About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
A compare and contrast of my 8 year old Timbuk2 messenger bag with my new Targus CityGear LA laptop bag.
This is also my first crack with enhanced podcasts, using ChapterToolMe to include additional photos of the laptop bags within the podcast.
Listen to the Laptop Bag Comparison – Targus vs. Timbuk2 [9 min]
Jen and I just returned from Boulder, Co via Rapid City, SD and Kansas City, MO and I wanted to send out thanks to everyone helping to make it a fantastic journey through the midwestern states. In roughly chronological order, I’d like to extend a big thank you to:
A couple dozen photos are now up over in my Flickr site in the Boulder Road Trip 2005 set.
David Orenstein on his love of movies and the Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival.
Theremin and Network are also on my list of all time favorites.
Part 2 of a 6 part series on the life passions of Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg & Gotlieb’s partners and staff.
Listen to Reviewing Roger Ebert with David Orenstein [20 min]
Howard Rubin on his lifelong passion for cars and the Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Timeless automobiles on Howard Rubin’s list:
Part 1 of a 6 part series on the life passions of Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg & Gotlieb‘s partners and staff.
Listen to Reviewing Ralph Lauren’s Car Collection with Howard Rubin [20 min]
To help communicate the value of podcasting, I offer this single-sided Podcasting 101 PDF covering:
Download the Podcasting 101 Sheet [pdf].
If you’d like future 101 Sheets delivered automatically, here’s the 101 Sheet RSS Feed
This week included 2 of my best restaurant experiences ever.
The service at the Highland Grill is always above par yet today they even outdid themselves. Our server was personable, chatty, and just indignant enough to remind us this was her turf. She made spot-on recommendations and when my dining companion asked about hot sauce, she brought him his own bottle of Tabasco and a side of their special spicy concoction.
Jen highly recommends the calamari tacos.
Same here, very personable staff with spot-on recommendations. I threw her a ringer when I ordered the Gueze Giradin. Which I couldn’t pass up. Here’s an mp3 of the story on my first Gueze tasting. She handled it expertly.
Great turnout at my MN-ASIS Brain Food Sampler talk earlier this week. We covered quite a bit of ground in 30 minutes, thanks to everyone attending for the great questions. Here are Ann Treacy‘s notes, published as her latest Byte of the Week email newsletter (Thanks again Ann):
“Last night I went to a great presentation by Garrick Van Buren to the Minnesota chapter of the American Society of Information Science and Technology. He was terrific! I am killing two birds today by writing up my notes and sharing them with you and ASIST. So today’s Byte is an annotated bibliography of many of the resources Garrick mentioned on wikis, blogs, RSS, and podcasts.”
- Garrick’s web site – includes links to various blogs, wikis, and podcasts, including Garrick’s podcast, First Crack.
- WordPress – software to help you create/maintain a blog. As their site says, they’re “free, yet priceless.”
- Audacity – open source audio recording for creating a podcast.
- Audio Hijack Pro – upgraded software for creating a podcast.
- Audioblogger – easy tool for creating podcasts, much like blogger.com for blogs.
- WikkaWiki – software to create a wiki (a wiki is akin to a shared blog).
- NetNewsWire – an RSS reader – for info consumers.
- Feedburner – Helps you generate and track an RSS feed that you have created – for info creators
- MNspeak part blog, part wiki, part old fashioned web conference.
- Trackback – this is the Wikipedia definition of Trackback, a concept that allows and tracks posts among blogs with a reduced chance for spam.
- Technorati – a search engines for blogs (aka the blogosphere).
- Google Patent – we mentioned this last night, this is my [Ann’s] favorite article on the topic.
Target’s “newplace newspace” line is an obvious strike against Ikea’s hip and disposable interior furnishings, and a big win for customers. (There are more Targets than Ikeas near me and if you’re in the US, I’d bet near you also.)
Then this morning I hear, Ikea to sell groceries.
Reminds me of the scene in the Right Stuff where Jeff Goldblum rushes in proclaiming “It’s the Russians”, kicking off the Cold Warer, Space Race (thanks Al).
UPDATE: 11 November 2005. I noticed somebody came by this post googling for IKEA’s target audience. For that, I’d recommend the lyrics to Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘IKEA’
Looking for the best route for the first leg next week’s roadtrip (Minneapolis to Rapid City), Jen and I checked out MapQuest and Google Maps and found something very interesting:
MapQuest drives across South Dakota at 71 mph
Google has the cruise control set at 61 mph
In television and radio, it costs the same to reach 10 people as 10,000 or 10,000,000. In fact, the sunk costs of transmitters and FCC licenses inherently bias toward larger audiences. If everyone within range of your transmitter isn’t paying attention to you, there’s still marketing to be done.
On the other hand, the distribution technologies in podcasting inherently bias smaller audiences. Each additional website visitor adds to the load on web server, an additional straw on the proverbial camel’s back. Eventually, the server can’t take it and crashes (slashdotting). Adding insult to injury, when a podcast suddenly gets popular the site is slashdotted, the publisher’s monthly bandwidth allocation is also gone.
With the release of iTunes 4.9, some of the most popular podcasts were taken down, right as their demand peaked. In the same way the goal of viral marketing is to turn customers into the marketing department, Dave Slusher and Leo Laporte are experimenting with BitTorrent to transform their listeners into their distributors. BitTorrent turns internet distribution into something more akin to broadcasting, where each additional visitor makes it easier on the publisher. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t yet support BitTorrent. iTunes does support video-casts, and given video files are a magnitude of size greater than audio files, this is worrisome.
Aside from the tag-driven directory at Odeo.com, all of the podcast directories start with a limited number of high-level categories (19 in the case of iTunes). Any finite number of generic top-level categories inherently conflicts with podcasting’s bias toward extremely niche conversations. In the same way Yahoo’s top-level categorization conflicts with the web’s inherent bias toward extremely niche conversations. For more on this, listen to Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated presentation at ITConversations.
Notice the above link is to a specific presentation at ITConversations – categorization at the individual podcast-level is more useful than categorization at the podcaster-level. I’ll extend this further; if two podcasters fall under a same category, both of them need to specialize further.
Soon the best, most relevant, most engaging podcasts won’t be listed in iTunes or any directory. The risk of slashdotting and mis-categorization is too high.
As Groucho Marx famously stated:
“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”