Published on
January 9, 2005 in
podcast.
Podcasting is still in its infancy. A lot of podcasts programs are about podcasters podcasting, on how they do it and why it’s so great. This is rather normal, since it is still new, and on the producing side a lot of (technical) issues still need to be addressed. I also hear the occasional “It’s 9AM. It’s raining. I haven’t got a clue what to say next.” podcast. But shows like IT Conversations, BBC’s “In Our Time” and The Dawn and Drew Show show where the possibilities lie. This is high value content. It is clear that at some point people will start making money with podcasting.
Adam Curry dreams about a public figure like Howard Stern joining the podcast movement. I agree with him that this is a good example of how podcasting could be the mechanism for a paid subscription model. Paid subscription also means: you only listen if you pay, so subscribers will need to prove their membership, i.e. authenticated podcatching.
Since podcasting is based on downloading files over HTTP, you actually don’t need to add much to the current scheme to enable authentication. Virtually all HTTP servers have username/password authentication support (HTTPS with certificates would be overkill), so I can see 2 models emerging:
- open feed, protected audio
- anyone has access to the RSS feed, but you need a username/password to download the files.
- protected feed and audio
- you need a username/password for the feed and for the audio files
My guess is that the first model will be the most common:
- the publicly available RSS feed gives information on the podcast, shows up in blog search engines and as such serves as publicity.
- you only need authentication for the audio files. These may in many cases be hosted on a different server than the feed. With podcast service providers like libsyn.org emerging, authentication might be a problem a podcaster can also outsource.
- protecting the feed too might be a solution in cases where there’s confidential information in it.
- in any case, this means that podcasters like iPodder or Doppler will have to build in username/password support for file download. No rocket science, just something straightforward that needs to be done.
A predictable problem will be that, since MP3 files do not have DRM (Digital Rights Management) built in (the files can easily be copied), they might get passed on from 1 paying subscriber to X non-paying listeners. In that case, if this 1 subscriber sets up an ‘illegal’ unauthenticated podcast feed, there are ways to put watermarks in MP3 files to pinpoint after some time who that cheater is. Also, Windows Media and Real Audio do have DRM capabilities, so as long as the ownership check happens during playback, and not during download, podcasting with these type of files could work too.
There is no need to get out the Fort Knox methods yet. Security should be enough to make misuse difficult, but no so strict that it becomes too cumbersome to actually use the podcast. Just adding a username and password when you subscribe to the RSS feed in your podcatcher will get us a long way.
Published on
January 8, 2005 in
movie.
On paper it must have seemed a guaranteed winner:
- Oliver Stone as director: not that active as of lately – true – but responsible for blockbusters like JFK, Wall Street, Platoon and Born on the 4th of July
- a strong story of battle, success and leadership with a clear super-hero
- Colin Farell (as Alexander): the Irish bloke who became the receptionists’ hero after hanging on the phone for over an hour in “Phone Booth”
- Angelina Jolie (as his mom, Olympias): the predator babe with the luscious lips and the excellent performing C-cup
- Anthony Hopkins (as Ptolemy): any director’s first choice for playing an old man in a movie
- Val Kilmer (as Philip, Alexander’s father): the pilot with the chewing gum in Top Gun
Rosario Dawson (as Alexander’s ravishing wife Roxane): who also played in “Kids” and surely has ‘grown’ in more than one sense of the word!
- some B and C-list actors like Christopher Plummer and Jared Leto …
But the result is a disaster. What will you remember from the movie’s characters? Ptolemy was a boring old man, Olympias a manipulating bitch, Philip had only one eye, Roxane was a hot-blooded exotic beauty with a funny accent and Alexander was a heavy drinker and definitely queer. What images will you carry with you: Egypt looks silly, Babylon looks formidable, war is bloody, elephants are huge and queer men wear mascara.
Continue reading ‘Alexander: worst movie of 2005 yet’
Published on
January 8, 2005 in
Belgium and NL.
(Post in Dutch)
Enkele bloggers organiseren op 19 januari een geek dinner in Gent. Op een geek dinner komen mensen samen die gepassioneerd zijn door technologische nieuwigheden. Op het geek dinner verwachten we iedereen die met andere geeks wil praten over podcasten, fotobloggen, bloggen, gadgets en nieuwe media.
We eten daar samen een hapje. Iedereen betaalt zijn eigen consumpties. We komen samen om 19u30 voor, in de Backstage, St-Pietersnieuwstraat 128 te Gent. Aanmelding vooraf is verplicht via het reactieformulier bij smetty.be of lvb.net.
Zullen alvast aanwezig zijn: Cindy De Smet, Erwin van Hunen, John Baeyens, Luc Van Braekel, Karel Uyttendaele (jr.) en deze geek.
Published on
January 7, 2005 in
music.
Looks like the Line6 GuitarPort has just gotten an freeware rival:
Justin Frankel of Winamp and Gnutella (and Waste, sheesh!) fame has a new project�and it could be his most wicked yet. The Jesusonic CrusFX 1000 is a prototype effects processor for musicians, designed to run the text-based Jesusonic software (available for download on the Jesusonic website). Each button on the prototype triggers a different, linking effect, and new effects algorithms can be coded and compiled in real time for testing.
(via Gizmodo and blog.zog.org)
Mmmm, toys …
Published on
January 6, 2005 in
Google.
While we were creating the Pixagogo site, we paid a lot of attention to optimal and correct search engine tuning. More specifically, Bart “SEO man” Anrijs read most documents available on the subject and handcarved the HTML until it was just right. It worked as expected, and we now have a very powerful (and legal!) tool to push stuff up high in Google rankings: the Pixagogo Public Albums. The basic idea is to create an album that is featured in the Public Gallery. It won’t work for porn or other illegal material, because we check all candidates for public albums manually.
We first noticed it with some of our own albums, like my Skeemz album, which ranks #1 for a Google search on ‘Isolde Lasoen’ and most of the names of the other band members, or Wim’s honeymoon pictures album, which scores excellent for “trouw foto’s”.
So if you want to promote an artist, a site or want to show off your collection of Delfts aardewerk, here’s a good way to be found in Google, Yahoo and MSN:
- get a Pixagogo account
- create a nice album with pictures of the subject you want to promote
- choose a relevant title, with the words you want to rank high on
- add links to your own site if you have one
- and submit it as a candidate for a public album.
If the album is accepted, wait a week or two and do a search on the words in the title. The results will even grow better in time. You can also check traffic on your album with the ‘Statistics’ button.
TEST: This blog already ranks #1 if you search on ‘podcast icons’, so now I’ve created a Pixagogo podcast icons album to see how long it will take for the album to jump ahead of this blog’s listing. Keeping my fingers crossed!
UPDATE 13 Jan 2005: the Pixagogo album just got picked up by Google and jumped right to the 2nd place, right behind my blog post. I’m curious to see whether it can jump ahead of it after a couple of weeks …
Random logo: 
Published on
January 5, 2005 in
Belgium.
In this geeky world I’m in, there are few magazines as spot-on and influential as Wired Magazine. It’s one of the magazines I keep around for years after publication.
Wired was important not just because it was the first magazine to make the computer world seem hip; it also trained its eye on the implications of the onrushing new technology, not merely on appraising the newest machines and trendiest gadgets.
(from nettime.org)
I typically buy a copy of Wired when I’m in an airport, because they don’t carry it in most Belgian bookshops. So this year I thought: let’s just pretend we’re wealthy and buy a year’s subscription. I clicked the ‘Subscribe’ button on the site, and lo and behold, a year’s subscription only costs $10! (That’s about the same price as I pay over here for a single issue.) Great! Oh wait, that’s for US only. Let’s check ‘International’: for Europeans it’s a hefty $70.
Even if $70 is not the end of the world, why on earth would I pay a 600% premium for just transport? This made me think of the Brewster Kahle speech on NotCon 2004. The founder of the Internet Archive has set up the Internet BookMobile, a vehicle with all technology on board (Internet, color printer, binding machine) to print books on demand. His claim is that it costs $1 to print a black/white book with a color cover, while it costs $2 for a library to handle the lending of a book. Printing a self-made book (uploaded in PDF format) through the CafePress site costs $4.50. Kinkos charges a bit more ($5.95). So if one had to print 1000 copies for Western Europe and ship them from France, Germany or Poland (cheaper labor), this should be possible for less than $5 per copy?
So here’s my question: given the state-of-the-art in on-demand printing technology, isn’t it possible to have US-based magazines digitally transferred to a European location and printed closer to the reader? So I could subscribe to Wired, Fast Company ($56 for Europe instead of $12), Business 2.0, Rolling Stone ($65 for Europe instead of $13), Time Magazine, Newsweek (70€ instead of $30 per year) and – what the heck – Playboy ($45 for Europe instead of $12) for what one Wired subscription costs now?
Published on
January 4, 2005 in
Web2.0.
I recently stopped reading blogs with SharpReader. It’s a great product, but I had over a hundred feeds that I was monitoring and that’s just too much information coming in. No way to get through all that and still get your job done. I now started from scratch with BlogLines and am trying to think twice before adding a new feed (currently at 10).
I remember the IT Conversations/BloggerCon podcast where Robert Scoble talks about the hours he spends each day reading 915(!) feeds. Ok, there are people who only post a couple of articles a week, but there’s also blogs like the excellent MetaFilter that give you between 10 and 20 new stories every day. How much time does it take a person per day to make 1000 decisions like: “Am I going to read this?”, “Should I click on this link?”, “Should I put this in my favourites/blog list/furl list/…?”.
One way to go is to let someone else do the filtering. You could stick to reading 10 blogs that compile the juicy bits. I’ve seen 3 kinds of these aggregated blogs:
- Repost: Scoble has an aggregator blog where he re-posts (copy/paste) interesting articles he came across while weeding through oceans of information. Inasfar as Robert’s interests match yours, that is an option.
- Excerpt: BoingBoing and the above mentioned MetaFilter have a group of people posting interesting links embedded in small articles (5-10 lines) with the short content or some background info and leave it to you to decide if you want to click further.
- Link blog: Jeremy Zawodny has a link blog where he just posts links, hardly any explanation. You get a dozen posts per day with a title like “An Article Buried in Junk” and you then have to decide whether you want to click on it and read it. No background, no personal opinion like “Good point”/”Hilarious rant”/”Despicable proposition”/…, nada. As a filtering tool it does not work for me, but I can imagine that for Jeremy himself it works like a recording of his mouse wanderings, an outboard brain. “What was that eBay story again I saw a couple of weeks ago? Oh, I put it on my linkblog! So I can Google it!”
I guess we’ll have to wait for someone to combine bayesian or collaborative filtering with a feed aggregator, like Wesner Moise suggests. How could this work?
- client-based: If there were a tool like Popfile for blogs (this would be an HTTP proxy that can interpret RSS/Atom feeds and mark the interesting posts by changing the title), it could ‘learn’ what posts you find interesting and use its bayesian filtering to find similar articles. Popfile was made for spam detection, so maybe we have to look at spam-oriented collaborative filtering efforts like Razor to get this on our desktop.
- server-based: if you read your feeds through a web interface, and the actual content is on a central server, it is much easier to enable filtering. I think BlogLines would be an excellent candidate for this. They already suggest new feeds to add, based on the ones you’re already subscribed to. They just need to dive a level deeper and work on the article level. And the user should have something like a [--|-|0|+|++] quotation toolbar under each article. Mark Fletcher, I’m counting on you!
Let’s see how long it takes before I can say “Told you so”!
Published on
January 1, 2005 in
news.
There’s nothing I can say about this disaster that has not already been said. See the damage it’s done on lvb.net.
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