justinmaccarthy

The BBC is reporting from PodcastConUK, Europe’s inaugural podcasting conference, in London.

There are some interesting quotes from the BBC and Virgin radio on Podcasting:

“It won’t be too long before this [podcasting] becomes the normal route to discover new talent,” says Chris Kimber, head of BBC Radio Interactive.

and

In the short term, thinks Mr Kimber, this is likely to affect the types of programmes that get commissioned for the BBC radio output.

and

At PodcastConUK, Mr Cridland announced that Virgin’s new unsigned band show, Virgin Radio Extreme, had been created with podcasting at its heart

Read more at the BBC

Podscope is a search engine that allows you to search for spoken words within audio content. Currently they are indexing podcasts. The technology is developed by TvEyes, which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999. It seems to work pretty well. Check it out !

There has been a lot of stuff happening at Microsoft recently, as the software giant struggles to fight its stagnant appearence. One of the Microsoft products that is going to get a much needed facelift is Hotmail. The beta is called “Kahuna”. Over at channel nine they have posted a video with the developers talking about the technologies used and the overall goals of the new GUI, which basically means AJAX (not that you will hear that buzzword mentioned once)

However watching the video, a worrying fact come it light; the UI is targeted towards IE 5.5 and IE6. Thats mean NO browser on Apple or linux. No Firefox, no Opera, no Safari.

You would think that the users of Apple and Linux , Firefox etc. are the people microsoft should be trying to impress? They are the segment of the market they DON’T have. Makes you wonder.

Microsoft has launched a iPhoto/Picasa type application called Max. Max allows you to organise your digital photos, create slide shows etc.

Interesting Nerd note.. its built on WinFx

It seems you can search by tag in Google Blog Search, if you enter “tag=cambodia” or “tag-cambodia” you get different results than searching for “cambodia”.

If you sell online, read what Seth Godin says about the
shopping cart conversion. I suspect he is right.

Via Fractals of Change , a great idea from Stuart Henshall

Stuart’s idea is that Bell South ought to immediately virtualize all the nonworking phone numbers in the stricken area. VoIP providers can then immediately make it possible for the owners of these numbers to reclaim them from wherever they are, set up voice mail on them, and/or forward them to other working phone numbers. Bell South can have the numbers back when the landlines are restored to service.

Via Doc Searls..

Check out the extremely odd Rocketboom vlog coverage of Katrina. I’m not sure what to think about it at all? What do you think?

Jon Udell has a piece about the problem of link rot for RSS readers, The saga of RSS (dis)continuity , which I was about comment on when I read Dare Obasanjo’s post, which basically says nearly everything I was going to say in the first place.

Its hard to be cool

I’ll will comment on one thing mentioned by Jon and Dave,

Jon Udell said:

If you control your server, you can of course do an HTTP-level redirect. But your blog is hosted, you probably can’t, in which case you need to use the feed itself to signal the redirect.

to which Dave Obasanjo replies:

This part just boggles my mind. If the user’s blog is hosted (e.g. they are a LiveJournal, MSN Spaces or BlogSpot user) then not only can’t they control the HTTP headers emitted by the server but they don’t control their web feed either. So what exactly is the alternate solution that works in that case? If anything, this points to the fact that blog hosting services should give users the ability to redirect their RSS feed when they leave the service. This is a feature request for the various blog hosting services not an indication that a new technical solution is needed.

Actually a technical solution is needed, but its nothing to do with RSS. Its a URI problem, if you lose control of your domain, (or never had it), you are stuck, there isn’t much you can do without the kindness (or $$) of the masters of the domain. In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee wrote an essay called Cool URIs don’t change, but it’s hard to be cool, and Bill de hOra’s piece on the subject will tell you why, so I’ll just point you there.

I know some people hate him, but I like Robert X. Cringely. I liked his Revenge of the Nerds series. I like listening to him on his pulpit. I even liked his Plane Crazy documentary. So that said, I am looking forward to his new IpTV series, Nerd TV which starts next week. Hopefully the content will be great, it sure looks like he has got the delivery exactly right…

For those who think of television as radio with pictures and would rather listen to their NerdTV, the complete shows will be available in three audio formats: AAC (m4a file format, just like iTunes), mp3, and ogg vorbis. The audio files are, of course, substantially smaller than the full video versions, too.

For those who don’t want to spend an hour, we’re pulling two short clips from each show — “the juicy bit” and “the nerdy bit,” which ought to appeal to the technical and/or prurient interests in most of us. Give them a try, it’s easy.

The kind of content I like, anyway I want it. Perfect. I hope this kind of broadcasting leads the way.