Within the next couple of days I am going to redo my DnBPodcast.com site and make it a WordPress blog. I will also give a $100 gift certificate for Beat Port on Acid to the user who posts a notice about DnBPodcast.com to the most drum and bass message boards. After posting, tag it with del.icio.us and use the delicious tag dnbpodcast like this. Make sure you search the forum for a post first. If you do not, and you post to a forum that already has a post, it does not count. No need to contact me about it, I can monitor the progress here. I’ll announce the winner in the podcast who can then contact me to receive the prise.
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
Tribe.net is sensoring the user created content that makes their site so great. They are doing this in fear of the 2257 law as reported by Boing Boing. As a Tribe.net, user I received an e-mail from Tribe a couple weeks ago announcing the change in their terms of service.
As reported by Digg.com, MySpace.com is going out of their way to sensor references to YouTube.com, a site that is like Flickr but for video. Good job, MySpace (whatever your motives are), now I am linking to YouTube. Time for someone else to take over this space since they are now owned by NewsCorp. It can lead to some great business strategies for NewsCorp, but it looks like they are going to blow it because apparently they do not yet understand this market. Death to MySpace.
I really want to go to this intensive, three day, limited to 12 people Ruby on Rails workshop at the end of next month, but I am poor. Will you help me by donating? It is a whooping $995! Thanks! In return, I can do you a special favor you may need that I am capable of, including:
*Making you a theme song for your podcast
*Taking an old dat tape of your band and uploading it to the Podsafe Music Network
*Taking an old dat tape, cassette tape, or 1/4 reel tape and turning it into a podcast which includes web hosting and creating a related blog that you can write to
*Making you a chapter enhanced podcast
*Audio compression (making it so the sound is not really quiet in some parts and really loud in other parts) and EQing for your podacst
update 1/31/06
The workshop has come and gone, and I was not able to attend 
but I am going to the RoR Meetup.com meetup tonight.
PodKeyWord.com never “hijacked” the Vegan.com feed! This story is a couple weeks old now, but Steve Rubel and Joseph Jaffe at Across The Sound are still talking about it, and did not hear the truth about it. I am not using hyperlinks because it is possible that this is a publicity stunt, but just an awareness of the truth.
Read the PodKeyWord.com blog at http://www.podkeyword.com/blog
The guy at Vegan.com was a user of the PodKeyWord.com service. Think Feedburner with the tags you can use in an RSS feed you can get from del.icio.us. In other words, one feed, possibilities of multiple podcasts in the feed all on the same topics. This feed became more popular than the original feed, and Yahoo Podcast and Apple picked it up in their directory. Could it be because the Vegan.com guy did not se the value in submitting his feed to all of the podcast directories?
It seems the the guy at Vegan.com did not understand that by deleting his PodKeyWords account (would be similar to deleting your Feedburner account) which was done via an e-mail by a request from Vegan.com to PodKeyWords.com, that he would cut off most of the Vegan.com listeners!! What a moron! Now he is accusing the guy from PodKeyWords.com of hijacking his feed!
Here is what the Vegan.com guy should have done. He should have made a show where he tells his listeners to switch the address of their aggregators to the new feed, run both feeds for a couple weeks, then turn off the old feed. He assumed that guy PodKeyWords could easily point feed he was republishing to the new feed that Vegan.com wanted the listeners to use. This apparently is not the case, and PodKeyWords.com wanted to charge Vegan.com for such a service that is unnecessary, and not part of the agreement that PodKeyWord.com had with Vegan.com when Vegan.com established an account with PodKeyWord.com. Hence the “fee” which was then dramatized into a “ransom.”
It is like saying, “hey FeedBurner, I don’t want to use your free service anymore even though all my listeners are subscribe though you, but could you do me a favor and have all my listeners magically change the feed addresses in their podcast aggregators to this new feed I want them to use? Thanks!” Well, it is very possible to point the feed to another address using Feedburner.
False accusations due to misunderstandings or otherwise can really spread fast in the podcasting or blogging communities since the medium itself is a way for a regular user to spread information to thousands of people very quickly and easily. We saw this last when Leo Laport accused Feedburner of publishing his listener stats without his permission, when Laport clearly enabled this feature in Feedburner without understanding what it did. The reason in both of these cases is misunderstanding of the use of technology that is very new to everyone.
The next time a podcaster or blogger feel a anyone has done them wrong, they should do the research by going to forums like PodcastAlley or PodcastingNews, or the Yahoo Podcasting group, and ask other users before they go and send a mp3 comment to Adam Curry. Adam should have researched this also before he played the comment.
Moral: Never assume that anyone on the internet you are not paying will perform a special service for you that is critical to your business plan. I have never assumed this, but Vegan.com had to learn the hard way (or is it viral way, using this whole thing for attention?).
UPDATE 12/19/2005
PodKeyWord has complied with Vegan.com and created the redirect. He must have forced him to do this by using threats from his lawyer and what not. This is very unlike someone who is supposedly against using brute force against other beings.
The whole thing happened because of Vegan.com’s own actions. His actions stated that he wanted PodKeyWord service to be the main feed for his podcast.
The Vegan.com site is recommending to other podcasters to put copyright info in their feeds. What the hell would that accomplish? Vegan.com, as the copyright owner, authorized PodKeyWord to republish the feed. When Vegan.com later realized that he didn’t like what he did, he resorted to the tactics of a child. By then, the feed had repopulated all over the net because PodKeyWord was automatically submitting feed addresses to iPodder.org, at one time, the most comprehensive podcast directory on the net.
Here is how Google or Yahoo could extended their reach even more if they acquired TiVo. I will outline the steps they could take in the order they would need to take them in.
1. Google could open Orkut to everyone, and allow them to create profiles where they enter the types of things they are interested in (movies, music, books, hobbies, professions). Or, Yahoo could acquire Tribe.net or Friendster.com since Yahoo360 does not seem to be catching on, and they are in acquisition mode.
2. Allow Google AdSense or Yahoo Searchmarketing users to make video or audio-with-still-images commercials and host them on Google or Yahoo.
3. Google or Yahoo acquires TiVo, adds BitTorrent, video blog directory, any other free content.
4. TiVo becomes free or offered at a discount if users are Orkut/Friendster/Tribe members.
5. AdSense/Yahoo Searchmarketing commercials are matched with the user’s Orkut/Friendster/Tribe profile, and users need to watch short commercials created by the AdSense/Yahoo Searchmarketing users in between the free video content they have subscribed to, or, there are Google/Yahoo banner ads along the bottom of the screen.
6. Google/Yahoo adds a feature similar to Odeo in their search where the TiVo will download content they find in their search.
UPDATE: I just found this similar article that touches slightly on what I am suggesting here, an interview with John Battelle.
Imagine if TiVo reinvents themselves as the platform for user generated content, joining with participatoryculture.org or ourmeidia.org, and includ a BitTorrent engine. You can now whatch RocketBoom on a Series 2 TiVo connected to the internet. After the Long Tail effects video blogs, and there are a ton of them to choose from (as there are with podcasts now) and I find something I really like, I will definitely get a Tivo. They could be the Podshow of Video. They could partner with a ton of advertisers and exploit the Long Tail to a point where you will only see ads for things that your would be interested in. Or maybe a partnership with Skype/Ebay to turn the Tivo into a video phone? Could that work? If Tiov does not do it, someone else will. If Tivo does things right, the future for them could be really exciting. Why not Apple? I think people really want to use their real TV, not a computer or a little Video iPod for this type of content.
Microsoft, you cannot afford to wait for your own Office Live or whatever you want to call it to be written. By the time you are done, it will be too late and these other companies will have taken the market and made you irrelevant. So, why don’t you follow the lead of Yahoo and start buying Web 2.0 apps like Writely and Jotspot, and one of the Web 2.0 calendar apps that are still privately owned? You could only have dreamed of completing something like this by this time yourself. Just don’t mess them up too much and disenfranchise the user base. Eh, you probably don’t care about that.
Update, 3/2006
Too late, Google got it.
Update 10/31/2006
Google snaps up JotSpot.
I joke around with my friend who uses Yahoo for search. I say “just Google it, I mean, in your case, Yahoo it.” “Yahoo it” does not sound as cool as “Google it.” Yet, I am very impressed with the moves Yahoo has made in comparison with what Google has done, despite the fact that Google stock outperforms Yahoo by a factor of 10.
Here is what Yahoo as done this year:
-acquired Konfabulator
-released Yahoo 360 social networking site
-acquired Flickr
-acquired Upcoming.org
-released an RSS aggregator/RSS reader/e-mail browser
-released Yahoo alerts application
-acquired Del.icio.us
-deal with Six Apart
-deal with Gawker
What has Google done?
-acquired Dodgeball (who?)
-opend Google Maps API to developers
-released Google Sitemap tool
-released Google Talk (only one person on my buddy list so far)
-released custom home page (which I use everyday, 8 hours a day)
-released Goggle Reader (which I hate)
-released Google Analytics tool
-acquired a private plane
-opened homepage module API to developers
P.S.
I wrote this before the post on Signal vs. Noise here , just had not published it yet.
I launched a new site today. It is a wiki for iPod and iTunes users and podcasters to suggest feature ideas to Apple or any other companies that want to make the “iPod Killer.” Anyone can contribute to the wiki. You must create an account to edit. It is at http://www.suggestions4ipodanditunes.com
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