Okay, I'm all signed up for Podcastercon. I've got my flights, hotel, rented car, now what?

Well, it's not even an unconference. Brian Russell, who is organizing the event, says we have to figure out what the sessions are. He's just providing a chunk of time, organizing everything, and he worked with Paul Jones at the University of North Carolina to get the space.

It's up to us to figure out what the conference is about.

Now one of the things it's certainly about is Podcasting. That's why it's called Podcaster-con.

In the past I might have led a discussion about the technology of podcasting, but you all know that now.

Maybe I should just do a group Morning Coffee Notes live and in your face?

What do you think? Post a comment if you have an idea, or if you have a snark.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 12/12/05; 10:30:47 AM - --

Audible announces they've got a way to tell how many times a podcast has been listened to.

I can't imagine how it works unless:

1. They modify the software that runs on everyone's playing devices and also magically give them all the ability to phone back to their servers, or

2. They've decided to change the term podcasting to mean "the shitty DRM-based service that Audible provided before podcasting wrecked their business."

Now it's possible I missed a third alternative, if so, I'd love to hear what it is; but for now I'm bettin on #2.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 11/11/05; 4:25:04 PM - --

I've been looking at modernizing my podcasting tools, with an eye toward news-oriented casts that would be useful in time of emergency (like a big earthquake, hurricane or terrorist attack).

I found that none of the major networks has a feed of news-oriented casts that update more frequently than once a week.

I found that even though NPR has dozens of podcasts, they don't have feeds for the news shows you'd want to have in time of emergency: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fresh Air and Diane Rehm. Not one of these mainstays is available as a podcast.

So while we've been very cheery in encouraging the mainstream guys and gals, they haven't really stepped up yet.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 9/9/05; 8:26:20 PM - --

Last week two companies, Odeo and Podshow announced investments from leading venture capitalists and angel investors from Silicon Valley and Boston.

The investors must have some idea what businesses the companies are in, but we're no wiser after the announcements.

If you had to guess, what money are these companies chasing? Are they building companies, or trying to get bought by a technology giant like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft? Will other podcasting companies be formed and receive funding from technology investors? 

I'd love to know what people think. 

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/14/05; 11:05:12 AM - --

I got an email from Sable Cantus, saying he's having problems subscribing to Morning Coffee Notes on Apple's iTunes.

I am subscribed to your podcast feed on itunes and it just isn't coming through.  You came through fine on ipodder lemon, but I switched with 4.9 itunes.  I see a couple of episodes from early July but it's been about three weeks now and nothing. 

I would prefer to have all my podcasts aggregate from the same place and therefore am asking to please check into this.  My radio feed works with itunes fine so I hope this is something that can be rectified.

What I appreciate most is the intellectual "rambling" that takes place.  I feel that your strength is to get many of those thoughts into one conversation.

I don't plan to change Morning Coffee Notes. It was one of the first podcasts, and I designed the format. If Apple can't read that feed, then their iPodder app is worthless. Switch to something that works and has a developer who answers his email, like iPodderX.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/11/05; 7:31:43 PM - --

I had dinner last night with Jim Moore, one of four people who are part of the new venture capital fund that's committed to RSS. They don't have a blog yet, we talked about that, among many other things.

I've known about their plans for quite some time, to me it's like Jean-Louis Gassee's announcement of Be, back in 1995, a project I also knew about before it's announcement, and one which surprised me because it was so enthusiastically received by the industry. I wrote this DaveNet piece, welcoming him back.

The same thing happened with the RSS fund, I knew about it, didn't think it would stimulate much interest, and was surprised when it did. I wanted to know, from Jim, why.

He explained. RSS is more than a format, it's an approach to creating systems. He likened our web content management software to corporate publishing platforms, like Atex, which were cumbersome, hard to use, and even harder to manage. Connecting them to other manufacturer's systems was so hard that people practically never did it. The whole point of RSS, Jim argues (imho correctly) is to make connecting systems together so easy that users can do it themselves, without any help from system managers or vendors. This is a brilliant observation, in all my years thinking about RSS, I had never approached it from this direction.

Then we talked about a question that Jason Calacanis asked at Tuesday's OPML meetup in NY, one that I answered in a less than opportune way. Jason wanted to know if it was possible to use the OPML Editor to browse structures produced by databases. I explained that the environment that the OPML Editor runs in is ancient and rich, and among many other connectors it has an ODBC interface, so yes, it could easily be done, and there are developers who would happliy do it (for a contract fee of course).

This is true, but it missed an opportunity to exhibit the way of thinking of RSS and OPML that Jim had talked about. The correct answer is, yes, of course, just put an OPML cap on the database service, something that can be done in an afternoon of scripting (including a couple of coffee breaks, and one or two false starts) and then you can plug your database into any tool that understands OPML. Or if you prefer, create an RSS cap, and plug it in just as easily, but without the hierarchy (assuming there's only one level to your data).

But forgive me for missing this opportunity, because Odeo and Apple missed an even bigger, related, one (but of course there's still time for them to correct that). They're not expecting to see it, so they don't. I know that Adam Curry has urged Apple to see it, as far as I know, no one has pointed the opportunity out to Odeo. Last night I got Jim to look at it, and it wasn't easy, because (my opinion) he was't expecting it, so maybe you weren't either.

The podcasting community did more than bootstrap a new medium in record time. As if that wasn't enough, it also bootstrapped a directory of podcasting resources and podcasts themselves, and a way of doing directories in communities that goes way beyond podcasting in importance. It's a structure of interlinked OPML directories, maintained by the community, linked together by the architecture of OPML. It's the small pieces loosely joined philosophy applied to directories, and it works. There is no official top level of the directory, but many people think of Adam Curry's ipodder.org directory as the top level. For many months Adam toiled over this directory, using an early version of the OPML Editor that I created for him. Many of the people who create directories that Adam links to actually code the OPML by hand, that's how dedicated and visionary these people are.

It's a wonderful thing! People in the community want the newcomers to podcasitng to use their work, and help them do more. But so far they've taken the Atex approach, one-corporation doing everything-for-everyone. It can't possibly compete with the structure the community has already built. I'm committed to making it work, and I think we have the strength to do it, because so many people are pulling in the same direction. Last night I got Jim to think about his OPML search engine (in development) as a way of searching the podcast directories. And of course any other public directory structure that uses OPML. This way his work, will immediately be relevant to a small community of enthusiastic people, which is exactly how these things get started.

Okay, this is clearly something I need to podcast. And we'll certainly talk about it at tonight's meetup at Berkman Center in Cambridge, 7PM.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/14/05; 5:00:00 AM - --

As you know, the question that will determine whether Gnomedex is a conference for posterity or just another random schmooze fest is this: What's The Song?

Every great blogging conference begins with a rousing rendition of some cornball classic. At the first BloggerCon it was Take Me Out To The Ball Game. At the second, hmmm, what was the second? At the third it was This Land is Your Land, and at Blog Nashville it should have been Dixie (imho) but instead it was some ridiculous patriotic standard (one of the many, hard to remember).

So now we gather in Seattle, and I get to lead off a discussion, so you bet your ass there's going to be a song.

Now -- the only question left is -- Which One?

# Posted by Dave Winer on 6/22/05; 3:43:24 AM - --

Here's an email I sent today to all people who are registered for Gnomedex...

Good morning and Happy Father's Day!

As you may know, I have been working on an OPML Editor. It's an outliner,
grown out of last year's open source release of Frontier, and is itself open
source, licensed under the GPL.

Its native file format is OPML, the standard format for lists of RSS feed
subscriptions. So you can use the OPML Editor to open and edit subscription
lists for all the major feed readers and aggregators, tune them up, merge
them and split them, publish and share them. Finally, there's a rational way
to edit the subscription lists.

OPML has also become the standard format for the podcasting directories. All
the nodes in the community directory are edited in OPML, many of them by
hand. Now there's a tool that's designed for exactly this purpose.

The OPML Editor is good for all kinds of lists, directories, project
planning, designs. The tool can be used by professionals and managers,
doctors, professors, lawyers, accountants, writers -- basically anyone who
thinks for a living.

Another way of looking at it -- RSS is great for news, but not everything is
news, some things, like the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or the
elements of the periodic table, don't change. Or change slowly, like the
teams in major league baseball, or the top home run hitters. For information
like that, knowledge, representing the relationships between nuggets is
what's important, and that's where outliners like the OPML Editor, that's
now in beta, excel.

It's so exciting that we're all going to be getting together later this week
in Seattle, and I wanted to take this opportunity to invite any of you who
are coming to be part of our test group. To me, it's an incredible
opportunity to have face-to-face discussions with people who have used the
software and have ideas they want to share.

Would you like to be in the test group?

If you would like to be part of the test group, please reply to this email
as soon as you can. Note that I will be travelling on Wednesday, and may be
hard to reach after that, since I'll be actively schmoozing with Chris and
Ponzi and everyone else at Gnomedex.

And I'm totally looking forward to seeing you at Gnomedex in Seattle! (I
hear the weather will be great.)

Dave Winer
Gnomedex Keynoter

PS: I know this is terrible, but the software is only available for Windows
at this time. We're looking for Mac people with experience designing user
interfaces with MacBird. As soon as the dialogs are converted we'll begin a
Mac test group.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 6/19/05; 3:24:33 PM - --

# Posted by Dave Winer on 6/15/05; 7:28:09 AM - --

# Posted by Dave Winer on 6/6/05; 2:29:28 PM - --