Thursday, 12 April 2007

How We Should Get Podcasts On Our Phones

There are a handful of services that bring podcasts to mobile phones over the phones data connection.

Unfortunately, navigating the phone that way is really hard.

I think there’s an easier way.

Update 31 Aug 2007:
I love the internet. If you wait long enough, the things you’re looking for will find you:
Podlinez is a free service that lets you listen to podcasts on your phone.”
via Dave Winer via Nathan Rein

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

Wanted: Bud Nippers

I took a long walk yesterday, and on Dave’s recommendation, listened to the great Skepticality interview with Pro. Philip Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment, The Lucifer Effect, etc) on how “normal” people turn “evil”.

Answer: Baby-step by baby-step in an environment encouraging exclusion.

While my initial reaction to the blogosphere drama of the last couple weeks is to ignore it in hopes it’ll go away, right when I think it does….it morphs into something even more fucked up.

Zimbardo’s recommendation to prevent bad things from progressing: the bystanders (there always are some) are responsible to stop it. Immediately and continuously.

“To defend the people who no one wants to defend. That, imho, would be a very positive first step.” – Dave Winer

Yes, this means you. And me.

Elsewhere:
J’s 5-word code of conduct

Thursday, 5 April 2007

There’s No Accounting for Taste

From my perspective, transparency is about being up front about biases. Objectivity is an unachievable. Covering all sides of anything equally and without a subjective adjective is not only futile, it makes for a boring read. The prerequisite for making anything interesting is a perspective, a slant, some reason to care. Without that reason, why bother?

I like pizza.

One of the most popular posts here is my two year-old review of Punch Pizza. As you can glean from the title, I didn’t have a great time. I said so. Nine people came by, some agreed, others disagreed, ‘CDSIII’ wrote a very lengthy piece arguing Punch was the best pizza in the nation. While I’m very grateful for the comments, they don’t change my less than superb experience that evening. Nor did that single experience keep me from giving my money to Punch in the 2 years since.

I don’t search out objectivity. Nor do I expect it from anyone I read. Whether I’m looking for the best French Toast in the Twin Cities, a good wine for dinner, or anything else. I only care about really good or really bad experiences, and I search out lots of them (objectivity through aggregation).

So Tim, rate and review what you’re interested in. I know you like fruit-forward wines. If a wine you’re involved in isn’t fruit-forward, I trust you won’t rate it very highly.

I’m Demoing The FeedSeeder Project @ MinneBar 07

If you’re on the fence about attending MinneBar, I’ll be demoing the FeedSeeder Project. Maybe that’ll tilt you either way.

I’ve got a stack of index cards listing features that should be implemented by then. 16 features, 16 days. Tick tock.

Update 11 Apr 2007:
I’ll also be leading a session on ‘Designing for Use’. Bring your UI design problems and we’ll work through them, getting them to a place that’ll make people smile.

Thursday, April 5, 2007 1:23:16 PM

In an effort to reduce my chronic back pain from hunching over the laptop screen, I just unpacked a 23″ Cinema Display. My first impression: Sure has a lot of cords.

Wednesday, 4 April 2007

This Song is a Commerical

“This Song is a Commercial” by Wonderlick

“The future is ad-supported music. Not that the idea is new idea but it is reality.” – NVTS, Evolving Trends

The future is music as ad and the future is already here. Recorded music is an ad for the live performance (always has been). Recorded music is an ad for a musicians expertise – a marketing tool to get ever more interesting projects, gigs, whatchamacallits. Same as blogging and podcasting and book writing.

Aside from that, if advertisers aren’t excited about supporting podcasts and video blogs, I can’t see them excited about supporting individual tracks.

Elsewhere: 23 April 2007

“The trick to making money in these spaces isn’t to saddle the content with some annoyance no one wants — but to make it more valuable in a way that people are willing to pay.” – Mike, Techdirt

Tuesday, 3 April 2007

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 1:36:44 PM

Anyone else catch the excellent example of ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ in this week’s The Amazing Race? 4 people counting the same set of stairs, deciding the number that 2 people settled on was the correct number.