Belize April 2004

Picture Archive on June 24 143,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

I spoke about Belize many months ago, but only recently figured out how to put the amazing pictures online. So here is one from a stroll along the water's edge.

John Kerry

I am what I guess could best be called typical of my peers whether you call them Republicans or Democrats. Most of us who live in California and work in businesses in technology are economically conservative and socially liberal, er maybe even Libertarian in some cases. I have moved over time from left leaning to just a tad bit left of center.

I am not wildly excited about John Kerry, but I don't see how you can vote for someone who has run the country the way George Bush has these last four years. Several calls to amend the Constitution? Record deficits with Tax cuts? Iraq?

Time for change. Too bad Bill Clinton couldn't run again(That should get some excited).

I must say more importantly that after next week, I will miss my frequent helpings of the following:

Drudgereport
Instapundit
Dailykos
Swingstateproject
Race2004

Thanks for making me care and making me realize how shrill both sides can be.

A closely divided Legislative body should act as a buffer against anything too crazy from either of the potential winners.

Out of Touch & Podcast #4

Travel is bad for blogging, RSS reading, and Podcasting. Fortunately its good for business which I guess is why we do it. I have some topics to catch up on in some posts later, but for now I leave you with a bit of a hard edged version of the radio show....

A couple of things I can't forget. We stayed at the W in San Francisco, enjoyed some great food at LuLu's and EOS, but the most memorable part involves this car. We needed to rent a car to go from SF to Menlo Park for several meetings and when we stepped outside to get into the rental car they brought this monstrosity....

So there we were, a half a tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes, looking for money for the penguin....

CTIA Update

Lots of meetings. Lots of fun. Didn't do the sessions piece so I would say that I didn't see anything earthshaking like at the spring show. In between meetings I saw this post, and realized that the place was across the street and was during an open time.

So I got to meet Russ in person, and also got to meet the founders of Buzznet, Feedburner, and one of the Digital Chocolate people. The crowd got big too fast so it devolved into small groups, but it was fun to randomly get to hang out with some cool people.

Today, more meetings.....

Show Attribution

Ok so here are the links to the various artists featured in the existing shows:

Show #1
Triangle
All Thats Left
A Second Chance
Eight Page Pullout
The Gospel of Gloom and Gladness

Show #2
Sweetness
Atomic Garden
Core 13
Sputnik Monroe
All Thats Left

Show #3
Head Change
Audiopilot
Sara Schaefer
Unaware
All Thats Left

Since the publication of the first podcast I there have been 12,819 requests for shows, 1336 downloads of Show #1, 544 of Show #2, and 208 of Show #3. Its been fun watching the power of RSS distribution.

Thanks again to the plugs from Adam and Dave and the nice comment yesterday from Hardcore Insomnia Radio. If you want to send me something for the show drop me an email and put some files up on AcmeNoise.

The $250 Million Radio Show #3

Posted today here. Dave Winer mentioned the show Thursday in his coffee notes. Very cool. I swear I will do the band list for all three shows with links later today or tomorrow.

October 8 016

October 8 016,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

The coolest guy on the planet checking out the USS Midway museum in downtown San Diego.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Northern California Twice

Next week it's off to CTIA in San Francisco. Should be fun to catch up with a bunch of friends and business associates.

The following week its a quick Friday afternoon flight back up to attend BloggerCon. This should be really cool, and I am trying to sort out my ideal itinerary. I am thinking:

Podcasting is a must. It will be fun to hear Adam Curry live.

Mobile Blogging is next. It is related to what we are working on at Intercasting, and the semantic battles should be fun. Unfortunately my Sony Ericsson P910 will not have shipped by then, so no mobile blogging from that.

I am torn between Overload and Election 2004. I am a political junkie so that has a natural appeal, but meeting Scoble and the topic of overload in general fascinates me much in the same way as meme and idea diffusion fascinates me. So it's looking like Overload.

Law. I can't pass up the chance to hear Lessig. Having been in the eye of the storm between content rights versus technology innovation, this should be a great way to end the day.

This should be a really cool time with a bunch of really smart people.

Test

this post enabled by airblogging.com.

Daily Source Code

Well I was bummed to hear about Adam Curry's mom on his Daily Source Code. Having lost my parents I know how hard it can be to discuss those kind of topics. When the show turned to lighter fare, My podcast, The $250 Million Radio Show got plugged and included a section from the first show. That was cool.

So tonight I sent out show number two. Check it out if you get a chance. I will post a playlist from the two shows later on. After I sleep. :-)

Always On

Ok, so a couple of weeks ago I read a post by Scoble about Always On. Since I had signed up for every other social networking / neo blogging scheme on the planet, I figured what's one more. More importantly, it's being headed by Tony Perkins of Red Herring and Upside fame. I saw him speak several years ago and really enjoyed his talk.

After signing up for the site, I was surprised to see that he was planning on publishing a magazine about blogging written by bloggers. In concept this is cool, but in practice it seems to me that the pace of the blogosphere doesn't lend itself to a print magazine. Its kind of like sports to me. I don't Tivo football games because the minute I hear the score, I have no desire to watch the game arrive at that conclusion. Most of the bloggy memes I have seen so far sound fairly tired a month or two later, although clearly there are exceptions. So who would buy this magazine? People who don't blog yet, but are interested. Yeah, that doesn't sound too promising to me, but I hope he makes it work.

So I delayed writing this because it didn't seem helpful and its really an opinion of mine that I have developed recently that shows how print media lags bloggy media so badly that I don't read the usual suspects when I fly anymore (Biz 2.0, Fast Co., Wired) I have already read what they are writing a month or two earlier. So tonight I get an email trying to upsell me to become an Always On insider. WOW. So this site had done nothing for me yet. I haven't visited it more than once, and here comes a pitch that feels weak to me. I am going to sign up because it's Tony Perkins and if he asked me for $50 bucks I would give it to him because I used to live Red Herring, but so far I haven't seen a reason to support Always On. I hope he proves me wrong. I'd like that. Guess I need to check out the site more, because I must be missing something.

User Generated Content: New Distribution Models reaction to Robin Good post

The Robin Good Weblog has this awesome writeup in response to the same article I mentioned here. Over the last couple of months I have been trying to synthesize the various conversations and conclusions I have arrived at regarding how media evolves in these posts here, and here, and here, to hit the main ones.

The post I read today hits on many of the same themes. I especially like the comments about media reaching it's zenith right before it is superseded by something else.

Over a quick lunch today I mentioned to the person I was eating with, that today's consumer of entertainment and media is an active participant in what they are consuming in the form of entertainment. Arguably they may even be the creator, or at least a collaborator in it's creation.

The media world in general is both a place of unfortunate perspective looking backwards when one considers the consolidation and homgenization of content, while holding untold potential in terms of what the new media world will look like in the future. To me the key issues to consider as we stutter, lurch, drag, and vault forward are:

1. We must have good/better tools to allow each of us to become creators of content. This includes easy tools that normal people can use, not tools that require people to understand unix command line language, etc.

2. We must create the tools that allow people to find the content that they want to consume, or should consume, or might be interested in consuming (etc.etc.) in an easy way. Think TIVO.

3. Intellectual property rights need to be revisited for a world of digital distribution. When I think of digital music and my experience there it makes me sad. For all of the promise that the various platforms hold, the legislative and judicial frameworks do not support the innovation in a safe way. Please don't take that comment as an IP anarchist, rather, there should be some balance between innovation and IP. The pain shouldn't be $150K per infringement. Does that fit the infraction? I don't know. It sounds severe to me.

4. Networks must continue to evolve. I think this one is happening and holds lots of promise, but things like massive adoption of RSS or things like podcasting are going to create the Pointcast effect which will bring the networks to their knees. As we prepare to launch our wireless application, I am astounded by the relatively small number of network usage for data in terms of actual users and the amount of data being transmitted over wireless networks relative to the Internet. It will be interesting to see how these networks deal with enormous data loads.

Dircaster

Saw this on a couple of blogs the other day and this was much better than copying someone else's XML and uploading it to a server. If you install dircaster.php into a directory, any subsequent uploads of MP3 files will update the XML when the php file is hit by ipodder or whatever else you are using. Very cool.

ChangeThis - Malcolm Gladwell

I was a bit disappointed in the previous version of the ChangeThis newsletter and manifestos. I wasn't really drawn to any and I found one in particular very weak. I was pleasantly surprised to find three of great interest to me this week. Malcolm Gladwell's (The Tipping Point, one of my favorite books of the last several years) piece entitled The Talent Myth was fascinating. If you manage people, or lead an organization this is a must read.

I don't want to editorialize and wreck the story, but it makes an interesting case against hiring the 'best and brightest' and indulging their whims. Instead it makes a strong case that cultures more focused on the systems approach to management and talent are more successful. Think Enron vs. WalMart.

RSS 2.0 with enclosures

I have had enough 'technology' for the coming week. My Podcast experiment involved the following:

Downloading and getting familiar with Audacity (Open source audio mixing software)

Setting up my cellphone Bluetooth headset to record my audio tracks

Mixing the show

Downloading and installing the LAME encoding software that Audacity needs to convert to MP3s

Uploading the MP3 file via ftp to Acmenoise.com

Figuring out why I cant get to the URL link (Permissions)

Figuring out where to find an Rss 2.0 XML feed to model my link on

Editing my XML link

Uploading to Acmenoise.

What a lot of work! I thought this would be easy.

If you are using iPodder my feed link is as follows:

$250 Million Radio show

http://www.acmenoise.com/temp/250millionradio.xml

My first Podcast

Ok, been a way a while. But in between the flying and business and weddings, I made a quick and dirty podcast of music to check out.

Here it is. I need to figure out the RSS 2.0 with enclosures thing though....

Road Warrior

I forgot the feeling of being a road warrior. When I was at Vivnedi I would try to spend a week a month in the New York office. I always came home wiped out from all the meetings I would try to squeeze in each trip, So, this week in New York has brought back those memories. I love NYC, but it can wear you down. So other than meeting after meeting, my other New York Highlights.

Hip Guide failed me my first night in town with the selection of Stone Rose as a cool club to grab a drink. I like some of Randy Gerber's other clubs, but this one, although it has a fabulous view, felt contrived and had terrible service. One over worked model/waitress could barely contain her displeasure at having to run around the whole room by herself. Definitely a pass.

The next night we met Thomas Ryan who was one of the founder's of Cductive (later bought by eMusic) who is doing some work with Virgin Mobile. It was great swapping digital music war stories, but even more interesting were the two places he took us to. We started out the night at Soho House in the meatpacking district. This is a very cool private club that caters to the media and entertainment industry. We had a business meeting set up and this was a great place to chill out and talk business. Afterwards we had an awesome dinner at Spice Market which is located next door (and was another Hip Guide recommendation) This was a great dinner.

The next day was travel hell. Late flight to DC. Fast haul to Laurel. Over to Reston to have the pleasure of meeting with Stowe Boyd. Rush to Dulles, miss flight. Get on next flight. Wait on tarmac for an hour. Fly back to NYC. Four states and half the day in screwed up travel. Fortunately for business it was a fabulous day.

Dinner was at Fiamma, which was a solid Italian experience in a real nice cozy room. Today will be the most packed before an early morning jet back to San Diego.

Podcasts

So heading from San Diego to NYC seemed like a great time to catch up on all the Podcasts I have downloaded as well as the various MP3 files from Web 2.0. I was so bummed out to find once I got on the plane, that the audio levels on so many of the shows was real bad. Of course, Adam Curry's shows were good as were the Audio Activist podcasts, but the Web 2.0 stuff was barely listenable.

I am putting together a music show I want to do sometime next week and I am painfully aware of how bad audio mixing is a major problem for a listener. I would advise those who are making shows to make sure that their mix is good. I haven't found any good tools yet, but I haven't really looked much yet either. I found an opensource mixing tool called Audacity that I am going to try to use next week. More late. I love NYC.....

Flying to New York today.

More Radio Stuff

Radio Re-Volt - Minneapolis Art project(Walker Art Museum) similar to the previously mentioned micro-transmission post.

Can I Get A Witness! Amen!

This is what its all about. Its DVCam filmmakers or shows filmed on DV like 28 Days later. Its the Mashup creators. Its the hundreds of thousands of bands on sites like Pure Volume. Its the same ethic that started punk rock. Hell, I can play three cords, etc. Its DIY. We technology people look to the blogs and podcasting, etc. but whets really going to be fascinating is when the creative production tools go mainstream. I think that although some of the best stuff I have read in years comes from techno-centric bloggers, the real power is with the 15 year olds at Live Journal and Myspace. This is IM with narrative. IM with history. IM with context.

I communicate in different modes depending on what I want to communicate, or more importantly, how I want to be communicated with.

My communication becomes my media. My information, my persona is a multi modal form of dialogue which is tailored to the delivery mechanism and audience. Our discourse is our narrative to the creation which is our life. Entertainment is active now, not passive, and I am the star of my own show.

Sony Ericsson P910

I have been meaning to get a new phone for a little while. Actually ever since I purchased my Bluetooth Keyboard and couldn't get it to work for lack of a J2ME driver for my Sony Ericsson T610.

So without fail I trek over to the Sony Ericsson site each week to see if they have updated their release date for the P910a. This morning, after a child induced bout of insomnia, I noticed that they finally updated the shipping information to Mid November. I guess I can pre-order it now, although I would prefer a hard date. As my birthday is mid November, this should be a fitting reason to indulge the technology fetish and get my hands on what looks like an amazing piece of mobile technology.

RHZ Amateur Radio Net

The previous mention of the angry article talked about the Radio Rhizome Project in Los Angeles. I was curious what this was and decided to spend some time looking into it. I am fascinated by what they are doing. I always enjoy the idea of spectrum as a public asset or a regulated part of the 'commons'. What Radio Rhizome is doing is dancing on the edges of broadcast law and using the power of the Internet to create a radio station that strictly speaking is a collection of broadcast nodes with synchronized programming.

Any of us can get an AM transmitter and can broadcast a limited signal on a chunk of spectrum, provided the range is limited and provided that nobody else is licensed to broadcast at that frequency. Essentially I can broadcast from a small base to my neighborhood from a very low power station. But what happens when a bunch of people are connected to the Internet, and have transmitters and are all simultaneously broadcasting the same feed provided by one source? Well you all of a sudden have taken back a part of the airwaves and formed your own public access / community radio.

I think this is an interesting concept, which probably has a lot of the same challenges as public access /free wifi. Can you get enough consistent coverage to actually create a consistent signal that is worth hearing? Maybe in dense areas like New York. I am thinking San Diego, probably not.

It will be interesting to see how citizens view spectrum over time. I find it interesting that so much has been allocated to corporations in a variety of frequencies that can't be used by us, but that isn't being utilized by commercial ventures either. Kind of an application of the commons for a purpose without any real good coming back to the community. Sort of like domain name squatting.....

Anyways, this from a physical perspective, and Bit Torrent and podcasting are all fascinating and innovative takes on non - center of the network distribution that have interesting possibilities.

User Generated Content:Roll Your Own Network

Yesterday was a big day for user generated content / edge of the network content in the blogosphere. This article 'f*ck big media' was picked up on slashdot and Wired put out this piece.

These are both good posts, although the first has a bit of a hard edge. I like characterizing the battle in content as the battle between the content luddites who got caught off guard by the technological revolution in distribution versus the P2P 'jihadis' who are every bit as dogmatic as the former. We need some middle ground, we need some product.

Capitalism - SpaceShipOne

It's amazing what the profit motive can accomplish when all other things fail. Although NASA has a rich and proud history, it's amazing what one can accomplish when $10 million dollars (and the obvious future benefits resulting from success) is the prize.

Our politicians lack the vision to galvanize the country's resources around solving serious challenges we face (Environment, Energy etc.) Looks like we need a few more capitalists to get the ball rolling.

User Generated Content: Low Def TV

One of my projects between Vivendi and Intercasting was a show idea that I worked on with a couple of friends called Low Def TV. A friend sent me a link yesterday to a site called ManiaTV which is a web equivalent of what we were shooting for with Low Def, well sort of.

In February of 2002 we launched MP4.com at Vivendi. The idea was to basically do the MP3.com thing for internet generated video content. The tools for producing really cool and high quality content were widespread with Flash and DV Cam filmmaking and we wanted to showcase this. The site was given zero resources and our GM Natasha Rabe was told to fight to make it work. The site got some really cool traction but ultimately got killed in the divestment of the various Internet assets.

Joe Fleischer (Big Champagne, Crush Management) and I spent a bunch of time talking about how TV evolves, etc. Joe was explaining how TV shows and movies were being trading on Peer to Peer networks at an amazing rate. I shared with him my concept of content coming from the edge of the network as being the most interesting trend in media to me. So we started thinking about Opensource TV and eventually came up with Low Def TV.

We got a hold of David Todd, the content acquisition guy from MP4.com, and started soliciting a bunch of content from the best of MP4. We spent a couple of months getting together an edit and eventually shot and edited a 22 minute pilot. I love the show, but it was really naughty, kind of a variety show for the Jackass crowd. We sent it out to limited parties and seemed to be getting some interest until some woman named Jackson flashed a nipple during the Superbowl.

At any rate we have started sending it out again for reaction, and if you want a peek at the DVD drop me an email.

There are a multitude of talented and bright people doing a variety of things with edge created content using a variety of distribution mechanisms. I haven't spent much time with them yet, but my take is as follows:

1. Centralized hosting of video content costs too much.
2. P2P hosting of content has the challenge of either 1. closed networks, or 2. service level challenges, or 3. possible legal issues (STOP INDUCE)
3. People don't watch TV on computers. Yet. The work with companies like Akimbo and others holds some promise.

For now, I think the best one can do is aggregate content from the edge of the network into show formats (Indie, art, comedy, etc.) and pitch these as the next step in Reality TV. For now.

Channel Derrick

What's going on in my channel you might wonder?

Music:
Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand: Cool CD, reminded me of the Strokes on the first listen. I need to spend more time with it, but it will be in my playlist for a while.

Green Day - American Idiot: Still too early for me to know what I think about this CD, but so far so good. I heard that this is their masterpiece. It didn't hit me right away, but time will tell.

Brand New - Deja Entendu: I am really enjoying this CD. Courtesy of my eMusic account. (More on the new eMusic look and site in another post). I obviously got into this late as it was released in 2003, but its really fun for me to hear bands develop and although their first didn't do much for me this is refreshing and this band could have a lot of promise in the future.

Books:
We The Media - Dan Gilmour: I can't add anything to the numerous posts online. As a disciple of user generated content, this book IS user generated journalism. If you are interested in any of my User Generated Posts in the least, then go out and by this book.

Radio:
Adam Curry - Daily Source Code: Just got turned onto this by the recent podcasting posting flurries. At first listen, I was not getting it. Upon a couple of other listens, I can't wait to hear tomorrows show. Its not for everyone, but I love the man in the wilderness, or in this case the Netherlands doing his show for no one or everyone. The transition from MTV VJay to hacker podcaster is just too much fun for me.

TV:
Lost: Ok so TV makes a funny turn when we go from Drama to Reality TV(Survivor) to Drama representing Reality TV(Lost). I am drawn in for now, but this could go either way.

Videogame:
NCAA 2005: I can't quit this one, although in general, the games are an increasingly infrequent indulgence given how busy things are with the business, pending triplets, etc. I liked this so much that I didn't buy Madden 2005. Lucky for me, it shipped with a bad bug...

Definition of Moblogging - Take 3

This is funny. This is moblogging, or I guess evidence. I guess it really isn't moblogging if you don't post it to someplace for others to read though....

Clusty

Now this feels different. I just changed my homepage from Google to Clusty on Firefox and IE.