage of the cheap hardware that had developed by the 1970s.

Originally a license was required to operate a CB radio, but as the popularity increased many hobbyists ignored the requirement and the craze flourished. It developed a culture that has even been compared to today’s use of Internet chat rooms.

Although the technology was meant for local use, an operator could enhance the aerial to increase the range. Occasionally, by an accident of nature, people could communicate between countries, an occurrence they called skip shooting because the signal bounced off the ionosphere and to other parts of the world. This meant that at the right time people could communicate around the globe.

Richard fondly remembers his brother holed up in his bedroom chatting with whomever would listen. He’d collect postcards from other hobbyists around the world and post them to his corkboard on his wall.

Amateur Radio, also called Ham Radio, is a little more professional than CB. It also requires a license, but the operator must pass an exam to receive a unique call sign allocated by the government. For many people it’s still a hobby, but the government sees it as a way of encouraging a better understanding of radio.

Needle Time

When radio became popular in the early twentieth century, the British government provided a radio broadcasting license to one organization. Known as the British Broadcasting Company it was composed of several private firms tasked with testing broadcasts throughout England. In 1922 the company was incorporated and became the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it controlled the entire nations radio.

Over the years the monopoly was broken when some broadcasters outside of Britian transmitted to the British mainland. In 1931 Radio Normandy began broadcasting from France, and two years later Radio Luxemburg followed. Although the broadcasts were limited, usually to the evenings, they were successful ventures that provided a mechanism to advertise to a large U.K. population.

When recorded music rose in popularity, the Musicians’ Union and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) came to an arrangement with the BBC, stating that it could only play a certain number of hours of music from records—the agreement was dubbed needle time. The aim was to ensure that performing musicians could still make a living, rather than being replaced by the gramophone. This limited the amount of recorded music that the BBC could play, and the public wasn’t provided with the diversity found in places like the United States where no restrictions existed—this happened at the same time that rock music was hitting its stride with bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

At the same time some clever Dutch entrepreneurs started broadcasting from ships off the coast the Netherlands. The country had similar government licensing to the U.K. that restricted broadcasting from within their territory. As it happened, their territory stopped three miles offshore. A ship, outfitted with a transmitter, could avoid legal repercussions by staying outside of local waters.

Back in England, Ronan O’Rahilly had his own music label, but when he approached the BBC (and later Radio Luxemburg) for some airplay, he wasn’t greeted with open arms; being an independent label meant that he was second-class to the majors. So when he heard of pirate radio stations dotted around the world’s oceans, he hatched his plan for Radio Caroline.

On Easter Sunday 1964, Caroline broadcast from a ship off the coast of Britain and quickly developed an audience numbering in the millions. Free to play back-to-back music, develop it’s own individual voice, and adopt top 40 play lists, pirate radio boomed.

After only three short years the British government created the Marine Offences Act. It prohibited broadcasting from ships, aircraft, or marine structures without the correct license. It effectively nixed the business of running a pirate station.

Several days later the BBC launched it’s new pop station, called Radio 1, which filled the gap and emulated the successful American formats. Ted Allbeury, a pirate DJ, is rumored to have said, “Radio 1 is like seeing your mother dancing the Frug. She may do it perfectly well, but you wish she wouldn’t behave like that.”

Weblogs

Jorn Barger, a recluse who would go missing for months at a time, first used the term weblog in 1997. He also happened to be a former artificial intelligence programmer, so it makes sense that he invented the term—he knew a thing or two about computers, the web, and logs.

Logs certainly aren’t new; they were originally used to record a ship’s speed when the world was flat. Over the centuries they’ve been used for official record keeping or informal scribbles. The latter being a better analogy for today’s weblogs, because they’re often very informal.

Simply put a weblog is a journal kept online, and it’s often suggested they expose the author’s unique voice as apposed to something like a brochure. The entries, or posts, are often in reverse chronological order, with recent entries at the top of the page.

Some people compare weblogs with podcasting; possibly because webloggers started the trend or they’re both informal. They have both been slated as the precursor to the death of major media, who are more formal with their news delivery and entertainment.

Comparing the two is exactly like the comparison between a magazine and a radio show. There are common features, but generally they appeal to communities for very different reasons. To name a few advantages of podcasting, they are great when commuting, for listening to interviews, and as a medium for music.

Audioblogs

Out of breath and speaking from 19,340 feet at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, Deputy Chief Rick Bruce and 15 other police officers honored fallen comrade Isaac Espinoza. They trekked up in memory of Espinoza who was shot dead while on duty. The talk from the summit was recorded and posted to the Internet instantly to share with friends and family.

Admittedly not everyone will have access to a satellite phone when they climb their nearest mountain, but anyone with a phone can certainly post an audio message, called an audioblog, to the Internet.

Audioblogging emerged from the booming weblog medium as a way to capture someone’s rambling or rants as audio. In fact many people believe this was the precursor to podcasting (it certainly influenced Adam Curry). Weblogs were said to capture the voice of the writer, and adding audio seemed like a way to be a little more personal with the reader.

In most cases audioblogs were short and of low audio quality. Many were simply the vocalization of a weblog’s post, a way for listeners to catch up on their favorite blogger’s rants while commuting to work in the morning. Anyone could create one by using any method to record audio to a computer and uploading the result to the Internet.

A small community evolved and started evangelizing the use of audio in the blogosphere (a name given to the community of bloggers). Harold Gilchrist started posting audio to his blog, Garth Kidd jumped in with tips from a developer’s point of view, and Adam Curry realized how audioblogging was going to help his audio ambitions.

Several companies launched services that enabled audio to be recorded and then easily posted to a blog. Audioblog.com, by Eric Rice, was one such service. For a few dollars a month a member can upload audio, record it via a web browser, or dial a number and record a message with a telephone.

The police officers didn’t stop at Kilimanjaro, they moved on to Europe’s tallest mountain, Elbrus. The team, labeled Cops on Top, even added an RSS feed so they could podcast the latest installments of their climb to honor another fallen colleague, Officer Thomas Steiner.

Podsafe

Most people understand the concept of copyright. Laws govern the use of creations, like music, photographs, and video, and without the correct license or permission it is illegal to reproduce these creations. So it’s illegal to use copyright music in a podcast without the correct license or permission from the copyright owner.

Many podcasters avoid the issue of copyright by using a few different methods: some don’t play music at all, some apply for the right licenses, and others use music created by indie bands who grant them the right to use their music. The music in the last method has been nicknamed podsafe.

As it turns out, the activity of sharing and playing podsafe music is turning into a revolution on it’s own merit.
Musicians usually work long and hard to secure a contract with a major label so they can be discovered by the public. It’s only with a labels help that they hope to sell their albums. With millions of artists worldwide vying for the attention it’s a struggle.

The United States Telecommunications Act of 1996 changed the legislation on media ownership to allow a single company to own more than just 40 radio stations. Today the United States radio is predominately owned by a single corporation. This company now formats their stations how they see fit. Working hand in glove with the major record labels, they play the music that they think we want to hear.
In recent years artists have been able to turn to online stores like Magnatune, GarageBand and iTunes to help sell their tracks. Sharing their songs with podcasters provides a promotional avenue for the artist, accessing thousands of listeners without the help of major corporations.

The PodSafe Music Network provides a repository for artist’s music. Once a podcaster has registered for the online service, they can use any of the tracks in their show. Through Magnatune, a podcaster can buy a license to use the tracks, and in some cases provides a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons is a new system that works within today’s copyright laws, and enables copyright owners to provide their work for free or with a variety of restrictions. It’s seen as a way for creations to be shared without the tight restrictions that accompany the standard use of copyright.

Combined: the artists, the online distribution, and podsafe music, provide a way for people to hear millions of new songs that was simply unavailable on the analogue age.

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Filling the Podosphere

A couple of months later Adam Curry was creating a show on the road, literally. On an October morning he was recording a Daily Source Code as he was driving his car. The hum of the tires on the road was broken by a shrill honk of a horn in the background, interrupting Curry as he explained his love for the eighties sounding music of American Heartbreak (the band of Michael Butler, from the Rock and Roll Geek Show podcast).

As he leaned out the car window Adam spoke Dutch to the offending motorist, he laughed, and reported, “Dude, will you check that out, a guy just drove up next to me, and he’s honking his horn and he’s holding his iPod up, and he’s saying I’m listening to the podcast. God damn, I said, I’m recording one right now.” Raymond Poort had recognized Curry as he drove in the traffic and wanted to show his appreciation for the show. It was a fantastic demonstration of how podcasting was spreading.

At the same time, Phillip Torrone had built himself a small cult following of geeks as one of the coauthors on a website dedicated to gadget, gizmos and technology called Engadget (he was also a writer for Popular Science magazine). With Lenn Pryor, who worked for Microsoft, they launched the first Engadget podcast on October 5 that explained how anyone could cheaply start their own show. It was just the type of information needed to encourage a raft of new podcasters.

With many people learning of its value through weblogs, podcasting started a growth spurt. Soon dozens of bloggers, some with plenty of real radio experience, started their own show and the variety exploded.

The traditional media, experienced in keeping an eye on the Internet for items of news, reported on the trend. Business 2.0, The Guardian, Time Magazine, and The New York Times all ran articles comparing it to mediums like weblogs and pirate radio. Fortune and Wired magazines sent reporters to see Adam at his new home in Guildford.

With a growing tide of media exposure, major organizations joined the flurry of new shows. Some major radio stations around the world, like KOMO, WGBH, BBC and Australia’s ABC, made some of their shows available as podcasts.

In January of 2005, two Australians boldly took the plunge and created the first company dedicated to podcasting called The Podcast Network. Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic were the hosts of a popular show called G’day World. When they realized that they were reaching several thousand listeners from their homes in Melbourne and Sydney they decided to create a network of high quality shows; almost like creating a station of podcasts for people to peruse and choose.

(Before you complain Cam, there is a sidebar on TPN, and a review of several of the shows that was to be published in the book.)

A couple of months later, Adam Curry and a Ron Bloom, an entrepreneur who’d known Curry since his days at OnRamp, started a company called Podshow. The intent was to commercialize the podcast movement through marketing and advertising, and they invited several of the most popular shows of the time, like Dawn and Drew, The Rock and Roll Geek Show, and Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang, to take part.
Soon after, Sirius Satellite Radio announced a show that would be hosted by Adam Curry and feature selections from podcasts. The show broadcast every weekday from 6 till 10 pm on channel 148. Podcasting was becoming commercial.

Unknown to many people, Curry was also in discussions with Apple, the company behind iPod and iTunes. In May, just after Steve Jobs announced the soon to be released podcast feature in iTunes, Curry confessed to a conversation.

While in a taxi headed from Phoenix airport to the Hilton hotel, he and Ron Bloom recorded a quick Daily Source Code, confessing the “highlight of the day, was without a doubt, about an hour and a half that we had with Steve Jobs, which was really fun.  Just a private conversation, and that was great.  Of course I can’t tell you everything that we talked about, but I will say that I was able to provide a lot of input.  The number one great piece of input that I was able to feed back was, hey, I want to record on my iPod.  And I can guarantee you that’s going to happen some time in the near future.”

On August 9 2005, the word podcast was added to the Oxford Dictionary.
podcast• noun a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.

A day later the news spread that Curry and Bloom’s company Podshow, had recieved $8.85 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Not only were people amazed at the dollar figure, but also with the line up of board members. They included John Doerr and Ray Lane; veterans from technology companies like Intel and Oracle. It was a big deal because the two venture capital companies had previously funded companies like Apple, Netscape, Google, and Amazon.

Today Adam Curry stands at his new podcasting desk, purpose built by his father-in-law, recording a new Daily Source Code. Gold and platinum records hang on the wall reminding visitors of Curry’s days with major media. In a single year he’d helped launch a new audio phenomenon and turn it into a commercial venture. Little of what happened to this point will be scrutinized in the future; it’s what Curry hopes will come of it that will make the difference: a new way for the world to distribute and consume media.

This post is from from my other blog here

The History of Podcasting

In some respects suggesting that podcasting has a history is amusing; the term has only been around since late 2004. The concept however has been brewing for several years and a number of people contributed to its creation.

The Internet has allowed many movements to occur in the last decade, and there is no doubt that podcasting would have happened sooner or later, but it was spurred on by a small collection of individuals, none more so than Adam Curry.

The Birth of iPodder

In 2004, Curry was living in the Netherland’s with his wife and daughter. He was finishing a year’s contract as a DJ at Radio Veronica (which incidentally started as a pirate radio station onboard the Borkum Riff, broadcasting to the Dutch public) and he planned to move to the U.K. with his family as a change of lifestyle.

In his hours off-air Curry had been developing a computer application by tinkering with some computer code in a language called AppleScript. He knew his effort wasn’t perfect, but he was proud of his development nonetheless. It did a very basic job of collecting audio files from different sources on the Internet, and automatically loading them onto his iPod so he could listen to them at his leisure. He named the code iPodder, and he released the first version to the public on August 15, 2004.

Note: For the curious, AppleScript is a language for Apple’s computer operating environment. It’s made to be a simple English-like language that enables people to automate computer tasks and applications easily.

Although Curry had never programmed before, he’d decided to start out of sheer frustration. He’d had the idea for the computer program for several years, and had mentioned its application to some clever programmers in the hope they’d develop it. Very few had been interested, and so he began learning the little bits of code he needed for the development.

Curry’s move to the U.K. was a plan to change his lifestyle, but he had no idea what a dramatic change the next few months would bring.

Really Simple

In the mid-nineties Curry met a hard-core developer named Dave Winer, who was an old hand at writing software applications. Dave helped to create several different companies and many different technologies that defined computing.

Dave constantly sounds like he’s half asleep, but he’s got a keen mind for working out the intricacies of technology. He started the company Living Videotext, which was sold to Symantec for a tidy penny, and later started another company called Userland Software. This helped him become a major driving force in the popularity of weblogs, because of its blog software called Radio Userland (which was originally created as a music sharing system).

Over the years, Winer was one of several people that helped develop a form of computer language called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Its purpose was to make it easy for anyone to receive information over a computer network like the Internet: basically a really simple way to syndicate information. It’s now widely adopted by online news providers, like newspapers, magazine, and weblogs, so anyone can easily subscribe to their updates, known as a feed. Advocates swear by its efficiency because they can peruse dozens or hundreds of updates much quicker than they can visit the individual websites in a web browser.

Note: RSS is also known as Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary. In most cases you’ll see an orange icon with the text RSS or XML on a web site that supports the format.

The two stayed in touch, and as Dave built Radio Userland, Curry used it and provided constant feedback. Occasionally Curry’s insight delved headlong into his understanding of the radio industry and his thoughts on how it overlapped with technology. Even back in 2000 he was watching the developments of RSS and suggested that he thought it was “the key to successful growth of personalized content consumption.”

Building on his years of experience in broadcast and his working knowledge of the Internet, Curry came up with his Last Mile theory and published it to his weblog in October 2000. He knew that people were impatient and that the wait for large files to download made people disinterested; they’d rather do anything but wait. He suggested that people should be able to subscribe to a source of media, like a person whose taste in music you enjoyed, and that their recommendations could be trickled down to your computer overnight. That way you could listen to the tunes the next morning instantly.

When Curry met with Dave in New York for a Userland brainstorming session he pushed the message hard, and in between meetings at the Carnegie and Katz’s Delicatessens he got his message across. Dave left the session and in January of 2001 added one simple element to his RSS specification called an enclosure. Simply put this was a way to include a multimedia payload into a feed. Publishers could now include video or audio in their syndications.

The Dawn of Podcasting

A major hurdle had been overcome; the technology was now in place to make it easy to publish any media, including audio and video, to the Internet for subscription. What didn’t come were publishers. Eventually a few applications were developed to use the enclosure feature, like syncPod (that Kevin Marks demonstrated at BloggerCon in 2003) and Enclosure Extractor, but there still wasn’t one that was easy for anyone to use. Without subscribers there was no incentive for publishers to dive into producing audio or video shows.

In the meantime RSS was becoming popular with authors of the written word. Online newspapers, magazines, and weblogs used the code to improve the usability of their website. This led to greater development in applications called aggregators, or newsreaders. Users of the applications could subscribe to an RSS feed, which would deliver the information straight to their computer on a regular basis. The software became popular with geeks who wanted to keep up to date with the latest news quickly and easily.

Some early adopters started using the enclosure tag for audio. Harold Gilchrist, a pioneer of audioblogging, was one of the first in October 2002.

It wasn’t until almost a year later that Dave Winer decided to start his own experiments. Christopher Lydon, an American media personality, was conducting a series of interviews with blog personalities and releasing the audio online. Lyndon interviewed Winer in July, and Dave used the audio as his first media payload on August 19, 2003.

Curry, a celebrity blogger himself, met Lydon on the eve of the BloggerCon conference in 2003 and they hit it off. When Lydon heard Curry’s ideas he confessed, “I’m a political journalist and talk-radio jockey who wants to use the free, global range of the Internet to extend the magic of good conversation.  So here we are at BloggerCon, scratching each other’s backs, learning fast and expecting to make something happen.”

In June 2004, Winer started his own audioblog called Morning Coffee Notes. He’d been chatting with Steve Gillmor, a technology journalist (or as he prefers to be labeled, an anarchist), about his audio show called The Gillmor Gang (see the review). Gillmor suggested that one of Winer’s audio shows was the best he’d heard in some time. That evening over dinner Winer chatted with Andrew Grumet, another software developer, about creating a business around RSS and audio. He figured the only way for it to take hold was to start his own show and see where it led.

Podcasting started to gain momentum. With a collection of interesting content, like Lydon’s interviews, IT Conversations, The Gillmor Gang, and Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, more people sat up and took notice.

The Daily Source Code, Curry’s own show, was born on August 13 2004. He’d been listening to the new collection of shows and decided he’d start one to encourage programmers to join the development of iPodder (that’s why he used the word code in the show’s name).

It wasn’t long before a collection of other high quality podcasts appeared, like: Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles on August 20, The Dawn and Drew Show on September 23, Coverville on September 28, and Reel Reviews on October 17. Many more started to appear, and Doc Searls, an author and popular blogger, noted that on September 30 Google found 526 results. By mid-October that number had exploded to 109,000.

Note: As we write this the results for the term podcasting in Google is 9,390,000. Why not try your own search for the term. We bet it has grown.

This post is from from my other blog here

Wearing an untucked black t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of Ugg Boots, Adam Curry adjusted his hair as he walked from underneath the downwash of the helicopter’s rotors. He was hamming up his appearance for an interview with the BBC Culture Show, who paid him a visit because he was riding high on a publicity storm that was brewing around a technology he’d help develop. That day, as they chatted about podcasting, the term was less than two months old.

The house, that he called Curry Castle, was as grand as the nickname suggested; a beautiful home in Belgium that he shared with his wife, Patricia Paay, a famous Dutch pop star, and daughter Christina. The Culture Show reporter described Curry, an ex-MTV video jockey from the eighties, as a “web millionaire and podcasting daddy”; an appropriate description with his wild blonde hair and rose colored glasses.
Curry was accustomed to the attention of the press. He’d just finished a one-year stint as a disk jockey at the Netherland’s Radio Veronica, and he and his wife were local celebrities. They’d returned to the Netherlands in the late nineties after Curry had sold OnRamp, his web design and hosting company.

The move hadn’t abated his passion for the online world, and he’d spent years preaching about its possibilities as a platform for broadcasting. Over time his discussions had only led to small progressions toward his goal, so in frustration he applied his hand to computer programming and it led to the birth of podcasting.

It seems ironic that one of Music Television’s VJs would be the catalyst for the next progression in radio. After all, it was The Buggles song, Video Killed The Radio Star, which launched the television network in the eighties. Many predict that podcasting might just be the technology that brings radio more life.

Podcasting

Podcasting, in its simplest description, is downloadable Internet audio. The purists of the format will point out that it’s a little more complicated than that; there is an element of automation that really gives the technology its power. With some technical tricks, that listeners don’t need to worry about, anyone can subscribe and automatically receive audio to a computer and an MP3 player, like an iPod.

Note: The word podcasting is simply the combination of the word pod, as in iPod, and casting, from broadcasting. However, you don’t need an iPod to listen to shows, simply any device that plays an MP3 audio file.

It’s this automation that caused such a buzz and had the BBC knocking on Adam Curry’s castle door. Making audio so easy and transparent to receive means that listeners can be more concerned with what they want to hear and not how they receive it.

Another simple way of describing podcasting is Internet radio shows that can be taken anywhere and listened to at anytime. Some people don’t like the association with radio, because the main theme always includes the convenience of listening to the show in your own time instead of a broadcaster’s schedule. To clarify this element, people call it a TiVo for your iPod.

In fact the longer description adds one extra element. The real value of podcasting is that anyone with a computer, microphone, and access to the Internet can make an audio show. This, coupled with the listener’s ease-of-use, caused a chain reaction and now there are literally thousands of different types of content.

There are podcasts about music, technology, movies, business, words, camels, coffee, politics, and parenthood. The range of podcasters is just as diverse: professional DJs, truckers, lawyers, counselors, journalists, camel herders, actors and the girl next door. Anyone and everyone can create their own radio show about whatever the heck they please. It might mean that only their wife and mom listen, or perhaps 50,000 people tune in, but the beauty of the show is that it can be whatever they want.

A Brief History of Radio

To really understand the impact of podcasting, it’s helpful to study a snippet of nineteenth and twentieth century history. Although many would argue that podcasting is very different to today’s radio, there are some very interesting similarities.

Radio’s invention is commonly credited to Guglielmo Marconi in 1896. Like many inventions, there’s always some contention on the credit given, and in 1943 the Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s patent for radio because it added nothing to an earlier patent by another inventor called Nikola Tesla.

A Canadian, Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, was the first to get radio really rocking. On Christmas Eve, 1906, he was the first to broadcast audio by transmitting to ships along the Atlantic coast. He played O Holy Night on the violin and read a passage from the Bible. Morse code operators, known as sparks, received the signal; the first voice they’d ever heard broadcast to their headphones.

In the preceding years several organizations created radio stations. Large companies began to litter the landscape with radio as their business, focusing on activities like personal communications, news, and stock promotion schemes. Eventually, fraudulent promotions saw executives and associates from some of the companies arrested and jailed.

In 1912 the RMS Titanic set sail with wireless equipment built by the Marconi Company (the whole ship was state of the art). It didn’t save the proud ship, or many of its passengers. So to ensure the quality of the future operation of equipment the U.S. government created the Federal Radio Act of 1912, the first government regulation requiring radio stations to be licensed. It was hoped that licenses would lead to higher quality operations, and in turn, help avoid similar disasters.

When the U.S. entered World War I, the government halted the use of broadcasting for none military purposes. Its use in the war was deemed so important that they couldn’t have the radio systems compromised by other broadcasts. It was even illegal for civilians to own a receiver.

After the war the ban was lifted and the use of radio boomed. Hundreds of thousands of amateur licenses were in use in the U.S. and Britain. Likewise, corporate radio advanced in both countries, and lead to mass adoption of the medium for information and entertainment.

With so many people using radio technology in the twenties, interference between broadcasts became a large factor. The result was similar to a room full of people talking. With enough people chatting at the same time, all the conversations become unintelligible. So the U.S. government created a law that regulated the use of the radio spectrum (the range of frequencies) to reduce the amount of interference. They allocated slices of spectrum for different uses (like military, aviation, commercial radio, etc.), and sold broadcast licenses. This is like dividing the room and sending people to different sections with instructions on how long, loud, and the topic they can speak about.

Note: There is a consensus today that with advances in technology we don’t need to regulate spectrum. The concept, known as an open spectrum, is to use technology to tune into individual conversations in a clustered frequency, ignoring the irrelevant chatter. Slowly the world’s governments are deregulating some parts of the spectrum; like those used by cordless phones, garage door openers, and Wi-Fi.

In stark contrast to the First World War, the Second World War saw radio used for international news, entertainment, and encouragement. Roosevelt used the medium as a fireside chat to bolster U.S. confidence.

Music, news, drama, comedy, sports, and talk shows provided the public with an amazing array of choices. Radio was abounding with innovation, which today we call Old Times Radio. Even today we recognize many of the names from the era: Abbott & Costello, The Saint, The Shadow, Burns and Allen, Sherlock Holmes, Flash Gordon, Dragnet, Father Knows Best, and Charlie Chan.

In 1938 Orson Welles managed to stand out from the crowd when the War of the Worlds radio drama fooled many into believing the news of an alien innovation was true, and panic ensued. Radio’s golden age had come.

In the fifties, television stole the limelight. Radio couldn’t differentiate from the new medium and new formats had to be found. One such format was the Top 40. Todd Storz, a the director of the radio station KOWH-AM in Omaha, Nebraska, realized that certain songs in a jukebox at a local bar were played over and over again. He surveyed record stores and began playing the most popular tunes on a higher rotation on his stations. The format was a hit, and radio stations around the country adopted the model.

In 1981 MTV (Music Television) was launched. Television’s first 24-hour music station changed the way we consume music and radio. It’s often seen as causing a significant shift in how musicians are deemed to have potential—their looks often mattering more than musical talent.

Today broadcasting is the domain of major corporations. Their usual mandate is to provide entertainment for the masses (excluding some public and pirate radio stations that offer niche content). After all, they generate revenue by offering advertisers a large audience. Creating a radio station that focuses on a niche is far too expensive to warrant.

Over the years broadcasting has become a complicated and expensive business, with government restrictions, industry politics, large license fees, and expensive broadcasting equipment. Podcasting on the other hand is cheap; comparatively the cost is minuscule. There are no legislations that govern a podcaster, other than copyright, and for these reasons alone podcasting is a fascinating and fast paced medium.

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About a year and a half ago I was contracted by O’Reilly Media to co-write a book about podcasting. After writing in all of my spare time I churned out several chapters and reviewed over 100 podcasts.

As it turns out, they published the Podcasting Pocket Guide, which only contained a small amount of my work. The rights to the rest was eventually returned to me.

I was particularly pleased with Chapter 1. Mainly because I took a long time in researching the roots of podcasting, and also because I thought I’d produced it in an interesting way. I’ve been thinking of releasing the chapter in this weblog, and as Scoble points out the anniversary just passed, so I thought I’d be great to release it as a series.

The following is the work I did on the chapter. Some might take issue to a few section on who, and when, things occurred. Although I’m pretty sure almost all of it is very accurate, I’m happy to hear from anyone who might like to add or change anything. The beauty of a blog is, I can always go back and make updates on the fly.

I start with a little history of radio, because it’s important to understand what compels many to use podcasting as a more liberal way of distributing audio. It also provides a way to explain why podcasting is an important medium.

Here are links to the three parts, and separate sidebars:
Introduction to Podcasts part 1
Introduction to Podcasts part 2
Introduction to Podcasts part 3
Introduction to Podcasts sidebars

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Updating yesterday’s post about the TechCrunch and TechCrush trademark issue, I’ve had confirmation that it is a trademarked term, it just doesn’t show up in the USPTO search (which as I mentioned, is possible given the disclaimer on the search results).

Mike Arrington has also provided his version of the story on his blog, CrunchNotes.

Overall I have to hand it to Mike. I think he did a great job of dealing with the situation, and if you hunt through some comments on the other weblogs that discuss the issue, he was very proactive, in an open and honest way.

Also, unlike the web 2.0 debacle and a new trademark issue over Real Estate 2.0 (pointed out by my mate Jon of Australian Blogs), which is even more farcical, TechCrunch isn’t just a generic term we all expect to use.

But this raises an interesting issue. How can a corporation protects itself, without having to throw legal letters at companies or people that are not damaging the business. Like Creative Commons with respect to copyright, is there a way to allow none damaging, none commercial uses of trademarks: a way to mash-up logos, make-up terms, or use logos on fan sites for instance.

Perhaps I misunderstand trademarks, but given I’ll be looking at exactly this subject shortly for my start-up web service, code named Web2Thing, I’d love to know everyones opinion.

Is there a way to protect a logo or business name, without restricting interesting or fun uses by others?

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It looks like a new trademark wrangle is hitting the blogosphere.

Duncan Reilly has pointed out that TechCrush, who only recently launched, is putting a hold on things while they sort out some legalities. It would appear from this conversation at Deep Jive Interests, that Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is the culprit.

A little digging over at the United States Patent and Trademark Office comes up blank in relation to TechCrunch for searches on “TechCrunch”, “Tech Crunch”, and even “Crunch”. The search doesn’t prove a trademark isn’t registered, but it seems peculiar. We’ll see if Arrington makes something official.

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Om Malik posted today about a new hybrid set top box.

This reminds me of a suggestion I made a few months back to Eddie McGuire, the new Chief Executive of Australia’s Nine Network. Well, not actually face-to-face to Eddie, but directed at him on this blog.

Om points out that Pace Micro are demonstrating a a hybrid set top box at IBC in Amsterdam. By hybrid, he means that it will “take high definition video input from satellite, and at the same time be able to take standard definition Internet video over Broadband and display both of them on your television? And while you are at it, throw in a personal video recorder for good measure. And then allow consumers to access that content over their home network!”

Om suggests that Rubert Murdoch, the man behind Fox, would love such a set top box. What he doesn’t point out is that Pace are actually the company that already supply Fox in the UK, and Australia with their set top box hardware. That’s right, Foxtel IQ, the Aussie digital cable network re-badges Pace Micro set top boxes.

It also reminded me of the BeyonWiz that I saw last week at Influence 2006. It’ll be available in Australian stores in a matter of weeks, retailing for $1,700. It has two wifi antennas to connect to your home network, two digital tuners to record terrestrial television, and a hard drive. It’s real beauty is it seamless integration into home networks, from which you can stream movies, music, photos, etc. to your television. If I had the cash I’d pony it up as soon as they hit the store.

My point is the same as one I’ve been espousing at a few presentations that I’ve been giving lately: television as we know it, is almost dead.

Imagine the first television network, cable or terrestrial, that offers it’s viewers the ability to receive content via traditional broadcast, but also provides content straight from the Internet to the television. All they require is a hybrid set top box, which are hitting the market as we speak. Imagine the flexibility in providing content: podcasts, videocasts, music, television shows, premium content, NASA TV, Rocketboom, ScobleShow, etc. etc.

It’s looking likely, with Pace’s new set top box, that Fox will beat everyone to the punch. Will MySpace make it to your televison sooner than expected!

Update: Dang, this news, from our friends at Boing Boing, is even better than what I had in mind.

Neuros, makers of the coolest video-recording toys in the world, have just released their OSD, a fully open set-top box. Neuros already made history with its Neuros Recorder 2, a device the size of a deck of cards that turned any TV show or DVD into something you could watch on your PC, PSP or iPod. Now with the OSD, they’ve gone one better, with a device that has a fully open firmware that anyone can hack and improve. What’s more, they’re offering cash bounties to hackers who add various features to the device, including $1000 for a YouTube or Google video Browser, $600 for a Flickr Photo Browser, $500 for a WiFi PSP or PDA remote, $700 for a TiVo-like recording function for radio/satellite radio, and $500 for getting VoIP running on the device.

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G-DayWorld meets South Park

Originally uploaded by mspecht.

Immortalized as a South Park character by Michael Specht.

Thanks Michael for being kind!

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Nik, of Omnidrive, has done five minutes of digging and found out who the person behind Dead2.0 is.

As Nik points out. If you’re going to write an anonymous blog, make sure you’ve covered your tracks. Alternatively, don’t bother writing an anonymous blog. Privacy is, after all, dead–it’s one of those things we lost in the 2.0 wave.

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I’ve been watching recently as Mark Jones, IT Editor at the Australian Financial Review, has slowly started posting blog posts biased toward main stream media. That’s to be expected I guess, he literally spends 10 hours a day immersed in the industry. Previously Mark worked for IDG Communications and was instrumental in helping them blog-up and add podcasting. He’s a very cool guy.

His post today, Ballsy or scary? reminded me of a conversation that Cameron and I had on today’s G’Day World (yet to be posted) about Bono’s thoughts on the music industry. I pointed out that a lot of what is happening on the Internet today is all about disruption–specifically around old business models.

What Mark points out is that the “French-speaking Belgian Association of the press” won a court battle, in which they said Google could not link to, nor cache, its articles without paying the Association. By not complying the court ordered Google to remove the links and items in cache or face a fine.

The Association obviously doesn’t understand the new way of distribution. They obviously don’t understand, what David Weinberger calls freechasing, in which you give items of value away for free so you can benefit by repercussion.

This isn’t an easy thing for some organisations to grasp. However, it’s becoming the norm online. There are literally thousands of organisations giving away valuable things for free, and benefiting in other forms. Google itself is a great example, providing search for free, and now branching out into word processing and video to name a couple of examples. They now make billions in advertising.

I also heard, many months ago, Jonathan Schwartz talk about the airline industry. He pointed out that one CEO suggested that airfares will be free, and in-air services will provide the airline with profit.

(The same blog post mentions the interview I did with Jonathan as part of my I/O Podcast.)

You see, it’s now time for many companies to start thinking outside the box, because the Internet has created a disruption.

Main stream media should worry less about making money, and more about servicing it’s customers. They will be surprised at how many other ways there are to make some coin.

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scientaestubique mentioned a new ancillary service to Flickr today.

There are now more than a billion people online, and most of us use the internet to engage in some kind of social activity. In doing so we have helped create over five million terabytes of unique virtual content

We have virtual communication like email, instant message or video. We belong to virtual communities like social networks, image sharing or interest groups. And in these communities we have created virtual identities like homepages, avatars and blogs.

But sometimes life can be a little too virtual.

MOO dreams up new tools that help people turn their virtual content into beautiful print products.

For any Flickr Pro Account members, if you’re quick, MOO have announced you can grab a free batch of 10 MiniCards: one side with one of your Flickr photos, the other with your contact details. I’ve put in my order, and can seriously see the day when I’ll place a large order for my start-up.

Update: Glad I got in before the site was Boing Boing‘ed. They’ll churn through their 10,000 free packs in no time.

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I’d like to welcome Jason to the blogosphere with his new weblog provokeit.

I had the great pleasure of chatting with Jason for a good few hours at Phil Sim’s Influence 2006 last week. I’m sure that anyone that spends a little time talking with him realises a couple of things. He has a huge amount of ambition, and he knows a lot about technology and the IT industry. I’d recommend subscribing to his blogs feed, because I’m certain he’s going to generate a bunch of interesting discussions.

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I’m spending the weekend at a mates place in Melbourne. Unfortunately, with all the travel and talking I’ve got a bit of the flu, and am constantly on the verge of losing my voice. I almost feel handicapped, socialising is much more difficult when people can’t hear what you have to say.

Today we’re heading out for a bbq picnic at a park near the Heidi Meseum of Modern Art to celebrate my friend’s birthday. I’ll be lugging the 350D around in the hope of catching some great photographs. I’m not quite sure if my photography is still a hobby, or now an addiction.

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Father Bob

Originally uploaded by rich115.

Thursday night we had The Podcast Network dinner in Melbourne. Besides the fact I’d almost lost my voice–which made it hard to talk with everyone, especially over Cameron in extrovert-mode–I had a great time.

Cameron points out that Miriam stole the show–which may have had more to do with the two flirting–and amazingly she is actually female. She’s also been censoring her own weblog…..posts about the evening mysteriously disappearing.

Urbaer also has a great summation of the night, which in general looks like it was enjoyed.

As you can see from the photo, Father Bob made an appearance, and is as much a character as Cameron. He grumbled about most things, which made for some fascinating insight; you just had to read between the lines.

If you’re wondering about the sunglasses, there the ones Cameron as made famous. We all took a turn in trying them on. Check out my Flickr photostream for the lot.

Overall it was great to finally meet a bunch of people, like Michael Specht, who I’ve read and spoken with over the years, but never met face-to-face.

Cameron is also promoting a dinner for the second anniversary of G’Day World and Australian podcasting. I doubt I’ll have the frequent flyers to make the trip, so maybe we should get Virgin or Qantas to sponsor the event.

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Speaking of TPN, if you’re into Open Source software, check out Ewan’s latest adventures at EuroOSCon on The Tech Conference Show.

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G’Day World

Originally uploaded by rich115.

Cameron Reilly and I have know each other for about a year and a half, and we’ve been doing the G’Day World podcast together for several months, but we’d not met face-to-face until yesterday.

Today we did a G’Day World from his place here in Melbourne, and it was a blast. In some respects it was a little unusual, when I caught myself nodding instead of agree with a yeah or two.

Anyway, it was great to meet Cam, who I’ve come to see as a good mate, even before meeting in person.

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David Havyatt, from AAPT, is giving a presentation at the moment. I’ve had the chance to chat with David a couple of times in the last few days, and he is well switched on. He is discussing the impact of communications, and delving into areas that I love to discuss in my presentations. It’s good to know some of our telecommunications execs understand the changes happening (David also has a political weblog, Anything Goes).

Last night was fun. We went to Hope Estate Winery. As well as the opportunity to sit in their Barrel Room for dinner, with barrels that must have had 6 foot diameters, we were entertained by a real medieval joust (well, ok, not real as we’re not still in the dark ages….in most respects). At the end of the night there was a competition, for the Beyonwiz set-top box, which included a pole joust: competitors sit on a padded pole, and beat each other with padded batons until one falls off. I’m not a fan of competing in these types of things, a mixture of being shy and an adverse reaction to competing, but damn it was funny to watch.

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I sat on a panel this morning, with Roulla Yiacoumi from the BRAN podcast. We both gave a short presentation about our experiences with podcasting, and then fielded a few questions on the topic. It seems there is a fair bit of interest, and a few people implied (or did I infer) they’re in the throws of producing their own, or certainly looking at doing one.

Duncan Reilly asked a couple of interesting questions (thanks Duncan), one of which allowed me to rant about my thoughts on the death of the current broadcast model. I’m of the opinion that time-shifting will see the death knell for current television and radio. With a whole generation growing up, able to get any form of content on demand, the networks in television and radio are going to have to reconsider their models.

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Day two of Influence has mostly been about product. I’m not a big fan of product pitches, mostly because I figure I can find what I need in a brochure online. However, it’s fun to watch the interaction between journalists and vendors.

Amongst the raft of media products that were demonstrated his afternoon the one that caught my eye was the beyonwiz DP-S1, a dual recording and time-shifting high definition set-top box. There isn’t much new there, but the way it seamlessly connects to a home network impressed me–two in-built wifi antennas no less- and something I’ve been waiting for for a while. I’d love to be able to grab content off the Internet (even more important with Amazon Unbox and the iTunes announcement this week), and share it from my laptop in the office with little fuss (my modified Xbox requires an FTP transfer, that can be a pain). The only issue right now is the $1700 price tag; I’ll have to wait a while before I can grab one at that price.

I’ve also taken a few snap shots of the area. I’d hoped to have taken a few more, but with the rain clearing only briefly today, it’s not been opportune.

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The rest of day 1 at Influence was a little more of a blur for me. Due to my lack of sleep the night before I hit a wall mid-afternoon, and my energy lagged. Still I did really enjoy the dinner, especially the entertainment from PokerStars , which included a presentation from a tournament player, Lee Nelson, who has won several million in the last year or so, and laptops on each table to compete against the rest of the room. Our table, unfortunately, bowed out early.

I’ve found the format interesting. Essentially Phil collects a bunch of journalists (and bloggers and podcasters) in the one place, and the two swap notes. In many cases it’s a blatant product pitch. As I write this I’m sitting just outside the consumer session about personal computing, where the presenter (I’m not sure who) has spent the last 20 minutes bagging the competition. I thought rule number one (or certainly in the top ten) is not to speak negatively about your competition.

I’ve started day 2 a lot fresher, with a great night sleep. I’m now just preparing for my presentation on podcasting that I’ll be giving in about an hour. It’ll be interesting to see what conversations ensue.

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I arrived last night in Sydney at about 11pm. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it meant that I missed the West Coast Eagles vs Sydney Swans finals match, as I was in the air as they played.

I stayed in the hotel Ibis, near the airport, and for some unknown reason I just couldn’t sleep. I think overall I managed to muster an hour or two of incredibly restless shuteye. At 7am I emerged, readied myself, and headed downstairs to checkout and get myself back to the airport for a bus up to the Hunter Valley.

The trek up included some really interesting conversations with James Tuckerman, the founder of Australian Anthill, and Jason Van from Bartercard. I figured this was a great sign as to what is to come.

Right now I’m sitting in the Home 2.0 session at Influence 2006, which is a little too much like a product pitch for me. Linksys and AAPT have both given us an overview of their product, which I guess may be of benefit to some in the room, but I’m here for the conversations. The Web 2.0 session was a bit more valuable–although it did run off the rails when government legislation of online gambling infiltrated PokerStars presentation–with some interesting thoughts by Ross Dawson.

In general though, Phil Sim has arranged the days in a more informal “unconference” fashion: a short presentation from a panel member, questions to the presenter, followed by the next speaker, and a panel Q&A at the end. In my opinion these work best when the moderator maintains control. SO far it aint too bad.

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Last night we had the first Perth Entrepreneurs network event at the Leederville Hotel. I didn’t count the people attending, but Viveca mentioned the number 15 to me near the end of the evening. It was held in an upstairs room of the Hotel, which I’d never seen before. It had the ambiance of an exclusive club, dark colours and faux leather chairs. It just needed a little smoke and it’d looked right for a movie scene about an out of the way poker club–I thought it looked great.

I didn’t get a chance to chat with everyone, but those people I did had some interesting stories and thoughts. It was certainly diverse, including engineers, project planners, web developers, marketing, and sales. Which is exactly as we hoped. We’d prefer not to pigeon hole the group, and reach out to a range of professions.

Viveca and I have already talked about the second networker, and we’re also in the early planning stages of an event that will include a presentation from a local respected business man or company. So stay tuned to the Perth Entrepreneurs Weblog.

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This weekend I fly east. I’ve been invited to a couple of conferences in relation to new media communication.

From Sunday to Tuesday I’ll be in the Hunter Valley for Phil Sim’s Influence 2006. They have a few interesting presentations in the consumer space that I’m eager to attend: Consumer: Web 2, Consumer: Home 2, and Entertainment Technology. I’m told they have wifi, or at the very least they have a media centre, so I aim to blog a little about the event. I’ll hopefully grab a few nice snaps to add to my Flickr collection.

Tuesday afternoon I jump on a bus and head to the airport for a evening flight to Melbourne. Ark Group have their Strategic Corporate Communication event at the Rialto Hotel on the Wednesday and Thursday.

My mate, and CEO of The Podcast Network, Cameron Reilly is also presenting at the event. Even though we’ve been working together for about a year and a half, we’ve actually never met face-to-face. So it’ll be fun catching up with him. Which reminds me, we’re also having a TPN dinner that others are welcome to attend if your in or around Melbourne next Thursday evening.

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Crocodile Hunter (RIP 04 Sept 2006)

Originally uploaded by rich115.

Note: I’ve had several requests to use the photo shown (which is also being used in Wikipedia’s entry on Steve, and currently on their front page). It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, so please feel free to use it or make derivative works. Add your link to the Flickr page if you’d like to publicize.

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Paul Woods, an Aussie Marketing Technologist and part time entrepreneur, has compiled a list of influential Aussie tech bloggers.

The list is created by checking the Technorati database, and compiling the list based on a Technorati ranking.

I don’t know if it means anything, but yah know it’s always fun when you’re included, and I currently rank 22. We’ll see if that changes next month.

Thanks for the list Paul. It’s all good fun, and with a few trackbacks it should see you jump up well past 100 this month ;)

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I discovered the term “hyperdistractibility” the other day. I’ve decided it describes my online affliction.

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Most complaints about Flickr’s latest feature, the ability to easily add your photographs to maps, have centered around the low quality satellite images that Yahoo! is using.

I do agree that the quality sucks, I’m just optimistic that we’ll see a vast improvement shortly, and find the feature itself to be fun, useful, and addictive. Lets hope that Perth gets an upgrade soon.

To give you an example of why the complaints are coming so thick and fast, just compare Google Maps satellite image of the South Perth foreshore (which I spent a short time at today taking this shot), with the one found in Flickr.

Flickr Maps

Google Maps

With Google I can actually zoom right in to find the jetty where I snapped the image.

The questions is, why doesn’t Yahoo! foot the bill for the same license as Google has for its satellite image. Personally I think this alone says a lot about the two companies. Google are perfectionists; only happy with the best quality. Yahoo! on the other hand like to throw a bunch of features out there, even if the quality isn’t quite right.

Which, by the way, I don’t think is the case with the Flickr team, but they’re not the ones responsible for the map data.

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Most complaints about Flickr’s latest feature, the ability to easily add your photographs to maps, have centered around the low quality satellite images that Yahoo! is using.

I do agree that the quality sucks, I’m just optimistic that we’ll see a vast improvement shortly, and find the feature itself to be fun, useful, and addictive. Lets hope that Perth gets an upgrade soon.

To give you an example of why the complaints are coming so thick and fast, just compare Google Maps satellite image of the South Perth foreshore (which I spent a short time at today taking this shot), with the one found in Flickr.

Flickr Maps

Google Maps

With Google I can actually zoom right in to find the jetty where I snapped the image.

The questions is, why doesn’t Yahoo! foot the bill for the same license as Google has for its satellite image. Personally I think this alone says a lot about the two companies. Google are perfectionists; only happy with the best quality. Yahoo! on the other hand like to throw a bunch of features out there, even if the quality isn’t quite right.

Which, by the way, I don’t think is the case with the Flickr team, but they’re not the ones responsible for the map data.