Rise of a C-list Blogger

I had two incidents over the last several days where I am now fairly certain that I have graduated to the ranks of the C-List blogger.

Winer posted about Blogging for Newbies. As I am a Blogger user going on close to two years I guess I won't take too much offense to that. We do also use Movable Type and Word Press in the office on occasion. I would have to say though that Blogger continues to get richer and richer. I had a conversation going online on this post with Scott Rafer and I wanted to make sure that no Viagra, Fantasy Football, Home Re-fi, Cialis, or any other nonsense found it's way into the discussion.

In order to do this I had to enable comment moderation. I was hoping that it would allow me to go back and clean up some of my more popular posts like this one, that are littered with blog spam. No dice. But I do get to see all the comments going forward. Nice. Or not actually. By this morning I was up to 100 or so comment spams. Ouch. That sucks. Why me?

At the same time, I received an email from a company. They said that they had read my blog and wanted to send me a product to evaluate it over a period of time because of my writing about wireless and media. Wow. Really? I am flattered. Hmmm. Wait a second, is this why I get all the spam now? At any rate I am excited about getting the new wireless toy sometime in the next couple of weeks. If any other consumer devices or services want to send some technology love my way feel free to do so. Sony? Samsung? Anyone? Bring it on.

So it appears dear reader, I am no longer an F-list blogger I may have graduated to the D, or heaven forbid C-list from here on out. Be afraid.

Rabble College Press

We have been getting some good press coverage with colleges. Here are some articles:

Rutgers
Oklahoma State
Auburn
Purdue
James Madison

Sony Blogger Phone

It appears that Sony and Google are entring deal where all Sony phones will enable publication to Blogger. Sweet.

My Weekend Digest

I was home alone this weekend with 2/3 of the triplets. I had a pile of work and emails to get through which just didn't seem to happen, although I did manage to get to the Lakers game last night in some amazing seats right behind Jack Nicholson. Seriously, like two rows right behind Jack. Brian Grazer was cross court, Penny Marshall off to the left. Pretty funny. Don't ask what I did with the kids. Shhh.

I read a lot over the weekend when the kids were asleep and there was a ton of stuff I want to blog about later this week. It was a really interesting weekend of reading though which seems kind of unusual to me, but maybe I just don't notice. So for my quick roundup:

Podcast hotel went down in Seattle. A lot of friends and acquaintances were there like Chris, CC, IODA, and Eric. Bummed I missed it as I am trying to get to most of the podcasting events. This one wasn't working for me.

Mashup Camp was last week. I have to remember to comment on the notes from the Wiki regarding mashups and mobility. I thought there were some interesting observations on WAP vs. Thick Client.

Dana Boyd refutes John Dvorak's assertion that researchers aren't studying youth culture. Other than Dana, I haven't seen much else trickle out to the rest of the world, but keep up the good work Dana!

Russ had a hilarious piece on the problems with Web 2.0 companies (Yes I hate 2.0 nomenclature even though I am guilty of perpetuating it) in that they really, really should have a business model.

Russ also beat everyone I know to the punch in unveiling that Myspace rolled out mobile alerts over the weekend. As we are more of a mobile pure play, with bi-directional support as a compliment, I don't have much to say other than the longer they focus on mobile to web and not mobile to mobile, the better for Rabble.

AmaGoohooBay

Via Moconews. Rafat pointed to an article in the Register reviewing the Yahoo! Go service. The title of this post came from the last paragraph in the article and it had me laughing. It was mentioned in the punchline about the fear the carriers have to have for the Internet cartel. The body of the article was really something that is a ongoing discussion in mobile. Mobile isn't the internet on your phone. That's not to say that there aren't really cool things you can do with mobile, but when you want to do the really cool things on the internets, there is this really cool thing called the PC.

So aside from the review, which is really funny in my opinion and certainly worth a read, the question remains, what is the right feature set for mobile? What things can take advantage of the communications capabilities, the fact that it's always with you, the fact that kids live on their phones?

I am not entirely sure what the right combination is, but I know that it needs to be something that is slimmed down, useful, and meets or solves some compelling need for mobile users. Although you could score this as one against the AmaGoohooBay guys, there still remains that for now Yahoo is the most mobile trafficed site, and there is no question that the big guys have a lot of time and energy to figure out what right is. If they can figure out that it may divorce them slightly from their existing business models, then things will get interesting.

Free Falling

It's 3:36 AM West Coast time. This isn't a bad time if you are on the east coast or in Europe. Problem is, I am not. The reality is, I am an insomniac. I don't remember how or why, it's just one of those things that creaped into my head sometime in my 20s. Some nights I just get up. When I was younger I would rummage through the fridge for a beer or a glass of wine or something to put me to sleep. That never really helped much. I'd find that the next day I would be groggy and spent most of the night fretting about being awake and thinking about how tired I would be the next day. Now, I just get up and work. Stressing doesn't help. The reality is, tomorrow night I will sleep in a deep coma. I can cope with that.

I wasn't sure what it was that was keeping me awake at 1:35 AM or so. It could have been my oldest son Tate who was sleeping in my bed last night, kicking me in the head and ribs. Prolly not. I find a way to get through that many nights. Rather I think it is flying. Around 2:30 or so I realized that I haven't flown since early January and a common theme in my insomnia is traveling. I am not sure if it is the excitement of being on the road (yuk) or my innate fear of flying. I don't recall how that started but as I have spent more and more time traveling back and forth across the continent, an irrational fear of flying has been one of the things I pack in my backpack for each trip. Laptop? Check. Business cards? Check. Presentation? Check. White knuckle fear of turbulence? Check.

I stopped traveling pretty much in the last several months of the year. Not because I wanted to or because it was an option. It was mostly because we hit one of those early milestones you hit in a startup. We had ramped up. The time between June of last year when we launched on Verizon to August when we raised money, to October when we were trying to go from a handful of people to an actual team had finally set in. It was time to put the pieces together.

The good news is we have. I think about the team we have in place and I am blown away. We are set to do much damage. The combination of internet and wireless talent we have assembled is impressive. Already in the last several weeks the output has been awesome. And so now it is time to get on the road again. Not the same platinum level of flying from last year, but certainly a good dose of the right meetings to make sure we move the needle faster than everyone else. The dirty secret in all of this is execution is key. All things being equal, getting things done quickly tends to give you an advantage. I think that this is something at the core of what we are and what we have become. Something about only the paranoid survive. I like that.

Ok. So this has run it's course. I think I can steal away a cat nap before I hit the airport. Yawn. More later. I am brining he camera. I like how San Francisco looks through the lens of a camera.

LBS and Zipcodes

When I was in my early 20s I spent a chunk of time as a studio dispatcher managing a fleet of cars running all over Los Angeles. I have to admit that trying to keep track of 40 cars running all over town with film, scripts, checks, and assorted envelopes was a hell of a mental exercise that helped me to hone my juggling skills and to focus my ADD in a positive way.

One of the by products of that is that I know every zip code on Los Angeles. By heart. I also know the address of any studio related business in Los Angeles. Cold. I was having dinner the other night with a friend who's wife worked for McCann Ericson in Los Angeles. 6100 Wilshire. Los Angeles 90036. I had to stop myself from saying that. I do that lot. I am not that good with New York, but I usually stay in 10019. Mid Town, West 50s. Sigh.

As LBS becomes a technical reality, apart from the privacy issues, I have to wonder what coordinates will mean to people. For example. Let's say for arguments sake that I am driving around Bird Rock or Pacific Beach in San Diego. 92169. It seems like a pretty big area that is encompassed by coordinates such as 32.79682, -117.25575 or 32.80830, -117.259114 or 32.798493, -117.246784. But the thing I have to ask myself is how do these finer slices of data help me? Especially in a place like Southern California where we drive.

Rather than the data being important in and of itself, I think that the relative measures of my specific location to things or people around me will be what's valuable. I don't know what this new world will look like, but it will certainly be interesting.

Danah Boyd on Myspace

Danah Boyd has a fascinating piece that is a high level overview of her research on Myspace going back to 2003. The most interesting take away for me was the idea that Myspace has become a virtual public place for kids to hang out primarily as other options become less and less available to this generation. Some of this seems pretty obvious but I think the conclusions on why MySpace and not Friendster as being driven by the differences between 20 somethings and teens was insightful and in general if this is a space you are interested in it is a must read.

Enter the Giant

Been a busy week for me so it's been a bit light on the blogging side. Of course the big news yesterday was that MySpace is launching with Helio when they debut sometime later this year. The announcement following repeated announcements of the impending launch of MySpace wasn't necessarily a surprise. To me it is certainly reinforced by what I wrote here in terms of what the impact will be. Debi did a pretty comprehensive write up here that fleshes things out a bit. Most of all though I thought what Russ wrote here, although saying he doesn't see it, shows that he understands it.

To me, it is good that there will be a lot of interest in this space. We are excited about what we have done so far, launched on Verizon, launched on Cingular, and are headed down the path to international distribution and the next generation of Rabble. It will certainly be an interesting year ahead.

Mobile 2.0: The Revolution will not be televised

Over the last several days I have been thinking a lot about the disconnect between thinkers in Silicon Valley and the youth market. While saying that there is a disconnect is a broad generalization, I certainly feel that it is the primary thought process among those who are designing and developing services for the marketplace as it relates to the web. This post I wrote the other day was picked up on Digg by a guy in Europe who posed the question regarding the relevance of A-list bloggers.

I personally don’t have an opinion on whether A-list bloggers matter or not but one comment to the Digg post on this page struck a chord with me. The response to the question about why there has been no mention of RSS support by Mysapce was that the reason nobody covered it or that nobody frankly cared was that MySpace was full of the “omglolkewl” crowd. I loved the comment but it also started my mind thinking about how transformative wireless will be/is and how the general ignoring of the youth market as trivial will be the Achilles heel of a lot of the companies that are focused on mobile.

Kids live on their phone. The Myspace kids and the Xanga kids and the Live Journal kids. They have grown the ringtone market place to the point that it is saving the record companies from years of declining CD sales and P2P networks. These kids use SMS messaging all the time. These kids don’t own smart phones. They don’t own Symbian series 60 phones. These kids don’t want the web on their phone. They have the web on their computer. They do other stuff on the phone. Kewl stuff. ROFLMAO stuff.

These kids have taken a geeky technology called IRC and turned it into something cool ala AIM, Y! Messenger, etc. Not that they invented it mind you, but they helped to drive adoption. They helped to drive the user base of sites like those mentioned above into the 10s of millions, not millions. There is a whole generation that is alive today that knows that their phone isn’t just for making calls. It is an advanced communication device that does a bunch of things, even if it is just a cheap phone.

When I think about all the web 2.0 companies and all the brilliant people who have created all the amazing things that I have been using in the last couple of years like RSS, Blogger, Podcasting, etc. I know that these people, like me are in their 30s and 40s for the most part. We grew up with the first PCs or had access to mainframes and really wanted to push the envelope at the time where the envelope was small. I recall fondly how I screwed with a guy in my Fortran class who was an ass by sending him messages over the PDP1145 without him knowing what was going on. I loved that shit. It made sense to me.

Most people my age don’t use their phones they way kids do today. They don’t really feel comfortable typing messages on their phones. They don’t really understand why people would buy ringtones (personalization, which by the way is a big part of the success of Myspace). They want to put their Yahoo on their phone. The problem is that my phone isn’t a Series 60 phone. Or frankly, I don’t want to do CERTAIN things on my phone when I have a much better tool called a laptop. The problem with my laptop though is that I can’t take it to The Mars Volta concert. I can’t send a picture of it to my friends RIGHT now while it is happening.

My general point though, getting back to what struck me, is that I don’t see much discussion on the fact that the first generation of people who are walking around with mobile connected camcorders are in our midst. They are using a technology that many of us assume to be mere pre-cursors to a wireless handheld computer when in fact it is something else different. The use cases are being created today by people who live in that medium much the same way many of us were tinkering around with assembly language programming of the Z80 and the 6502.

Which leads me to the conclusion that somewhere in the back of a classroom somewhere some kids are hacking their BREW or J2ME phones and trying to figure out what is really cool and what really matters to impress and share with their friends. With all due respect to Gil Scot-Heron I would offer that the Mobile 2.0 Revolution will not be televised. Or rather…

The Mobile 2.0 Revolution will not be syndicated via RSS. You won’t be able to download an OPML file of all the things you read or listen to as a podcast. You won’t be able to download all your settings and stuff. Because the revolution will not be syndicated.

The Mobile 2.0 Revolution will not be syndicated. It will not be brought to you by AdWords from Google, or Ad sense. It will not be presented in a dazzling array of Flickr photo streams. It will not be reported on by the Daily Source Code or The Gilmor gang or any other podcast on iTunes. The revolution will not be syndicated.

There will be no discussion of text messages of ASL? KEWL, LMAO, LOL, LMAO or ROFLMAO. There will be no commentary on Emo trends in music or the rise of Neo-Progressive rock bands and the return of Led Zeppelin. There will be no discussions of pre-paid phones, or Ying Yang twins ringtones. The revolution will not be syndicated.

There will be no highlights of Myspace Widgets, of goofy emoticons, of kids texting on their phones, day after day after day. Long after the discussions of Ajax and Flash Light and Windows mobile have died down there will still be tens of millions of people trying to find a away to get these damn communications devices to do more than they were meant to do. The revolution will not be syndicated.

Ok. So I may not be a poet. I think that the point of all of this is truly that there is something really big going on with kids and with phones and with communications and the creation of content and podcasting and videoblogging etc. But where it takes off, is with this generation that is more a content creator than a consumer. A generation that is more interested in seeing a funny flash show on ebaums world than on MTV. Ignoring that those who will decide which technologies are truly useful are large in number, long on time and short on attention will be a mistake. They are right in front if us but not many of us are watching.

MySpace has 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google

Maybe the shear size of what is going on with the youth market will start to get peoples attention. It certainly has at Business Week.

Walking Triplets

Brit,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

Having infant triplets is a fascinating experience. Probably the most fascinating thing is watching the many and varied paths of development that each of them take. Unlike normal people who have to wonder if their kids are keeping up with the neighbors, we get to see if they are keeping up with each other.

So it was with great enjoyment coupled with fear of the coming months of head injuries, that yesterday we watched the runt of the group be the first one to really move into the walking world. Late in the afternoon after an ambitious expedition tide pooling, Brit let go of the couch and stumbled forward with fits and starts and took around 9 steps before succumbing to the floor. He repeated this several times to our great applause and delight. Welcome to the world of the bi-ped Brit.

Rabble WAP Portal

Yesterday we rolled out the Rabble WAP portal at wap.rabble.com/index.wml or link that we plan to use for some off deck GSM distribution in the future. There are some fun goodies there right now to play with.

Peter Raises a Good Point. Ping Servers and Technorati

Peter followed up on my post and highlighted something that I didn't think of, the impact on the ping servers when all the Myspace users pages start slamming the blogosphere. That would be huge! Hey Sifry, when are you going to add Myspace to Technorati?

The Blogger Intelligentsia Ignores the Youth Market

I was talking to Peter today about some cool marketing stuff he is working on. The topic of influencers came up and I told him that I am not interested in the blogging intelligentsia or the web 2.0 crowd in general as I feel that many (not all) of them ignore the youth market. I told him that case in point to me was that Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, ignored the rollout of MySpace's implementation of RSS and Podcasting. I told Peter that it was funny to me that this post I wrote is the number one search result for Google for the words Myspace and Podcasting and that the "blogosphere" said nothing about the fact that 45 million people now see RSS and podcasting on their number one addiction. Hey Dave, What's the deal? THIS IS HUGE. This is way more important than the gazzillion web 2.0 companies that rollout RSS and other stuff that have ZERO customers.

By the way, Peter pointed out that he actually picked up on the RSS piece in this post before I saw the podcasting thing.

Rabble T-Shirts

T-Shirts,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

Want one? Send me an email to derrick@intercastingcorp.com

Comments are Fixed

For no apparent reason. Glad thats over. ;-)

Amazing Community Blog

Denise posted a comment a couple of days ago on my blog post about communities. I saw that I had one comment but couldn't retrieve it. When Sander told me my comments were down I investigated and saw Denise's comment. She turned me on to the Full Circle Online Interaction Blog by Nancy White. This is both an AMAZING blog on community as well as a great storehouse of links. I haven't had a chance to dig in deep but the first article was a reference to a previous post about community archetypes. This was totally what I was looking for. Now I need to dig in and see if there is any god stuff about nascent mobile based communities. ;-)

Comments are Broken

Ok, Sander just told me this morning that my comments were broken when he was giving me some juicy info in response to a post. So to be clear, I am not getting rid of comments as I don't really have that many. I will send an email to Blogger support to fix it because I missed a really important comment from a couple of days ago.

Rabble on Eventful

Continuing our marriage of mobile and the web, we rolled out the first half of our integration with Eventful today. Rabble users can now send the events they create on Rabble to Eventful using a combination of ours and their EVDB APIs. The next stage will involve allowing Rabble users to subscribe to various events through Eventful and lot other Rabble users see those events as a part of their channel.

30 Boxes

I set up my 30 Boxes account this morning and was really excited to see what all the fuss was about. I have been on the eternal quest to set up a group calendaring function that will allow us to manage stuff going on in the business. At MP3.com we used something called Ctime that was really useful and had both Web and standalone clients. It's funny how their is such a big gap in group calendaring.

30 Boxes is really cool. I especially like that I can aggregate a bunch of stuff like my Flickr photos and do lots of the social stuff found on many sites today. There are plenty of good writeups on the strengths and weakness seen so far but I though that I would go on record with a couple of requests (like I matter).

My most important need was to be able to publish my existing calendar out to an open calendar. This would mean that 30 Boxes could subscribe to the RSS feed of the ical file generated from our internal web calendar. For whatever reason it wont do that. I am thinking that is a problem with https. Not sure but a guess.

The second thing I wanted was to subscribe to my Basecamp files. Again no dice and probably for the same https reason.

I am going to play with Sunbird and see if I can get Sunbird to subscribe to 30 Boxes and then publish back to 30 Boxes from Sunbird which I have been unable to do so far.

Brokeback to the Future

For the record I think that Brokeback Mountain will win Best Picture and Best Director. I thought it was a great, although depressing film that was extremely well done. I hope Heath Ledger wins Best Actor but it seems that Phillip Seymor Hoffman will get it for Capote, which was a movie I liked but thought that the role for Ledger was more difficult. What do I know.

Today Sean was in the office playing a clip of Brokeback to the Future on Youtube that juxtaposes Brokeback Mountain and Back to the Future. This is the funniest mashup I have ever seen.

IODA Promonet

Several months back I was told about IODA Promonet. Come to think of it, it must have been around September or so. I actually met with Kevin Arnold and Marisol Segal and some of the others at IODA through an introduction from Adam Rugel.

I had heard great things about Kevin from others like Steve Grady and was looking forward to the meeting. At the time they spoke about Promonet, which was the resource they were compiling through their relationships as an indie aggregator/distributor. The concept of Promonet, to provide pre-cleared content to podcasters, was awesome. How they planned on doing it was something that wasn't obvious to me.

Fast forward for a couple of months. Sometime in December I get an invitation to use Promonet. At the time we are knee deep in the holidays with kids etc. and preparing for our Cingular rollout of Rabble. I make a note and a follow up reminder to log in to the service to check it out when I get a chance. I of course don't do it for weeks on end. People start telling me about how amazing it is. I start hearing and seeing listings of amazing bands in podcasts. I scratch my head. How?

Tonight I logged into Promonet. WOW!!!

They have put together and amazing service with amazing content. I am a little short on time so I will neither go through the list of all the most unbelievable tracks and bands that are cleared, nor will I be able to do a podcast tonight, but God help me. You can count on one in the very near future. If you are a podcaster, get thee to Promonet.

Russ Gives Some Rabble Love

Russ Beattie wrote a post a couple of days ago talking about must have apps for the Razr. We got a nice plug as a cutting edge mobile social networking application. What wasn't said explicitly was that Rabble is on Cingular now.

The Rabble Community

When I got home yesterday I remembered that there was another point to my previous post. After months of the same Flash animation on out homepage we rolled out a significant change. The point of the change was to let outsiders peer into the world of Rabble. If you go to the Rabble homepage right now you can see a number of our users and their most recent posts. You may find it juvenile or banal but I find it fascinating.

Back to the previous post, I do hope that over time we can put together some good case studies and stories to contribute to a conversation on how communities evolve and govern themselves, etc.

Community Blogs

Last week I was running through my normal RSS/blog reads. Hit the social media blogs. Hit the advertising blogs. Hit the youth culture blogs. Hit the community focused blogs. Wait. There aren't any. Or more correctly there aren't many.

I talked to a couple of friends about this and received a couple of really good recommendations and found a couple of others that I will link to at the end here. But what am I talking about? If you go back to communities 2.0, (I would argue that Usenet and BBS systems were probably virtual communities 1.0) there was a lot of excitement and interest around Geocities and iVillage and the like. With the flameout of the advertising market there was in my opinion a vast discrediting of the community space as large ugly noisy places with lots of people and no business models to speak of.

Fast forward to today (Community 3.0) and you have the monsters of the community space in the likeness of MySpace, Xanga, Live Journal in the youth market in addition to the various online gaming communities around Warcraft, Everquest, etc. What I don't really see though are the serious discussions about how communities form, or how do communities govern themselves, or what are the different types of members of communities etc. etc.

I am sure there is more out there than I am finding but in general see a lack of concentrated thought and discussion on some of the more academic or cerebral parts around a community. My obvious fascination grows out of my past experience watching a large artist community at MP3.com and my current experience watching the fledgling community on Rabble where the most interesting commonality is that it is generally an entirely mobile phone based community.

Maybe Dana Boyd will be taking on this subject in the coming months. (I hope so)

Some of the recommendations I was given or that were made to me were the following:

The Digital Vision Project from Reuters/Stanford.

Christopher Allen - Life with Alacrity

Corante's Many to Many

Have some ones I should check out?

Small Is In

Although the RAZR has been a good example of consumers flocking towards thin or smallish handset designs, last week there were two things that caught my eye that make me think that small is in.

The first one was all the hype and noise around Bluepulse that I first caught wind of from Mobile Crunch. I am not going to get into what OADP and SPOT are, but I will say that the thing I am really interested in is that although the platform and application support Symbian, more importantly they support J2ME. It's nice to demo or release products on a Series 60 platform except here in the United States, there are very few people buying data products who have those kind of phones. If you want to market to data consumers in the US, you have to support BREW and J2ME.

The second one was the release of the Opera Mini mobile browser. I have had Opera on my P910 for the last year and it is without question a great browser. The day that the Mini was announced I downloaded it expecting to be underwhelmed as it is targeted at low end handsets. Boy was I surprised. It rocks. I think I may actually prefer it to Opera 6 which I have been using for over a year now. Again, like the bluepulse work, here is a product focused on handsets that people actually have instead of handsets that work well when you want to demo products to people unfamiliar with handset intricacies.

As the hottest properties on the web start to look at mobile extensions to their platforms, you can bet money that Myspace, The Facebook, Friendster and others will be using extensive SMS and MMS hooks to support their massive audiences but on the client side their mobile strategy will have to be focused on developing BREW and J2ME applications, at least in the US.

Rabble mentioned in New York Times article

Subscription required. Here is the story.

User Generated Content Explained

In the last several weeks I have seen an incredible influx of traffic of people looking for the word or combinations of the phrase user generated content . Since I am approaching two years of blogging on this blog I guess my google, yahoo and other search love juice is strong. So if you are one of the people who happened to wander here looking for user generated content then welcome. I guess it would be helpful for me to explain why I called this blog that to satisfy your interest.

Back in the early part of 2003, Vivendi had made the decision to divest some of the assets that they had acquired during the reign of CEO Jean Marie Messier. At that time I was President of the Internet Music division of Vivendi following the acquisition of MP3.com where I was the COO while we were a public company. The group of companies that I oversaw at the time included Rollingstone.com, eMusic and Get Music (Which I see UMG is now resurrecting).

The time period between our acquisition and the decision to divest the assets was an interesting time for me. Our company went from a technology driven innovator to being focused on primarily creating an advertising supported media business. My focus was on rationalizing the business and trying to build a media sales force. I was big on advertising. I know that there were many people who gave me funny looks when I said advertising was coming back but ultimately I felt justified in the return of the advertising market and the acquisition of Myspace by News Corporation this last year.

Because a lot of our technical resources were engaged in a variety of projects for the various sister companies at Vivendi we were fairly constrained on new development and ultimately decided to spend a fair amount of time trying to gain some market intelligence to support our advertising efforts and to explore content trends by rolling out some interesting data mining experiments that I have documented in the past here. I think it's very interesting that the MP3.com successor companies like Pure Volume and Myspace are now in the content business. Hmmm.

Around the end of 2003 I met with Ken Cron who at the time was the COO of Vivendi under Barry Diller. My goal was to convince Ken that Vivendi should keep MP3.com, at least in a shell form at the very worst, as it would be a valuable content laboratory for UMG. I knew going in that I wouldn't be successful but I thought it would be a good conversation. Towards the end Ken asked me what I wanted to do. I told him about the story linked to above and said that I wasn't sure what exactly I wanted to do but that I was going to focus my career on working on various aspects of user generated content.

Fast forward through a TV pilot that went nowhere(although the idea isn't too dissimilar to Current TV and some others) to Intercasting. We set up Intercasting to take advantage of the intersection of user generated content and the development of media capabilities of the mobile device. Shawn lays a great foundation on our blog for a lot of the stuff we are working on. To me, at it's core, we are creating a platform for the production and consumption of mobile content. Rabble is specifically the first instance of what we envision to be a suite of products around a common concept. Although we are very much focused on location based applications of media production and consumption, we are at out core a media company contrary to what some others may think.

So that's the business part of why I called my blog user generated content. Then there is the personal part. This blog to me was quite literally, my user generated content. I knew at the time that I was committed to creating text that I have managed to consistently do over almost two years. I also knew then that I would be photoblogging using sites like Flickr where I document my family and my travels. What I didn't know at the time was that I would be podcasting an indie rock show. Or any of the other things like videoblogging etc. that I have been dabbling with over the last several years.

So this site may or may not be what you were looking for. If you like I'd invite you to stick around or I'd recommend that you check out my favorite user generated content site unmediated. This is my daily first stop and over time have come to know a variety of the people working on this group blog. It's a definite must read if you were looking for user generated content.

Sony Ericsson P990

I must have been in some kind of haze, but back in October Sony did a press release about the new P990 coming out in Q1. Oohh, Aahh. I cant wait to get this. Here is the Engadget writeup. All I have to say is WIFI, Edge, 2 Megapixel, Videoconferencing and FM Radio. Not sure about the radio part but the rest rules. I can't wait until later this year when it becomes available in North America. My P910 is still doing well but the WIFI possibilities have me really excited.

Skype Spam

So there I was yesterday busy typing away on my laptop when my Skype window popped up with a request from one Svetlana to chat with me. Last I recall I don't know any Svetlana. At least not one who uses that as her real name. So she says hello. I say hello. She says something else I don't remember and then I ask who is this?

She is looking for online friends. Nice. Block.

Today my Skype phone rings with a call from Toni 101. I don't answer and say hi on chat. She says hi. I say who are you. She says she is looking for online friends. Block.

Hmmm. Ok, so AOL wants to embed some weirdness in IM as of one of my last posts and now Skype is spamming me with dare I say women of dubious background. Sigh. What to do.

Stowe Boyd's New Blog Message

Stowe Boyd, who I am a big fan of, has started a new solo blog called /Message. If you are interested in collaborative tools and social media, this is a must add to your aggregator or reader of choice.

AIM Mail

So I fire up the computer this morning and what to my surprise but a weird AIM mail prompt. Oh my, I am so excited! Yet one more piece of garbage running on my computer. Why can't AOL let me choose whether or not I want crappy things like Wild Tangent and now this email thing to run on my computer? I think its a really bad way to instill loyalty in a user of a product, especially in this world of spam and adware proliferation. I'd like to make the decision on whether or not I have more things running in the background on my machine. I have been increasing the migration to Skype and I think things like this make it more and more likely that over time I will probably make a new selection on IM clients.

Shozu thoughts

I was playing around yesterday with Shozu. Shozu is a mobile application that allows you to mass upload picture from your mobile to the web. The application is very cool in that it doesn't really feel like an application as much as it is more similar to an overlay on the Symbian OS that interfaces with your media.

It took me a day or two to figure out how to grant permissions to Shozu to use my GPRS network. Once I did, I accidentally began an upload of 160+ photos to Flickr. I managed to stop it about halfway through the process but not before knocking most of the relevant user photos for my friends and family way off the first several pages. Oops.

So for the most part a really cool application. One MAJOR pet peeve though. The application tagged all of my photos with the ShoZu tag. Not a problem, I will just go into Flickr and delete that. I can't! That sucks. I need to send an email to customer service.

Good Company Listing Source

Last year when we were out raising money, a friend from Time Warner Ventures, introduced us to Tom Gieselmann at BV Capital. Tom was super smart, as most of the people we met were, and had some really good insight into the community space. One of his co-workers at BV Capital, Christian Leybold, did a year end roundup of companies that they looked at last year that you can find here. We are included of course. If you want to find a good one stop place to find a list of new/cool/up and coming companies, I would recommend you take a spin with this list.

Rabble Widget

On the right hand side of this page, I added our new Rabble Widget. Right now we only have a couple, but we plan to make some more. Because I synchronize my Blogger posts to Rabble I had to select a couple of posts that were created inside Rabble that didn't come from Blogger. On the top, and in honor of his recent departure from this planet, is my fish Ralph.

Podcastercon Video

Randall Greg sent me a link to a 14 minute video he took at Podcastercon that was mostly of the Copyright Session. You can see the video here. I couldn't figure out the direct link to the page but the website main page is here.

Link to Audio of Copyright Session from Podcastercon

Ray Moore who attended Podcastercon this last Saturday sent me a copy of the audio he took from the Copyright session. The file is just under 100 Megabytes and clocks in at just under two hours. I put the file here and will also put the link on the wiki for Podcastercon.

Podcastercon 2006 - Epilogue

Got back home around mid-day yesterday. I was pretty burned out from the trip as I had a hard time sleeping the whole time on the road. Not really sure why. A couple of thoughts:

1. What a great event. It had a decidedly different feel than the Portable Media Expo. None of the main blogger intelligentsia was there, which I though was actually kind of cool. Not much of a cult of personality was in play. I also thought Brian did an amazing job getting more than 300 people together for a very ad hoc yet effective event. I think the protests that Dave Winer had, and he is entitled to his opinion, were misplaced. It was anything but a commercial conference. It felt like an educational seminar.

2. The session that I led, actually I would say co-led with Chris McDonald, was really well attended and received. I took a long deep breath at the start of what was to be a 2 hour session with the fear that there was no way we would go longer than an hour or so. I couldn't have been more wrong. We had an amazing group gathered together with a variety of opinions and experience coming from podcasting, journalism etc. which made for a lively discussion that was meant to be more informative than scary. I know that Richard/Madge from Yeast Radio thought we were slightly scaring people but that wasn't the intent at all. I think he made it through most of the session but I think he missed the part where we came back to the point that this wasn't meant to scare as much as it was to inform.

3. The after hours hang out was a total blast. Ryan Irelan documented the group of us that hungout afterwards here. There is also a good picture here. I especially enjoyed hanging out with the Libsyn guys who Chris McDonald had carpooled with. I think those guys are doing some great work and wish them a ton of success.

Chris recorded our session and as soon as I track it down I will stick it up on my server on Acme.

Podcastercon 2006

I am at Podcastercon today in Chapel Hill. I'll be doing some occasional posts and a lot of Flickr pictures. Search for tag podcastercon2006 if you are interested.

The $250 Million Radio Show #29

Hot off the laptop. Show #29 is here. Notes will be updated on the podcast site tomorrow here.

North Carolina

Flew into Charlotte yesterday evening. Spent the night with a good friend and his family and puttered around Charlotte a bit before heading to Chapel Hill. I always imagined that North Carolina was a lot like Oregon without the rain. What I didn't realize is that it is in fact kind of cold here. I also didn't realize that there aren't as many evergreens either so it looks a bit like an East coast winter landscape with hints of a lush time in the spring. Uploading a podcast and off to bed.

Copyright Law and Podcasting

I am facilitating the session on Copyright Law and Podcasting at Podcastercon on Saturday, January 7th. The format of the overall conference is an unconference. If you are not familiar with this style of event, please look at this overview by Doc Searls.

The session is meant to be a conversation among those present about the things they are interested in. Certainly we all have opinions on the topic if we are podcasting. One of the challenging things about podcasting is that there is in fact a lot of legal implications of what you do if you are playing copyrighted material. Although there are legal structures in place, there is also a lot of ambiguity about what you need to do to make sure that you don't stumble over one of these legal areas and expose yourself to penalties and fines.

Some of the things we may want to discuss during this session can be the following:

What are the underlying rights associated with copyrighted works?

Who administers permission and payments if you want to use copyrighted materials in your podcast?

What copyright protections can I have in protecting the intellectual property that I create in my podcast?

What is Creative Commons?

Let's talk about acronyms like DMCA, DRPA, DPD, and CARP.

What is the case law that has been established thus far in digital music that may be relevant to our podcasting?

What is Fair Use?

What do I need to do to play cover songs in my podcast?

If I am concerned about playing copyrighted music, what are my alternatives?

As the session moderator, I am familiar with some of the above topics and will contribute to the best of my abilities, but will only do so in a conversation with everyone present. I am not a lawyer. Hopefully there will be some of those in attendance.

The stark reality of copyright law and podcasting is that it is a fairly new area that has some precedence and some indications of a legal/not legal framework and associated fines. Making yourself aware of what those areas are, and identifying alternatives to taking risks in our podcasts is what I hope we get to have a lively conversation about on Saturday. Please feel free to join in the session and contribute your opinion and knowledge on the topic.

The Rabble.com Website

When we went live last summer, we slowly rolled out a website that was used primarily to let our users synchronize their rabble activity with their web activity. In my case that meant importing posts from Blogger like this one into Rabble for other users to see. It also meant taking posts that I create in Rabble and publishing them out to Live Journal and Zoto.

Over the holidays we pushed out a beta website for our mobile users that allows them to pretty much replicate the phone functionality on the web. We designed it primarily for users of the application, rather than to create a web competitor to other websites. Frankly, we think a lot of really great websites do an amazing job on the web and we would rather find ways to partner with them instead of trying to re-create their functionality. We prefer to focus on the mobile aspects. One thing we did do was allow people to view with guest privileges if someone wants to send a post outside of Rabble to their friends or family. So if you don't have a Verizon phone and want a sneak peek at what's going on inside the Rabble world. Click on this link.

CPM Based Advertising in Podcasts

Paul Colligan wrote this post in response to some Adam Curry comments about avoiding CPM based advertising in podcasting. I can't agree more. How would an advertiser know that they are truly getting value from a purely impression based medium. I think that advertisers should pay for performance. Sure it's great if a million people download my podcast, but what if none of them come to the website to buy my product. Now clicks, I'll pay for that. :-)

The challenge with podcasting is that it is today a small medium. Of course it doesn't want to move to a CPM based model because it doesn't have enough advertising units to support itself. If we apply the Google/Overture performance based structure then it gets worse.

A move to sponsorship model makes sense if the sponsor feels they are getting value and would be in line with the old "soap" sponsorships of days gone by.

Or you could do it because you love it.

Mobile Monday San Diego / January

Ok, so the mobile crowd up in San Francisco has a lot of technology companies that are interested in wireless. We have Qualcomm. We are hosting this January's Mobile Monday in San Diego at the Intercasting Corp Office on January 16th with people from the Media Flo group. If you want to hear about the future of media on your handset, swing on by. Details here. Map here.

Machinima

I don't believe that I have ever blogged about Machinima but I thought it would be worthwhile to mention to people who may not have heard of it.

While digging through my contacts to clean up for the new year/send out holiday cards, I realized that I hadn't talked to Paul Marino in a while. Paul worked with me at Vivendi and left to pursue Machinima full time. Currently he is the Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

So what is it? The various filmmakers of this genre utilize tools such as gaming engines to create movies/film etc. Imagine leveraging something like the Quake engine to create a movie. This is the type of stuff that they do. You may be thinking that it only applies to making movies like Aliens, but the Quake engine allows you to customize environments and scenery to make just about anything you can think of.

Why do I care? User generated content or any sort of edge of the network media needs to use platforms and tools that allow the costs to remain low. By cleverly repurposing tools such as gaming engines, these filmmakers can do some really crazy things at very low cost. I would highly recommend that you take a look at some of the projects that have come out of this group.

Reflecting on 2005

Taking a page from last year, I thought I would hit the highlights of this year for me:

1. A year of health and survival for my wife Jessica, daughter Mallory, and sons Tate, Tucker and Brit. Tate turned 3 and Mallory, Tucker and Brit had their first birthday. We managed two family trips including a long week in Palm Springs in the spring and a trip to the Midwest in the summer. Note to self, no traveling with four small children for a little while. Soon, just not now.

2. We launched Rabble on Verizon Wireless. We had hoped to do this earlier in the year but wireless development and rollout on a carrier's network involves some serious heavy lifting. That said we are really happy with what is going on in the Rabble world and expect to make some major announcements in Q1 of next year.

3. We raised $5.5 million in a series A round. We have been really happy with how we managed the process and the decision we made to work with Avalon and Masthead. They have been supportive and helpful and we expect to reward them in the future for their trust in our vision and our execution.

4. I continued, although a bit impacted, my blogging. Work has really transformed my ability to blog about technology the way I originally intended to but continuing to maintain the discipline to sit down behind the keyboard if however infrequently or briefly is it's own reward, at least to me.

5. I continued, in an even more impacted way, podcasting. Although the legwork that it takes to do a show has been a bit too much for me, I did manage to put together 28 shows by the end of this year and hope to push out 29 by tomorrow night. At least that's the hope. On the other hand, the original inspiration for me to start podcasting was to raise awareness about copyright issues that will impact podcasting. On that front we have around 70 shows on the Association of Music Podcasting site, I spoke on a panel on copyright law at the inaugural Podcast Expo, and I am leading a session on copyright law at the inaugural Podcastercon next week. The raised awareness has been great to see and I think there are going to be some really cool developments in the distribution of music content via podcasts in the coming year.

6. My many travels this last year put me in touch with a ton of great people who I have become friends with over the last year like Tom Ryan from EMI, John Hiler from Xanga, and Adam Rugel from Odeo, to name just a few. The work it takes to maintain and increase your friendships is more than offset by the good times you have with those people you spend time with. I expect a lot more of that in the coming year.

7. I started coaching soccer for my son's soccer team. Although I must admit that I am more of a football nut than anything else(American Football), I have always felt that if you want to have an opinion on things then you have to be willing to get involved. Whether it is youth sports, school boards, or local government, I think that we have a responsibility to contribute. At least I plan to do so. We can't do much about those things we see on CNN or Fox News but we can do things to make our neighborhood a better place.

May you and yours have a joyous, healthy and prosperous 2006. Thanks for visiting.

Holiday Recap

For the last dozen years or so I have spent Christmas in North Dakota. Very cold and very white. Last year was complete chaos as the triplets were born and Jessica has a terrible health scare after what seemed like a normal delivery.

This year was sort of the first year where we establish some of our own Christmas traditions. I don't know what the future holds but we made a first cut at some traditions. Jessica's aunt Mary came out to be with us which was awesome as she is always fun to have around and was a great help with all the kids. It can be scary being outnumbered by kids but we seemed to pull it off.

On Christmas Eve we did the family church service where the kids barely made it to the end. Afterwards we fed the triplets and put them to bed before having present opening with Tate. Late that night Santa showed up to bring the everyone their goods.

In keeping with the Swedish theme that was mentioned earlier in the post about Korv, we made a Swedish dish called Frask Pankaka. Sounds like something pretty gross? Well it is basically Swedish Quiche fried in bacon and bacon grease that is then topped with whipped cream and lingonberry sauce. That's what I am talking about. We couldn't find the lingonberries so we substituted marionberry. Here is what the dish looked like before the sweet toppings:

Intercasting / Rabble Named As A Top 50 Futurecentric Company

Wow. That sounds really cool. Apparently PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Association selects 50 companies each year that are "entrepreneurial companies building ideas that are shaping the future." Blush.

We received a notice yesterday that we had been selected but didn't really know what it was at first. This is their 3rd annual list. You can find the list here. We are in some pretty good company. I am not familiar with many of the companies in pharma or biology or anything else like that, but I am familiar with Feedburner who many of my podcasting brethren are big fans of, Blue Frog, Digital Orchid, and GoTV.

MySpace Podcasting and RSS Support

This must be the week of quiet rollouts. Jason from Insomnia Radio/Kill Your FM pinged me on Skype this morning and told me to check out that MySpace has rolled out podcasting support on their site. At the bottom of the blog their is a box for your podcast enclosure. I went ahead and added the link to my file of my last show (reminds me, time for another one) and posted. I then went to Bloglines and found nothing when I subscribed to the RSS feed. Hey they added RSS support too! We played around a bit and didn't get anywhere but I did manage to subscribe to the RSS feed in iTunes and download the show. Hmmm. Ok so maybe there is a reason they haven't announced it. Here is my Myspace RSS - http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=1859573

Streethive

A company that is loosely in a similar space to Rabble called WaveMarket has launched their application Streethive on Cingular. I hadn't seen any press on it but ran across it on the Cingular deck. I will be spending some time on it tonight. I am not sure which handsets they support but I ran across it on a Nokia 6620.

Nutcrackers

Four years ago, Jessica started buying me Nutcrackers. I used to buy my dad beer steins from Germany for Xmas so this was kind of an update on that. Here is a picture of my first Nutcracker, a Santa and my latest one, a William Shakespeare nutcracker. Doesn't that rule?

CardScan

Since before Tate was born we have been in the habit of sending cards out to people around the holidays. We started with family pictures but quickly shifted to pictures of our kid and now kids. Jess made an amazing card this year so I felt an extra level of need to get a list of people to send cards out to this year. I rummaged through my office and realized that I have a stack of approximately 500 business cards that weren't in my PIM. Holy crap!

I started typing cards in (haha). After three I realized this wasn't going to work. I had heard mixed reviews on card scanners and decided to take the plunge. I ended up buying a CardScan scanner, I crossed my fingers and set everything up. Shawn laughed at me and told me that I would be scanning cards for days.

Surprisingly I blew through the stack in around an hour and have to say that the OCR was amazing. There are certainly some things that don't scan well but in most cases it worked great. I am a big fan.

I think my hesitation to use a card scanner was primarily because of the bad experience with products like Dragon naturally speaking and other voice recognition technologies, which I have to assume have also gotten better since I last checked.

So if you want a card send me your address! Or your business card. ;-)

Melodeo

I have a post to write later today if I get the time about business cards and technology. If you read that then you will understand that I am doing some catch up. Back at the Podcast Expo, one of the guys I ran into was from a company called Melodeo. Melodeo was interested in talking with our various podcasters in AMP because they want to have content to showcase their Mobilecast podcasting client for phones.

Occasionally I find myself in an interesting situation where on the one hand I want to distribute my podcast as widely as possible, and on the other hand we are working at Intercasting on creating tools for user generated content for mobile devices. Generally I think that most people have complimentary approaches to the market so it's at least fun enough to have a conversation.

So after chatting with Frank, I told him that I definitely wanted to add my show to their directory and that I would check out their client later.

Yesterday I decided to tinker with Mobilecast. I figured that they are probably focused more on the higher end of the handset matrix so I initially tried to download the client to my P910. Not supported. Hmmm. I checked out the list and grabbed one of our S710's from the office phone pool.

The client is pretty cool, and pretty straightforward. I dug through the music directory and found my show. I was given the option of downloading (doh!) or streaming. I selected stream and was pleasantly surprised to hear a not too bad down sampled version of my show. The audio support on handsets clearly has a way to go, but the first inkling of a start is there. I am a little busy with end of year stuff so I didn't get a chance to do much beyond that but the two questions I hope to answer later are what impact this has on a phone bill and battery life.

The most interesting thing about Melodeo to me was that during our VC fund raising process we had an encounter with one of the founders of Melodeo when they were still in the licensed content business. We, being strong believers in the user created content model, made a pretty strong argument for our type of business as opposed to the existing licensed music business. There is clearly a business for licensed content businesses but I just don't see it as a startup. I am sure it wasn't because of our meeting alone, but soon thereafter Melodeo was a mobile podcasting company.

Mobile Monday San Diego

We are hosting Mobile Monday San Diego in our offices next week on the 19th. The link to the site for information on speakers etc is here.

Holy Crap! It's my birthday

The Boys waiting for the show,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

I can't believe that it has been a year, but tomorrow Mallory, Tucker and Brit turn 1. It is certainly a surprise when you are doing a startup and plan on having child number 2 but end up with child # 2, 3 and 4.

It has been an awesome year of joy, sleep deprivation and pure chaos. But I wouldn't change it for the world. Their mother Jessica and brother Tate have been amazing. I have been on airplanes and am so proud that they have kept it all together. As I recall year 2 was even better than year 1 with Tate so I can't wait to see what is ahead of us.

Podcaster Con

I am leading a session on copyright law and podcasting at Podcastercon in early January. Here is the session description.

Korv Party

December 4 2005 031,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

This weekend I went to a sausage making party. That doesn't sound right, but it is true. It is impossible to be around a bunch of adults and spend time shoving meat into stomach casings and not make a bunch of really crude and off color jokes. This is one of the less obscene pictures I took. For the uninitiated, Korv is a rather bland Swedish sausage that is similar to bangers and it apparently is served around the holidays along with things like pickled herring and lutefisk. More pictures on my flickr page.

Gcast

Garageband just launched their consumer podcasting site at Gcast. I am uploading my last podcast up right now.

PSP Software 2.6

Right after finishing the write up on my insane new Location Free media server, I saw that Sony had released a new version of the core software for the PSP. Russ Beattie did a good review here.

In a nutshell the new upgrade has a couple of features. 1. It supports WMA. Cool for those who use that. I have MP3 files of everything I listen to. 2. It supports Podcasts via a thing they call RSS, which to me makes sense, but to many they think it is confusing and a missed opportunity. That's probably true but it seems that the frequency of releases for the PSP isn't giving them much time to let the marketing folks come up with fancy new names for things everyone else calls something standard.

One more quirk, or feature that is important to note is that when you subscribe to a podcast you don't get to download the MP3 file. Instead the PSP streams it to your player. Although this really isn't in the spirit of podcasting for some, to me it's perfectly fine as it avoids me putting a bunch of stuff on my hard drive that I have to delete later or creating a CD to fill up the landfills.

The last kind of cool thing I will mention is that every artist on AcmeNoise has a podcast link on their artist page. This functionality is really cool with the PSP as you can go around and sign up for music from your favorite bands on the site and then stream them whenever you like.

Location Free Review

Around my birthday I have been given a chunk of cash from a family member with the explicit instructions to go buy myself something just for me that nobody else could use. I love those kind of missions.

After hanging out at the podcaster convention, and seeing a couple if video iPods, I was sure that I had to go get one of those. But I paused for a second, Why would I get a video iPod when I have this rocking device called the PSP that has a screen the size of an iPod. I spent some time working with the various client software and came to the conclusion that generally speaking, the PSP is a by far superior device for what I want/need. Back to the drawing board.

I thought for a couple of seconds about a Series 2 Tivo, but decided to wait for just a wee bit longer as I have several Tivo's in the house and I should just start to swap them out over the coming months. The Tivo to go for the PSP had me really intrigued. While looking for the Tivo to go stuff I found something called Location Free. Oh my God. Wow.

So get this, I buy a little media server that I hook up to my home network via my router. I then take my media server and plug any sort of AV device I have into the media server. This could be a DVD player, TV, Tivo, etc. Once I have this set up I have to go and make sure that I have the most current version of PSP software, which of course I have. Additionally there is a disk that comes with the server that I can use to load software onto my PC.

Once the connections are made and the software is installed I can pair my PSP or Laptop with the media server. It essentially makes a WEP key sort of connection between the device and the media server. Once the connection is made, I can stream the AV from the media server to either the PSP or the PC wherever I am in my house. So for example while Jessica was watching the Macy's parade, I was busy cooking turkey and watching the football game on my PSP in perfect quality video. This is simply insane.

But it really wouldn't rise to the level of cool that it aspires to if it was restricted to just my house. With a couple of tweaks, I can access my home TV and media anywhere in the world where I have a Wi FI connection on my PC or my PSP. This is without question an amazing thing. Bored in a hotel room in New York? Nothing on TV? How about I go to the hard drive on my HDTV Tivo at home and stream a show to my PSP? Now that's cool. CNN? No problem. Local TV back in San Diego? Easy.

Aside from the gee whiz technical aspects this type of device, and I know that there have been other pieces of client software that do stuff like this but I would argue not as elegantly, there are amazing implications for personal media services and how we consume media in the future. I am currently demoing some advance software from MP3tunes called Oboe that is essentially a music locker service that Michael is rolling out. I'll post more on that later. To me it is very much in the vein of Flickr or Google Video or whatever celestial device there is in the sky

As a user of these types of services I totally see the value in it. The problem I have is that it requires me to do something to transmit the media elsewhere. The reality for most of us is that we have machines or hard drives lying around that have all this media that it would be really cool for us to access remotely. If it was made seamless and easy then it would preclude us from having to use some centralized service. In a way it kind of speaks to the difference between centralized services and peer to peer services. I know that I have small subsets of media on every service you can imagine. But I know that I have every picture I have ever taken on a digital camera on a hard drive stashed away on an old machine. If I can get to each of them in a simple fashion my guess is that the latter is better than the former. It will be interesting to see which is true.

Sidekick II software upgrade

About two months ago, Dave Harper was telling me that he had a new software upgrade for his Sidekick. I was jealous. I wanted to force an upgrade but alas that was not to be. This last weekend it finally came. Here is a link to the information contained in the upgrade. For the most part to me it was largely a small feature tweak with two exceptions that I thought were cool. First of the web browser now supports Javascript. This really helps make the web experience on the device a good one. The second main upgrade was around instant messenger. I can now see icons, I can see how long people have been online, I can read their away message etc.

I can't wait to see the Sidekick III!

Henry Rollins

My good friend Damon came down from Los Angeles to join us for Thanksgiving and to insist that I go to see the closing night of Henry Rollins spoken word tour.

For those who don't know, Henry is the former lead singer of Black Flag. Black Flag was one of the main hardcore punk bands from Los Angeles. They original founders also started up the SST record label and one of the members, Keith Morris went on to found The Circle Jerks which is my favorite punk rock band.

I had seen Henry do a spoken word show in Los Angeles probably about 7 years ago. I can't believe I had waited that long for the next one. He was AMAZING. Please do yourself a favor and see him the next time he comes around. Or buy one of his books. He is a brilliant renaissance guy who not only is a great artist from the music world, but an intelligent social commentator and an occasional actor.

Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving. Here is a post from last year about it. This year Jess said that I should keep a diary of the dinner to refer back to. So for better or worse I figured it just put it here and then I can pull it up on the Internets in the future when I am looking for it.

My brother Rodney and I did all the cooking this year with two exceptions. Shawn came over the night before for the annual "Get boozed up and cook party" which was in fact very tame and small this year. Shawn made an amazing Acorn Squash Soup. We served it the day after Thanksgiving and everyone wanted to know how he made it.

My niece Alexis did all the pumpkin pies.

Rodney and I made the following:

Herb Rubbed Turkey - 24 lbs. Same one I have been making for 12 years. It makes the most amazing gravy so I can't seem to break tradition and make something else. By the way, I made the most unbelievable gravy this year.

Mashed Potatoes

Vanilla Infused Sweet Potatoes

Raspberry Cranberry Sauce

Jess's moms stuffing

Cornbread stuffing with Chestnuts

Green Beans with Bacon and Cocktail Onions

I put some pictures on Flickr and Zoto of the whole clan.

Urchin

I am a big stats junkie, as you may or may not know. Of course I was very intrigued when I had heard of Google's new analytics package Urchin. I decided to check it out and see what a free analytics package would look like. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, so after a couple of days of waiting, I finally got to see a report. WOW. WOW. WOW.

If you are even a mild stats junkie, rush out and install this on your various domains and wait to see all the data goodness coming in.

I only have a couple of days worth of data to look at, and I haven't really dug in yet, but I really m amazed at the depth of data available with just a couple of embedded scripts to your website templates.

AMP Guys

AMP Guys,
originally uploaded by goodbeershow.

Here is most of the crew.

C21 Tones

A person who is involved with the C21 Arts project sent me a link to a site they launched several weeks ago that is an arts project that is focused on creating original ringtones for free distribution. The site can be found at www.c21tones.com.

Intercasting in the San Diego Union Tribune

They wrote an article today that you can find here. The article was a profile on a number of companies that came out of Mp3.com. Lot's of our friends were featured in this article, including Trusonic where I am on the board.

The $250 Million Radio Show #28

The Show can be found here. The show notes here.

Happy Birthday to Jason

So I just finished $250 Million Dollar Radio Show #28 and pinged Jason from Insomnia Radio online. We had been meaning to chat about an article I am going to write for the Kill Your FM zine. I asked him if he wanted to talk today. He said he was splitting for the day to celebrate his birthday. I was like NFW! I couldn't believe it. Of the six of us who started AMP two of us had the same birthday? Strange. Happy 30th Birthday Jason! Rock on.

Team Building at Intercasting

You don't create the platform to enable the intersection of user generated content and personal media devices without a strong team. We have been slowly building up the team at Intercasting and wanted to say a little bit about that.

Next week we have two new additions to what we think is a strong and impressive team that we have already assembled.

About a year or so ago I began a conversation with Debi Jones who happened to share a lot of similar interests with us as it relates to mobile blogging and social media. Our conversations were interesting and insightful and this ultimately led to a broader conversation that culminated in her joining us starting next week. We think she is going to bring some great insights to the foundations we have established and look forward to her ideas finding their way into Rabble as well as our other products currently in development.

Our other new hire starting this week is a quiet giant who I have had the pleasure to know since 1999. John Hardin is one of the brightest people I met during my time at MP3.com. Although we had an impressive number of amazingly smart engineers, John was among the cream of the crop who is widely respected among his peers here in town. John played a variety of roles at MP3.com including playing a part in the core team that developed My.Mp3. We recently plucked John from Napster where he was one of the top developers within the company. If you are going to build a strong platform for user published content, few people have the type of experience that John has given his experience in media serving and content management.

They join an assortment of other strong players including Deborah Critten, who oversaw our interactions with the labels at Mp3.com, ran our community efforts, and managed our most significant relationship with luxury brands company LVMH during the entire life of our deal with them.

On the technology side John will be joining a strong group of developers and some expected additions who will help to realize our vision of Intercasting on a handset near you. Stay tuned.

Almost 40

When I turned 31 my wife immediately started telling me that I was almost 40. Each year I had to protest that she was unreasonably aging me and that revenge would be sweet as two can play that game. Well today I turned 39. At last I have to concede that I will soon be turning 40. Sigh. 38 has been an interesting. Triplets, a new company, raising money etc. I suspect that 39 will be as interesting as 38 and frankly my entire 30s have been.

Music Licensing Link from Podcast Expo

Matt just sent me this link that has the audio of the session I was on at the podcast expo in Ontario. Unfortunately the first 5-10 minutes were cut off. When I find a better link I will post it. In the meantime you can get the idea of the conversation.

The AMP Guys at the Podcast Expo

The AMP Guys at the Podcast Expo,
originally uploaded by zaldor.

Hey that's me on the left!

PSP Media Manager - What do you mean its for my PC?

Over the weekend, some of the guys at AMP who publish the PSP zine Kill Your FM told me that they had landed a sponsorship deal from Sony for the PSP Media Manager. They guys were saying that this was the iPodder or iTunes equivalent for the PSP. I was intrigued. I had also seen the headline in my RSS reader that Russ Beattie had reviewed the product as well. What I hadn't done was read Russ's review.

My initial use of the product yesterday made me recall that you should never assume anything. I assumed that the PSP manager was a client application that resides on your PSP and allows you to download podcast and videoblogs and what have you for playback on your PSP. I mean I primarily use the device around the house to do a quick check of Google News, Fantasy Football Updates, and to check up on my RSS feeds. The device is like a little wi-fi web browser for me. Unfortunately my big disappointment was that the client is in fact a PC based client that you need to connect to your PC to synchronize. What a disappointment.

So after the initial let down, I started playing with the client and subscribed to KillyourFM, and loaded some podcasts and started subscribing to videoblogs. I'll spend some more time with it later today and if I have any insight will post something.

I have been really happy with the PSP and in an earlier post said that I was surprised that there was nothing that allowed content creation. I think that the lack of a device side client, at least for now, is yet another small shortcoming that I hope they fix in the future. At least on the client side, that is something you can do with software.

Quote about AMP

Check out this link. I love the point about AMP about halfway down.

Portable Media Expo - Postscript

I had some family illness that cut short my trip to Ontario. My panel went well. I expected some copyright Bolsheviks in the audience but in general over the last year people have finally come to accept that the copyright issues around podcasting are pretty daunting. Given that reality people are trying to understand how things will unfold. That seems pretty straightforward to me in that certain subgroups will adopt this as a great marketing opportunity and ultimately so will the copyright holders. The question how long is that cycle. I think two years.

It was amazing to see how fast this thing has grown up. That is truly impressive.

I loved getting to meet Kevin and Renmarie from Bandtrax as well as Julien from In Over Your Head. They were fellow co-founders of AMP before they took of to work on Podshow.

As for AMP, we had a great turnout and great reception from the various people we are working with or in the process of working with. I especially enjoyed getting to know and hang out with Matt Galligan, Chris MacDonald and Brian DeWitt. That combined with meeting others such as Ewan Spence, Eric Rice in person, David Betz, Samantha Murphy (in San Diego a week ago) and many others involved makes me psyched to be working with such a diverse and talented group of people. I expect lots of good things ahead for what we are trying to do.

At Portable Media Expo

Man I got in late. I posted some pictures and am off to bed. Very cool day standing around in a room with a hole bunch of people you know through phone/IM/and listening to their podcasts. All of us music people got a chance to hang out. More later.

The Portable Media Expo

Dave Winer linked to a Wired article about the Portable Media Expo where I am speaking at Friday on behalf of AMP. It should be a good time. Matt Galligan from AMP is rolling into San Diego later today to hang with me before the event and then tomorrow I am hooking up with CC Chapman, some of the Odeo folks and some other friends. It is the first big podcasting event so if you happen to be in Southern California in the next couple of days do go check it out.

Arnold gets Terminated

Arnold's threats to take back Cali - fornia were thwarted yesterday as the people of the state rejected all of his "tools" to take back the government and fix California. Amazingly, every initiative on the ballot was rejected. I know I voted no across the board. Although some of the measures may have had some merit, the libertarian in me said that this was a big stupid waste of time and money for no good reason. So let's tell the whole crowd no. What a great way to spend $60 million dollars. I think across the spectrum of centrist voters there was a feeling of stop playing games and get back to your job of running the government.

Adam Curry Finds God

Or something like that. I have been so head down at work that I missed the fact that yesterday, Adam Curry FINALLY had the awakening that if he continues to play copyrighted music, he will get sued into oblivion. I am sure that his new investors were excited to hear about the potential exposure. It's funny but over a year ago I made that point in my first podcast which Adam played. I guess a year isn't that long.

The interesting thing to see is whether or not the various publishers decide to go back through his over 275 shows and slap him with a serious lawsuit that will liquidate the pile of capital from the Silicon Valley VCs. My guess, you can take that to the bank.

It's unfortunate if that happens as it really will be bad for podcasting in general. On the other hand, there is a great new opportunity for those who embrace this medium as a means to distribute their music.

Mobile Users Vs. Internet Users

I read with a very big smile an article about Mobile Phone Data Useability sucks from Evan/Rabble over at Odeo. I know that I had at least one conversation with him about our approach to consumers and I think it is valuable to repeat it here. There are consumers who use their phone as their primary interface for communications. When I say communications I mean not just voice. These are people who use SMS the way I use Instant Messenger. These users are the earliest adopters of this sort of technology, and like all the good pioneers before them, they have managed to find ways to work around the limitations of the first or second instance of a platform.

When you think about mobile data, we are in the very very early stages. Phones are still being broadly manufactured to allow people to use the voice facility to speak with each other, not to surf the web or find their friends or other things that most people would use a computer for. Over time the usability will improve as more and more mainstream consumers start using those kinds of technologies.

When I look at what we are doing with rabble, we are focused on making the experience as strong as possible for users of this still early platform. To that end we have spent out time and resources focusing on the part that matters to people who use the phone as a primary device. What we haven't done has rolled out a website for our users. Our experience in the past has shown us that most people who are mobile data focused, don't necessarily want to mix that experience with the web. For those consumers who want to mix and match we have integrated Rabble with sites like Blogger and Live Journal because quite frankly, they do really good job for those of our users who use those tools.

We do plan on rolling out our website in the next couple of weeks. I'll be sure to post about that, but I am fairly certain that when our site goes live it will be a bit of a yawn for a bunch of our users. In the meantime I'd encourage you to check out the Rabble site where we are profiling some of our current users and their posts. It's good for some laughs.

iSportscaster

I received an email from someone on the staff of iSportscaster saying that since I was a aficionado of user generated content that I should check this out. I haven't played with it yet but I LOVE the concept. If I had the time I should grab the Chargers, but I can guarantee that isn't going to happen.

Rabble Featured in LBS startups to watch article

We were plugged and profiled in the Red Herring article you can find here.

The Neighborhood Kids 5

The Neighborhood Kids 5,
originally uploaded by brikmaster.

My kids are the Yodas on each end.

Three Computers Later

If it hadn't been such a miserable time, I would have loved to post about the misery that has been buying a new laptop. I will only say that the two Sony VAIOs that I bought and had to return made me really pissed that I hadn't bought a mail order laptop. I am now typing this from my new HP laptop that I am surprisingly happy with. I have installed my main business apps and am now starting to transfer over archived information, which is giving me a lot of food for thought about user generated content and how us digital people are creating an amazing amount of leave behind digital media. More on that later.

The Great Laptop Meltdown

A couple of weeks ago, my trusty laptop of over 2 1/2 years, began to act like a stroke victim. Nothing too serious at first. Some strange boots. Some long load times. Then some funny errors. This kept getting worse. I bought a backup drive and have been dumping on and off over the last week. I kept kidding myself that it might have gotten better.

So in the midst of heavy travel, heavy hiring, and all the normal stuff, I am doing the laptop migration. I ended up buying a Sony VAIO. I was leaning towards an IBM T43, but the deal killer for me was I needed three things, USB 2.0, Firewire, and Bluetooth. Unfortunately the T43 didn't have the Firewire which really bummed me out as those machines are tanks. The VAIO is super light and fits my overall Sony life style (Phone, Camera, DV Cam, PSP, TVs, etc.) but it has me worried about durability. I guess I will find out soon enough.

Although I am pretty uptight about the pain it will be to migrate all my stuff, I am excited about a new clean machine with no baggage to speak of. I immediately started deleting all the nonsense that comes shipped with the machine and then downloaded Firefox. Ah, very nice. I set it as my default and start to move tomorrow. I cant wait until we have a Web OS.

Platinum

Last week I received an email from American Airlines, my airline of choice, that notified me that I had made Platinum status. I didn't know if I should celebrate or cry. I am thinking cry. I can't believe that I have traveled that much this year without any international flights. Ouch.

Verizon Launches Blogging Category on Get It Now

Last night Verizon Wireless launched a blogging category on Get It Now. Its in the Get Going section and it currently includes Rabble and UPOC. I think this is the first time that a carrier has created a category like this anywhere in the world and we are excited as it is evidence that there will be more blogging options to come in the coming months. We expect that there will be similar moves from other North American carriers shortly.

Rabble and Zoto

Yesterday at BlogOn we announced our integration with Zoto here. Now you can send pictures from your Rabble Gallery to Zoto or publish pictures from Zoto to Rabble.