This conversation is getting interesting – but it’s still the “phoney war”.

A couple of hours after I posted on Odeo yesterday, I got a mail from David Janes at BlogMatrix suggesting I try out his new tool Sparks! (not my exclamation mark!) which is an integrated podcatcher, rss aggregator, blogging tool, media player and podcast creation tool (at least those are the elements that I could discern, there may be even more…) and which is going for an official launch next week.

For these tools, it’s early days and the field’s wide open, and as AC keeps saying on the DSC they can only compete on quality and time to market. Well my initial reaction to the BlogMatrix offering is congratulations on getting to market quickly – and engaging in the conversation with little guys like me – not quite full marks yet on the quality of the product. So quick to market with a product like this isn’t quite kicking someone in the nuts.

I found it straightforward, but I’m not good at thinking out of my own experience. I couldn’t get my head around the podcast recording/mixing bit. Your file gets posted in .torrent format – which is fine if you know what it is and you’ve figured out how to get bittorrent to work efficiently behind your firewall etc. etc. I think overall the missing bit is documentation – David tells me there is a support page up now, but it’s still very bare.

This is what I said to David by e-mail:

“1. Easy to set up and get going – I understood most of the things
that i needed to do, but I’m used to aggregators and I’ve been
podcasting already for ooooh a couple of months! I liked that I
didn’t have to give you gazillions of bits of information in order to
register – free hosting doesn’t hurt any either…!.

2. So far I have recorded all of my podcasts on minidisc, transferred
them to PC and then done some post-production in audacity which I’ve
also used for mp3 encoding. With sparks! I just tried uploading a
previously published file of around 3 megs – went up very easily,
though I could have done with a status bar to see how far it had got.
I also mixed something from scratch, but I don’t have a good mic with
me and I don’t really think in that mixing way – dunno need to play
with it a bit more – I kind of worked out what I was supposed to do,
and I could see it working for a daily source code type show, but for
me it was too complicated.

3. Not sure about the .torrent format – I can understand the
rationale, but it’s still a bit bleeding edge for me and it shuts out
a lot of my listeners many of whom have taken a long time to get used
to downloading mp3s! I also sit behind a variety of firewalls myself
and so I don’t always get the full benefit. I think it’s a risky
strategy is all – I’m sure you’ve thought about it.

4. I struggled to find my blog page to download and listen without
sparks! I’m sure I’ll find it again… but this was the only annoying
moment – perhaps it could be signposted or put in the registration
confirmation email – “once you’ve published something it will show up
at http: //www. etc” that kind of thing.”

This morning Doc points out that it’s currently only available as a Windows .exe, which is the kind of thing that Doc notices but I don’t. I think though that I would like it better if the UI were simpler – perhaps browser based or if it has to be a client-app, then as with Ipodder Lemon 2.0 a bunch of tabbed sub-screens.

Doc also hints that we might see something from Odeo soon – I’m sure there’ll be some more detailed Podshow announcement as well, so then perhaps we can start comparing real features rather than going on about what we haven’t heard yet.

tags:

odeo & podshow &
sparks & podcasting

This e-government conference looks interesting and is just far enough away to be a target time for me to get something up, running and buzzing in the Public Service Conversations area – whether I go to it or not.

Dave reminds us of what we still don’t know about Odeo. And Adam talks about advertising and making money in podcasting.

What bugs me about Odeo is that they’re a “podcasting” company without any podcasts! How much credibility does that show – would you have bought blogging from Evan if he didn’t have a blog – ? To me, every day that that continues is more evidence that all it’s about is sucking cash out of a market that other people have built. And what’s annoying about that is not that people are making money – I love seeing people make money, I have my own company, I’m a capitalist – but that people who already are millionaires use their position of power to make even more money out of something that someone else has put the slog into – that’s capitalism that sucks. I know that this is projection, I don’t know what is in the Odeo grand master plan, but not having audio available on your site when that seems to be fundamental to your product doesn’t fill me with optimism – how does this fit with Dave’s definition of integrity? We shall see. Perhaps Evan’s presentation to etech will be on IT Conversations in six month’s time…

tags:

odeo & podcasting

I’ve been using these inkernets for more than ten years now, so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and not in the target audience, but I can’t actually see anything of use in the UK Government’s launch of ITsafe.

Lessig is podcasting … in his own way. He reads aloud from his latest published work in Wired – a good piece on public funding of wi-fi – but the fact that he’s “just” reading it gets a lot more comment than the content of what he says.

He does explain up front, on his blog, that it’s an experiment. I hope the feedback doesn’t put him off trying something more adventurous. I’d love to hear him thinking aloud. Dave has shown (though other examples are rare) that one can still deliver a well-structured thoughtful argument in this medium and I think that this is way more powerful than something that was “finished” before it was started.

podcasting

Just saw the first instalment of the UK version of The Apprentice. I didn’t see very much of the Trump original, but from what I did see, our version (with Sir Alan Sugar in the megalomaniac [err… shurely giant of modern commerce] role) seems a little less theatrical but the format comes through, although the board room is lighter, funkier and well a bit more 21st Century than the US show.

What doesn’t change is the testosterone (among women probably even more than the men) and the parade of egos puffed to bursting point.

What I don’t get is why any of these bright, motivated, sales-matic people want to earn a (six-figure) salary working their balls off for someone else – why aren’t they doing their own thing? What has Alan Sugar got that they want and why on earth do they want to put themselves through this humiliating and painful process?

In terms of general dynamics, it’s going to be interesting to see how the male/female split works out. It was really interesting how the women took longer than I expected to start gelling as a team, there was much more prickliness and arguing than among the men.

It’s clearly a big risk to volunteer to be project manager for the first task. Those that did have probably made some enemies for the rest of the series. Also, I don’t know how much this was because of the editing, but there were team members that I didn’t see do anything during the task. I do think it’s remarkable that Miranda, who panicked and started selling at a loss just after lunch, without discussing it with anybody, managed to talk herself out of getting fired.

The small things that tickled me were the excitement they showed when they went off to the luxury accomodation, giggling and thrilled – they had arrived but also the way that the swagger that pervades the whole group turns to pathetic displays of mock humility when they face up to the man who put AMS into Amstrad!

I’m hooked though. I want to know how the tasks are going to progress. And I want to see those egos bumping and bashing and smashing into each other, and then grovelling for a place in the next round.

Apprentice
UK TV

Update: Note to self, shut gob till know what talking about. The way I describe that the stream should work is exactly how it works – it just doesn’t do that on the first batch of stuff when you import your subscriptions. From then on, it’s working fine. Still would like an enclosure link and some localisation so that my posts don’t show up in Pacific Standard Time, but I think this time I’ll take a closer look at the preferences before shooting my mouth off!

[Previously…]
Looking at CNETs new online aggregator Newsburst and I particularly like the fact that I could easily take my bloglines subscriptions over and try out Newsburst quickly and easily. I also like the stream function, but it’s not quite right yet. I sent them the following feedback:

“This is general feedback and an explanation of my requirements that I either don’t see or don’t see how to do straight off the bat.

btw Dashboard doesn’t work for me at all. Today online, I might look at occasionally.”

Oh now I’ve just remembered something else that’s missing. I don’t see my enclosures linked to when I look at my RSS 2.0 feed – back to the feedback form….

Technorati tags:
RSS
Newsburst

Jack brings another angle on tags/folksonomies

“tagging is personal. My set of tags for this blog only make sense within the context of my blog and my interests. Sure, I try to come up with tags that are sensible to the visitor, and I even create short descriptions of what I mean by “theory of constraints.” And in groups (where the social arises), my use of tags will certainly be informed by how others use them. But these same tags aren’t going to be exactly the same on someone else’s blog. The same goes for my Flickr tags, though I do try to use tags that will make sense to my family and friends who might visit.”

I think there are three important aspects to this point:

1. Context is very important to sense making – people reading the same tag will get a different picture depending on whether or not they already know Jack, his work, his blog, his other online activities, the industry he works in.

2. The social pressure to conform (or not) – this is, I think, what is so cool – by choosing your tags carefully, you can show your closeness or distance from another individual or group – one of the badges of membership of a community might be our common usage of some esoteric tag. Similarly I might deliberately set myself apart from a group by a subtle difference in my choice of tags to describe similar content.

3. Same to me is not necessarily the same to you. Which reminds me of what we were talking about over at Magdalena’s blog about the me now and the later me. What seems the same to me now will not necessarily be the same in a few weeks, months, years’ time. Context has a time dimension and although tagging is personal, personal changes over time.

Cool stuff.

On the Wikipedia:Community Portal page there’s an exhortation to help with the Collaboration of the Week. “Help edit Soviet Military History“, it says.

Good God – hasn’t it been edited enough in the last 90 years??!!!?!!

Dave points to a bit of scaremongering about publically provided wifi and says:

Citiwide wifi systems will make new products possible. Imagine an iPod that had wifi built-in. While you’re walking around NYC it could check if any of your feeds have updated. This is one of those things you gotta know we’re going to be doing in a couple of years, if not less.

Yeah, but even more so I can imagine a wifi mobile phone that does VoIP for free and so can the sponsors of this sort of reporting (Verizon the bluetooth cripplers are mentioned). I’d expect more of this sort of stuff, the closer that the day comes that I can walk around London chatting to people all over the world for no cost to me (& therefore no revenue to a phone company) beyond the price of my phone and taxes I’ve already paid.