Clear Channel Offers Podcasts!!??

Clear Channel announced today a major overhaul of their Net strategy. The company plans to
add original video programing to some 200 local radio stations' Web sites
begin offering subscription online radio services, the ability to buy songs digitally or in CD format, or even ringtones directly from their Web sites
and (unbelievably)
make some of its live morning shows available for downloading, commonly known as "Podcasting."
Clearly, the demise of radio is affecting the company (guess the Wired article was on target, eh? - here, here and here) A quick look at the trajectories of Apple (APL) and Clear Channel (CCU) tell an interesting story. Obviously, the two companies are not in completely comparable industries, but on the other hand, one has embraced The Shift, and one has not.

SF Podcasting March Meetup

I attended the SF Podcasting March Meetup, which was held at Tommy's Joynt on Geary and Van Ness tonight. It was a great place to meet, decent food, lots of beer -- very informal setting.

Michael Butler of Rock and Roll Geek Show fame was kind enough to setup the meeting. Approximately 30 people turned up - podcasters, listeners, budding entrepreuners, etc.

Doug Kaye guided a 30-45 minute discussion where the group talked about several different topics, including:

- Eric Rice/Warner Brothers/The Used announcement (Eric showed up a bit later and gave us a run-down of the sponsorship).

- Doug discussed OurMedia.org and the relationship to the Internet Archive. He provided some interesting stats on the staggeringly large amount of bandwidth that IA has available

- Jack Herrington gave a brief overview of the O'Reilly title he is working on entitled "Podcasting Hacks"

- Equipment and recording. Lots of comments about prices, specific setups, etc

There was quite a bit of energy to the meeting. Definitely feels like people are psyched about Podcasting and the future. It was great to be able to put faces to the email IDs and voices .. and I got to razz Michael Butler about his GPS :-) I think about 40-50% of the people there were recording in some form or fashion. As I was leaving, the Beercast crew was just getting rolling, along with the SayYum husband/wife team.

Laptops for everyone

Recently, I was reminded how important machine portability is the age of broadband/WiFi/VPN. Not that this is new to anyone, but I had an experience where a Developer was spending quite a bit of time keeping his environments (office and home) in synch.

He and I went over his machine requirements and decided a desktop was the way to go. He was pleased with the performance, etc. However, it wasn't too long before he was doing the occasional task remotely. He noticed immediately that a laptop would have been much more convenient. Unforunately, the dollars from the budget have been spent and acquiring a laptop for him isn't in the cards at the moment.

Which brings me to a basic tenet for my newly created "20 Rules of Entreprenuership" -- get everyone a laptop! No more desktops. The ability to work remotely is a requirement in this day and age, not a luxury (Of course, this ties into the corollary "Provide VPN Access to the Network")

Showtime/Yahoo Join The Shift

Showtime has announced that they will be streaming the season premiere of "Fat Actress" on Yahoo.

Yet another content network sees the future for what it is -- The Shift. Not only are they streaming it on demand, thereby meeting the definition of "Time Shifted Media", they are also distributing it over the Web/IP.

Who knows, but maybe the BitTorrent push of late (shutting down Loki, etc) has really opened some eyes?

jPodder/i18n

I signed on a few weeks back as Committer on the jPodder project. Specifically, I volunteered to help Christophe take the awesome jPodder and make it i18n aware.

Currently, we are working on externalizing all text in English. Once we have completed the task, we'll be looking for a few volunteers to help with language translation.

If you are interested, please contact the Dev list at jpodder-develop at lists.sourceforge.net

Look Out Yahoo!

Marty Schwimmer wants Bloglines to stop indexing his content.

In Mr. Schwimmer's view

"Bloglines' reproduction of my site is a commercial derivative work."

Russell brings up a great point, as have quite a few others. Instead of adding my thoughts, I figured I'd expand on one of Russell's points and use this opportunity to warn Yahoo (and Southwest Airlines!) Based on the screen shot below, Marty might be sending you a cease-and-desist letter at any moment. (Google, sorry didn't have time to make a screen shot for you guys)