The Boston Globe has a podcasting article up today. The negative spin of the headline (“Podcasting faces growing pains”) is curious. It’s true, having a popular podcast can lead to expensive bandwidth bills. But for their trouble we’ve given the podcasters an outlet for their passion and, for some, a bit of fame. I’d say that’s a net positive. In any case, I think the economics will work itself out. Podcasting is different for so many reasons. “Tivo for sound” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s because podcasting is a child of the Internet that we can build participative systems like GigaDial that allow us to program the content for one another. Podcasting takes not only the communication channel, but also the content, the marketing, ratings and programming out of scarcity and into the commons.
Month: February 2005
VersionTracker has a pretty impressive robot. Erik posted the software on this page to Sourceforge less than 24 hours ago.
Boston Globe: Somerville Gates creator Geoff Hargadon “has become almost preposterously famous.”
I love that podcasting is getting attention from the NY Times, but this article feels more like an ad for one guy’s company. A guy who as far as I know did nothing to make podcasting happen, and arguably hurt it by proliferating an incompatible syndication format.
Geeks only: OpenPodcast #1100
Staccato 10 is packed with great, creatively licensed music.
Stupid human tricks — parents’ edition. To make eating vegetables more exciting for our three year-old, we pretend that the crunching sends a shock wave through the floor, and, much to her delight, flail vigorously after each bite.
People are talking about the new Google toolbar, which modifies the Web pages you read, potentially to the benefit of the publisher’s competition and, unless they specifically disclaim it, Google’s bottom line.
Jason Kottke quits his day job to work full-time on the kottke.org Web site. He’s initially relying on reader donations to fund the effort.
Andrew Grumet's Weblog 