Category: General

Dave Winer‘s NYTimesRiver.com
vs.
the official Mobile.NYTimes.com

Ha!

Thanks for the pointer Dave.

Rex Hammock doesn’t declare downloading music and video is the same as being there, but a PDF of a magazine is akin to a photograph of Buttermilk pie.

All recordings are “photographs of buttermilk pie”. A pale, pale substitute for being there. It continues to baffle me how digital artifacts are treated differently – images verses photographs verses text verses audio verses video.

Like the example I’ve used before, iPhoto can read from any number of cameras – but iTunes won’t allow the same library on multiple iPods. Makes no sense.

A while back, I had this idea for mobile podcasting, along the lines of my ‘podcasting as mass voicemail’ mantra. Even picked up a domain name.

Thing is, I don’t know enough about how the mobile phone industry works to make it a go. No problem, looks like Pinger.com is on it.

If I, as a Pinger account holder could request an RSS feed to be pointed at my mobile phone number – Bingo, common sense mobile podcast receiving.

Yeah, rather than having my home pc download mp3 files, I could receive the podcast as a voicemail. Sure, this puts a time limit on the podcast – not a bad thing.

BTW – Pinger is funded by, Kliner Perkins, the same people funding PodShow, Tellme, Audible, Friendster, and Segway. So, hopefully, they’ll see this “synergy” as well.

“…the place where any telephone call takes place” – William Gibson

This morning’s Citizen’s League conversation reminded me how not everyone considers this website a location. In the same way a park or a coffee shop is a location – a place where people meet for conversation. I’ve long seen blogs as back porches and think of the First Crack Podcast as a coffee shop (with free wifi) where you quietly eavesdrop on conversations for 20 minutes at a time.

The difference is one of synchronization. You’re reading this post minutes, hours, or years after I’ve written it. There’s a decent chance you can still comment (in some way) whenever this is. Dave Slusher calls it the Space Telephone. Conversations at the coffee shop down the block don’t work like that – we need to be near each other in both time and space. Making that much more difficult to accomplish. Especially when much prep work can be accomplished through the space phone.

This asynchrony is advantageous – biasing long-term discussion over short-term sound-bites. Through in the bit that hyperlinks are inherently a social cue and you’ve got an ecosystem to extend a “real” community electronically.

Bonus: Steve Borsch moblogged the event.

More Photos Here

Griff Wigley wrote up the event. Griff’s point is a good one – we need more stories to share, more dramatic examples of how easy-to-use internet tools can enable groups to make civic change.

I had a very strange conversation earlier this week. On the other side of the table was someone trying to figure out how to use local weblogs and podcasts to build pre-release buzz for a movie no one’s seen yet.

If we assume this site and other bloggy publications are extensions of our everyday word-o-mouth, then it’s tough to recommend something you’ve had no experience with. That said, I wasn’t clear on what the movie was about. The existing materials didn’t help, nor was the backstory inherently compelling – best I could glean was something like Lost in La Mancha on a much, much smaller scale (That’s my everyday life).

Which brings me to a point about a movie Jen still doesn’t believe is real:

“Let me suggest that we promote a movie we’ve seen next time, and avoid hijacking our own channels into promoting something that will go down as the highest grossing crap B movie ever.” – Karl Long

While I’m completely behind Karl’s sentiment – the movie doesn’t really matter.

We all know, instinctively, intuitively, what kind of movie Snakes on a Plane is. It’s all in the title. The movie didn’t even have to be made. That’s the power of it. That’s why it’s compelling – 105 minutes, millions of dollars, plot line, all compressed into 4 words.

See the movie? Why? I’ve already changed my MySpace page to Sharks on a Tractor (thanks Conan O’Brien).

“The quality of the film matters nothing.” – Terry Heaton

. Terry’s got other tasty bits in there as well.

I’d like to thank Seth Godin for succinctly wrapping this post up for me.

“I knew all about SOAP and had no desire whatsoever to go. I’m just not ready to sit in a theatre with a bunch of people afraid of airplanes.”

“I’m afraid we come back to something that marketers have been struggling with for a really long time–the best way to succeed is to have a really great product.” – Seth Godin

If so, there’s a 30GB video iPod waiting for you.

Croncast 300 by 300th iPod contest

This means the heavy lifting of moving garrickvanburen.com to a new server, and the firstcrackpodcast to it’s own domain is complete (finally).

If anythings not working as expected, please drop me a line. Thanks.

Two things I’ve noticed already:

1. The forums haven’t migrated yet, I thought I’d take this opportunity to try and solve the spam problem I talked earlier.
2. The fastcast is all thrown off. Since the new server server thinks the files were uploaded now, rather then when they really were, the order is all thrown off. Let’s see if that’s an easy fix.