Churbuck.com

First a plug for Christopher Lydon’s new hour of talk radio on Public Radio International (PRI), OpenSource. Lydon is a fixture in Boston public broadcasting, a true Yankee voice in the clenched jaw tradition of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, who took to blogging and early experiments in podcasting thanks to Dave Winer during Winer’s Berkman fellowship at Harvard.

Lydon has relaunched his show with a focus on the Internet and all things web in the evenings on the local NPR affilates (WGBH). MP3s of the shows are archived on Lydon’s blog. 

Last night (6.29), Lydon interviewed Michael Kinsley of Slate and Crossfire fame, now editorial page editor of the LA Times, on the infamous recent "failed" experiment in participatory journalism by permitting readers to edit an editorial via a Wiki-interface. The net result was a total trashing of the system by porno-vandals, so Kinsley pulled the plug and those "in-the-know" chuckled up their sleeves.

I thought it was a good experiment, a perfect example of the perils of open postings in an unmoderated world, and the need for a good collaborative community to coalesce and self-police itself.

Anyway, the best line of the night, was the last line of the night when Lydon asked Kinsley what he had learned from a decade of online journalism. Kinsley’s response: "What the heck. Let’s try it." 

Netimperative – B2B print mags suffer in age of the Web

From England. 

Wired News: Grokster May Haunt Podcasting

I don’t see the syllogism that iTunes is at risk if people submit podcasts through 4.9′s podcast subscription facility. Common carriage would appear to apply, but I’m not the legal mind to make that determination.

 Sam Whitmore is blazing a lot of trails with Podcast IP issues through his work with ASCAP and the Grateful Dead to podcast music. He has a column on the situation at Forbes.com

Well say goodbye to Odeo, the still-in-beta podcast subscription and synchronizer. I had it running for a week but just hit the uninstall button to purge it in favor of iTunes 4.9.

This latest version of Apple’s already excellent music player and music library organizer has the potential to really drive podcast dissemination to the 10% of the American public who own an iPod (I heard that stat recently and need to corroborate it somehow).

I’ve asked our IS department to get a paid of iPod minis with Belkin FM adaptors so we at CXO can begin to develop a podcast channel of our own. I’m moving my existing podcast subscriptions — Sam Whitmore’s Closet Deadhead, IT Conversations, and Christopher Lydon’s excellent OpenSource — over to iTunes now and will try to put together a strategy for CXO that would compile an IT channel’s worth of weekly IT news for our c-level audience and then make the case that instead of listening to NPR (why does Michelle Norris insist on pronouncing her name "Mee-chelle" and not "Muh-chelle") or the latest Grisham book-on-tape during their commute or daily slog on the Stairclimber, that they can get smart and entertained with geek talk.

Colin Crawford blogs on the release with pointers to indepth reviews and the news that some podcasters are beefing about the implementation requirements imposed by Apple. Chad Dickerson writes about getting dinged by iTunes when attempting to port his podcast feed over.

InfoWorld: Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS: I’m having IE4 flashbacks!

About time someone called RSS for what it truly is — ActiveDesktop redux. Just kidding. Back in the day, when Forbes.com was looking for Microsoft’s blessing, we built an active desktop CDF channel that pushed a "quote of the day" onto the user’s IE 4.0 enabled desktop. The thing was an utter kludge our CTO John Moschetto cooked up in a short amount of time.

What did it do for us? Not much, other than the right to say Forbes was baked into IE 4.0. 

 Me, I like to compare RSS to good old Pointcast.

So much to read, so little time, and I refuse to concede to books-on-tape:

1. The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman. Everyone got worked up into a lather in May about this book. I dunno, so far I still think Walter Wriston nailed it better and earlier than everyone else. This is a good CEO book for the people who are late in getting the joke.

2. DHTML and CSS – Jason Crawford Teague. Why? Why not. CSS rules and WordPress is a good place to practice one’s chops thanks to the Presentation/template editor and tons of good stylesheet examples to mess around with.

3. Building Oracle XML Applications: O’Reilly, Steve Muench. My world revolves around an Oracle axis these days. If you can’t get rid of ‘em, join ‘em.

4. Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug. Web usability guide — couple years old, but the title is a mantra.

5. The Brand Gap: Marty Neumeier. Don’t ask. It’s on my desk. I should read it.

6. 101 Tivo Hacks: O’Reilly. The Tour de France is upon me and I need many hours of capacity to save Lance’s quest for number 7 while I toileth at my desk. Time to break out the Torx and bless some new mucho-gigabyte drives and stick em in the faithful Tivo.

I must be in some geek bio-rhythm cycle where all I do is download stuff and mess around in php files. Here’s what I am playing with and why:

1. MySQL – why? Because it’s there, it’s the "M" in LAMP and any good web application around these days is written with it in mind. Although I operate in an LOAP (the "O" stands for Oracle) environment, LAMP is where it is at if you want to mess around stuff like MediaWiki (the opensource engine behind Wikipedia), vBulletin (threaded bulletin boards), and Drupal (community focused content management system).

2.  phpMyadmin - a gui app for working with MySQL. An evil little critter to get installed, by the sysop at Cape.com, my ISP, says I can do it, so do it I shall. I needed it last week to recover a lost admin password for this blog, and I’ll need it before I can install ….

3. Drupal – a CMS that is also a very friendly blog platform, or so sayeth my colleagues elsewhere at IDG who are using it as the foundation of their community initiatives, some going so far as to trash forums in favor of Drupal blogs.

4. Odeo – a podcast aggregator/synchronizer. I’m off to Best Buy to snag a pair of iPods to start messing around with auto-synch streams with a future eye towards a CXO radio show. Beta but pretty useful.

5. Audacity – Dan Gillmor says this is the thing to use to cut a podcast, so download it and try it. It’s a nice alternative to good old SoundForge.

6. Adobe Premiere, Adobe Premier Elements – for messing with digital video. 

WSJ.com – High Court Rules With RIAA in File-Sharing Case

Okay, I’m generally an apolitical guy, but last week’s Supreme Court ruling that municipalities could extend eminent domain takings of private property for commercial economic development got me started and this morning’s ruling against Grokster has me foaming.

This latest is hands-down the biggest setback to technology policy in the history of the court. This is analgous to banning any implement, tool, or technology that has the potential for lawbreaking on the grounds that the potential is indeed the primary use.

 Given the plaintiff list — all I can say is the vested interests got their day in court and came away happy. My recommendation is to innovate, don’t litigate, because the train has left the station on file sharing and these corporate IP retards are going to be playing whack-a-mole forever with users determined to pirate, share, manipulate and break their media free of its formats, locks, and copyright protection schemes.

WSJ.com – Real Time

And to think I used to lust after a complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary — the WSJ’s Real Time column talks about Penguin’s Complete Collection — 1082 books that stacks 882 feet high and weighs 700 pounds. Got a spare $8K? It’s yours. 

Recent experiments by me with a Sony digital video camera and Adobe Premiere have pushed me into an obsession with the production of web-ready video in the expectation that video will soon go the way of audio and follow an RSS-path towards something akin to podcasting called vidcasting.

With high hopes set for devices such as Sony’s PSP to finally build a platform for portable video, I give it a year before vidcasting begins to surface as a meme.

The question is one of gnarliness — podcasting can be as time-consuming as one wants to make it depending on relative degrees of obsessive compulsiveness and the complexity of the production tools, but I found the learning curve on opensource products such as Audacity signficantly reduce the turnaround time to about a four-to-one ratio of post-production to capture time.

Video is a different matter. Thanks to the speed of a firewire connection, D/V can be sucked off of the camera and into the PC very easily. Editing tools I’ve been playing with are Adobe Premiere — which is way too feature-laden for my uneducated tastes (this bed is too hard), the video editor that is bundled with Windows XP (this bed is too soft) and Adobe Premier Elements which fits the bill nicely thanks to its ability to output onto recordable DVDs (and this bed is just right).

I recorded some rowing races earlier in the month and due to the keen interest by the rowers and their parents have had to find some time on the last two weekends to edit the raw footage, title it, and encode it for web viewing off of Churbuck.com in .wmv format. This past weekend I encoded the files into one 25 minute flick, complete with a DVD menu system, and burned the results onto discs for distribution to parents.

 It was, all in all, a good experience and Premier Elements was adequate for my purposes. I now need to read a good book on videography to teach myself the do’s and don’ts of over zooming, panning, using a monopod to cut down on handshaking, and what to do to override autofocus so the lense doesn’t autoseek on something in the foreground when I’m trying to capture the background. I’d put the production to capture ratio at roughly eight-to-one, mainly because I was trying to figure out hairy add-ons like scrolling credits that really aren’t necessary.

 Battelle’s scoop last week that Google was launching in-browser video playback today, drove me to Google’s existing video submission service, where I opened an account under my gmail name and uploaded one of the rowing clips. It was an easy process and the file is currently under review before being posted. I was asked by Google if I wanted to charge users for viewing (which I did not), so evidently there is a market to be made. Now my concern is hosing my bandwidth allotment for Churbuck.com. Once the clip is approved I’ll be interested to see how it is tagged for search finds as there was no tagging facility offered in the upload process. Google, according to Om, is using an opensource player, VLC, which I will download and checkout as part of some webcasting due-diligence I’m now performing for CXO.

 Key insight learned from these recent video experiments: the size of the image plays a huge role in helping the viewer assign sounds — conversation — with people. The smaller the image, the more disconnected the audio. Amazingly stupid insight, but nevertheless something I’ll keep in mind when building future web videos displaying in small apertures — keep the number of people to a minimum, the images are too small for the user to assign voices to faces.

 Google Video either turns into America’s Dumbest Digital Videos or really gets some quality and makes some people some money. Wonder what Google’s cut of the action is? Google Video deserves some attention.

Ah, summer on Cape Cod and it is time for the lost-kitty posters to start crowding each other out for space on the phone poles and bulletin boards of the village. Ever since rabies crossed the bridges a few years ago, (despite the state’s best efforts to immunize the critter population with vaccination-laced bait) there has been more and more paranoia about the wildlife in our midst.

 Coyotes are the latest theme to dominate the summer cocktail parties, replacing Lyme Tick Disease and the Wind Farm as the horror of the season.

 Tonight I was at the home of a person (who shall go unnamed) who has been visited several times by coyotes in his backyard, visitations that cause hysteria in his two young daughters who fear for the lives of their two schnauzers. This person has used the power of online searching and buying to order a life-sized rubber coyote, which now stands, rampant, head back in a howl, in his backyard. Beneath it is a remote-activated speaker which emits the pitious sounds of a lost fawn, the horror of a wild pig being savaged by a pack of coyotes, a rabbit being devoured (which is chillingly infantile), and a coyote calling his pack of friends to share in supper.

After a demonstration of this animatronic display, the unnamed person brought out a new crossbow with a   red dot laser sight and sank a bolt from across the yard into the flank of the rubber coyote.

It went thunk.

My host reasoned that while he was planning on illegally knocking off a coyote out of season, he would not be discharging a firearm within the city limits and therefore was only half-illegal.

I recommended that he seek out a newsstand and find a copy of Critter or Varmint magazines to help him in his quest.

Custom Robotic Wildlife – Coyote & Fox Decoys

IAB Resources and Research would appear to the touchstone for compiling various predictions about year-to-year growth of online advertising.

Unfortunately — for me, since  I need a solid prediction for ’06 now — the Internet Advertising Bureau is only showing estimates cooked up a year ago, and those include estimates for paid search, which by itself is arguably 25% of the category.

My worry working with expectations of growth in the high twenties and low thirty percent range, is two-fold:

1. Paid search shows no sign of slowing (save for some major click fraud discredit) and is, if one extrapolates Overture and Google Revenues, at least 20% of the spend and is not a space I play in).

2. The rapid rebound of spending between late 2003 and the present is widely predicted to flatten through the next four years and 2006, barring the development of a compellingly profitable new ad model accepted by marketers, could be the year that the CAGR starts to stagger.

The intersection of technology and the counterculture has always been a quiet but persistent theme in the sound track of the history of computing. John Markoff attempts a chronicle of the two worlds in his latest book, titled after the line in the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit that exhorts the listener to "feed your head."

The foreward is brilliant, where Markoff — who has been on the scene in Silicon Valley for over three decades — relates a conversation he had with Steve Jobs when the subject of LSD came up, and Jobs discussed the impact the psychedelic had on him and others in scaling the role technology could enhance and extending the capabilities of the mind. Markoff makes a succinct, but eseential delineation of the world into two camps — Information Libertarians and Information Proprietarians. Proprietarians are exemplified by the movie industry, the RIAA, Bill Gates (who early on cast himself against the practice of sharing code with his now famous open letter in  Dr. Dobb’s to those homebrew users who swapped his version of BASIC for the Altair), and those who would predict the demise of intellectual property through file sharing and piracy. The libertarians, Markoff says, are at the essence of the OpenSource movement, whose forefathers extended government funded projects such as ARPANET and opened up the standards of TCP/IP to the world and not a commercial entity.

 It’s a neat dichotomy, one that forces a binary alignment of the world into the Stewart Brand camp where "information wants to be free" and the Gates camp where "information is expensive."

 The book chronicles the efforts of Doug Englebart, John McCarthy, Alan Kay, and the coterie of coders and visionaries that transformed the world of information technology from a centralized time-sharing model of data centers to infinitely scalable, truly personal computers, technology envisioned as tools to extend and share the power of the mind. While many components of the tale are familiar — Englebart’s and McCarthy’s projects at SRI and SAIL are stories often told — and the influence of Xerox PARC is almost mythical at this point in time, Markoff plows some new ground in his discussion of how LSD was regarded in the mid-60s, before it escaped the labs, and the impact it had on otherwise buttoned-up engineers.

There is a little over focus on SRI and SAIL and not enough details about the overall role the counterculture played within the industry that followed the early innovations. The tensions created in the PC industry as freak-met-suit, the countercultural influences on seminal communities such as the WELL versus the traditional glass house mentality as corporate communities such as CompuServe. Markoff needed to take another two years and another 500 pages to truly chart the social threads that have been woven together over the past forty years to create the most astonishing industry the world has ever known.

 I highly recommend the book.

Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us

 Okay, so the Long Tail thing is growing old, but this is the best representation of the thing growing organically I’ve seen yet.

My daughter recently won the US National High School Rowing championships in the Junior Women’s Fours with Coxswain. This being her first year rowing, it’s a huge accomplishment for her individually, but most importantly her team, the Brooks School, which also won the title last year.

To put it all in perspective, I also learned how to row at Brooks and it took me until my senior year before I found a seat in the First (or varsity) boat. I never won a New England championship (which my daughter did this past May), nor did I ever earn a medal at the national level (there were no high school national championships in the mid-70s. For a novice to do this in their first season? Nearly impossible.

 Now Alexandra is rowing at the US National Junior Development camp in New London, an honor open only to the best junior rowers in the country.

 I taped the championships in Cincinnati and have posted clips elsewhere on her page here at Churbuck.com. More later on my forays into the world of digital video.

To steal a meme from the Nicholas Carr article that rocked the IT world two years ago — does IT matter when it comes to organizing and operating an online publishing environment?

Carr’s thesis was that IT doesn’t matter, or at least doesn’t confer sustainable competitive advantage to an organization, and that while vital to business operations, should be managed as a utility on a cost basis. This pushes the question of what, if anything, a web publisher should build inhouse or seek outside from the market.

As I am in the throes of an infrastructure rebuild, I can point to some fundamental assumptions about what technology needs to be directly under the control of the publisher, and what can be sourced elsewhere.

Beginning at the bottom of the "stack" — the server environment — few, if any publishers have ever considered a self-hosted environment where the racks were housed on their premises and managed onsite by their sysadmins. Decisions about operating systems, application servers, backend databases, have depended on cost constraints, the existing skills of the technology management team, and vendor preferences. At Forbes.com we launched into a Microsoft IIS/ASP environment because it appeared to be well supported and offered some environmental conditions — particularly in database publishing — that were compelling. Inevitably we had to suck it up and migrate to an Apache/Java world, which caused our developers and tech team a world o’hurt. Today — the preferred environment for many sites is LAMP, by its opensourced nature a commodity environment that further commoditizes further application development by opening up a wide community of opensource third-party apps ranging from WordPress for blogs to MediaWiki for Wikis.

 Above the OS lies the tricky part: the content management system, ad serving system, and third party apps.

As I look at CMS options I’m restricting my intial scan of the market to five choices. They are:

1. The incumbent home-grown solution (custom CMS development is a viable option, and indeed, the end state, even for customers of off-the-shelf solutions that require a high-degree of customization to fit their particular environment and variables)
2. An open source solution — Bricolage, etc.
3. A commercial solution I have experience with (in this case, Interwoven Teamsite)
4. A hosted solution. ie, Websidestory’s Atomz
5. A player to be named later

Continuing with custom development for the CMS forces the question "Should we develop such a system?" All technology sourcing questions — which it can be argued come down to build vs. buy? — need to assess staff capabilities and capacity against those functions which confer strategic competitive advantage and those which are "lights on/table-stakes" for staying in the game. Does a CMS confer strategic advantage? Should it be purchased versus developed? Would purchasing technology free internal application developers to focus on those activities which do confer competitive differentiation?

 A great deal of internally developed web publishing tools were a matter of survival and economics — we need it, we can’t afford it, so we’ll build it.

 The net of this scenario is cheap economics, and indeed, tailored apps, the result can be undocumented software which is a bear to train on, get users to adapt to, etc.

More to say on this topic anon … 

Lack of blogging here due to 65 hour weeks the past month; but coming out of the cave of analysis now and beginning to carve out some time to return to this blog (9:30 pm on a Saturday is an indication of loss-of-life).

Tons of stuff to post and pose:

1. Audience enhancement — not development as an art of "names" embrace. Wish I could find the old Bill Ziff keynote to some b2b publishers association in the 80s. Brilliant manifesto for working with one’s "names" on every thing from qualified circ, direct mail, registration, renewal, and multiple media delivery channels.

2. Podcast production. Easy as pie. Download Audacity, get a digital mike, then find something to say. Last week CMO Magazine launched its first in 36 hours from conception to publication. Production costs were the salaries of those involved. Issue is how to make cash from the thing.  (The story of getting copyright permission for the music in the aforementioned podcast is priceless. Good thing I tracked the owner down, he was the force behind the passage of the 1976 copyright legislation).

3. Lead generation – this is a whole new alien topic. Remember Glengarry Glen Ross? When the desperate condo salesmen are ravenous for leads and contemplate stealing them after bemoaning the old set is full of Polish people, deadbeats and people named Patel?  Now take that scene and apply to tech advertisers. 

4. Metrics – whole new game now that Hitbox and Omniture are in the game.  No more seat of the pants guesswork. Death to Webtrends and garbage numbers. But yet … still they fall short.

That’s it for now. Now to figure out how to migrate my admin password for this blog from an old laptop to my new one, and blogging can recommence or need to go on pause and be reconstituted, most likely under blogharbor at Matt McAlister’s suggestion.