Surfarama

I read this morning that Dave Winer is wondering about Skype and podcasting, and then I read Stuart Henshall’s instructions on how to Podcast with Skype.

This is actually pretty cool…the tools to easily put together really great content are coming together…Know someone interesting? Record an interview via Skype, upload to server, post link to file via blog, burn feed with Feedburner, and hey presto it is enclosured (is that a word?) and ready to be sucked in by any podcasting clients.

I think we are going to have to add a ‘media file url’ field to the Linkroll posting interface so users can easily build their own custom media channel with any media files they find online. This will then be accessible via your personal RSS feed (with enslosures which we’ll also add). Not even very hard and potentially quite useful.

Jason Calacanis has been riffing on BzzAgent for a while now and on Friday Doc Searls chimed in with his thoughts…namely that they suck.

Not that Calacanis needs Doc’s support in this, but it sure helps his argument when Doc drops by to let everyone know that BzzAgent missed the ClueTrain.

Now it would be really interesting if Seth Godin made it clear what he thought, given that he’s used BzzAgent to spruik his book(s?) in the past.

Flynn_LonghornsShirt_1,
originally uploaded by Charles.

Go the Longhorns

Merlin Mann nails the essence of good web design, framed as a list of Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make.

This is all true and is broadly applicable to all website design. I particularly like the flash/cilantro analogy.

Church Sign,
originally uploaded by The Rocketeer.

A great collection of Bad Signs

Hear hear…if Sony pursue this it will be a horrible example of how disconnected from reality big co. can get.

Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has decided to start a new ‘Hedge Fund‘.

I’ve decided to start a new hedge fund. However, this hedge fund won’t invest in stocks or bonds, or any type of business. It’s going to be a fund that only places bets. A gambling hedge fund.

Kinda cool.

This reminded me about the story of those MIT mathletes who took Vegas for millions back in the 90′s with their Blackjack system…a great read.

And the syndicates in Hong Kong who take a similar approach to Horse racing, tracking 100′s of data points related to horse and track form…apparently it works for them and returns over time have been consistently in the order of 24% per annum.

Oh, and then there’s the sports betting arbitrage sites like this one, which automatically troll the major sports betting sites looking for arbitrage opportunities for risk free profit…seems to me like you’d have to work pretty hard at it to make a living, but there you go.

Personally, I am not much of a gambler in casinos or on the stock exchange…my money isn’t smart enough! I’d rather invest it in building a business or in a business I was close to.