Surfarama

You know, ever since the whole ‘Podcasting’ thing has blown up I have really become addicted to the constant stream of great interviews and stuff from IT Conversations. Doug Kaye has obviously been at this for a while now, but I am willing to bet that his listenership has gone through the roof since the ‘last 6inches’ has been solved (!).

Of course, by that I mean that now it is so easy to sync up the latest content direct to your music device many more folks will be doing it…It has always been possible to download the content and import it to iTunes for synchronising with my iPod, but now I can choose the categories I want and automagically it is there on my iPod when I got to work the next day. I love it.

Now, here’s my wish list of interviews I would like to hear in the near future (in no particular order):

Dick Costolo – FeedBurner
Joe Krause – JotSpot (could be a good Memory Lane candidate too)
Ross Mayfield – SocialText
Jason Fried – 37 Signals
Stewart Butterfield – Ludicorp (Flickr)
Mark Fletcher – Bloglines
…and I’m stopping here only because I don’t have time to go on.

Each of these people is doing really interesting/leading edge stuff in their own domains.

Just for fun here’s a way to monitor persistent searches with RSS.

Wow, Slideroll is a gorgeous looking web app with some pretty rich functionality to produce awesome slide shows with titles, text, fades, pans and zooms all from the web based interface. Nice work.

I can’t help but think that this kind of thing would ultimately become part of a broader service. Combined with Flickr for instance and it would kick major ass.

But then again, maybe there’s a niche for a standalone app like Slideroll. I can imagine eBayers using something like this to add really slick product slide shows to their listings.

Yeah that’s it…the developer of Slideroll should sell or license the software to a consumer photo sharing site like Flickr and then focus Slideroll.com on the niche commercial applications like product slide shows for online stores and eBay etc.

Another trip down memory lane…I started BlogPatrol a way back, and sold it when there were about 3000 users. I just checked and they’ve now got over 7000 users. Nice.

They could do with a design overhaul mind you

Could this be what you get for the Podcaster who has everything?

…a mobile 8 channel 120gb hard disk digital recorder, recording at 24/96 for 15 hours on the internal battery, with waterproof faders…

Yep, this news from Eric Rice is pretty significant IMHO…now anyone can podcast from anywhere they can get cell phone reception…and that’s it. No recording software or knowledge required, just dial in, record your audio via the telephone (can we call this a podpost?) and badaboom badabing it’s distributed direct to subscribers audio devices…

Now, imagine Kevin Sites podcasting from Iraq, or anyone else for that matter, from anywhere else in the world. Be the media man.

I’ve been listening a bit to Adam Curry’s podcast, The Daily Source Code, recently (it’s about the perfect length for the commute to work).

Anyway, his October 26th edition (28MB mp3 file) is priceless…apparently Adam’s wife, Patricia, knew David Bowie back in the day and her recollection of meeting him on a few occaisions is classic (warning: not for the easily offended).

The guy is an ass

The hits keep coming from Feedburner…building on the increasing enthusiasm for Podcasting, they’ve launched a new service SmartCasting.

From what I can gather it enables publishers to simply drop links to rich media into their feed and the SmartCast service will automatically wrap them up in enclosures so that podcasting ‘clients’ like iPodder can automagically pick them up….coolio.

I was going to dig around and figure out how to do this myself (apparently there’s an enclsoures plugin for WP), but this ought to make it really simple…and not only that but it makes it possible to use link aggregators/filters like del.icio.us to compile your own custom Podcast stream just by linking to whatever media files you want. I was just thinking about this the other day…man stuff moves quickly.

Go and read Dick’s announcement, he describes it nicely.

IMG_0633.JPG,
originally uploaded by Charles.

Flynn went on his first play date today at his friend Harry’s house…it wasn’t all fun and games

Jessie.JPG,
originally uploaded by Charles.

I was putting Flynn to bed, and just before turning out the night light I noticed Evil Jessie looking over us…no wonder Flynn woke up with a start last night…scary stuff.