Bubbler tries to do for blogging what Apple did for PCs

Michael Bazeley in today's San Jose Mercury News has an article on a very interesting-looking new blog application called Bubbler.

... Bubbler is a hosted blog service, not unlike Blogger or TypePad. But instead of updating their blogs through a browser-based Web form, users post entries through a free Bubbler desktop application. This makes it simple to drag photos, audio and video files, office documents or just about any other type of file into a window and have them uploaded to your site.

What Reid is trying to bring to Web publishing -- design simplicity and ease of use -- is reminiscent of what Apple did for personal computing. ...

TimeTrax: a TiVo for satellite radio

My latest interview with a tech CEO is up at Engadget: The Engadget Interview: Elliott D. Frutkin, CEO of TimeTrax. The startup, which has been described as TiVo for satellite radio, has been doing some pretty impressive pioneering work in the field. Worth a look.

Father of the Mac dead at 61

San Jose Mercury News:

Jef Raskin, who dreamed up the affordable, user-friendly computer that became Apple's Macintosh, died Saturday night at his Pacifica home. ...

He was employee No. 31 at Apple when he joined in 1978. By the next year, he began to pursue his goal of simplifying the computer user's experience, focusing on a faster and more logical interface. And the computer should sell for less than $1,000.

He named the project after one of his favorite fruits as a child in Manhattan: the McIntosh apple. The computer's moniker was spelled differently to avoid trademark issues. ...

The Wall Street Journal's intractable problem

Adam L. Penenberg in Wired News on Whither The Wall Street Journal?

The Journal faces an intractable problem. Because you have to subscribe to access both current news articles and the archive, the Journal is leaving only a faint footprint in cyberspace. As with The New York Times, which insists that readers register to view news and pay $3 per article in the archive, the Journal barely shows up on Google or any other search engine. I googled "Enron" -- an issue the Journal covered exhaustively, and which two of its reporters even wrote a book about -- and not one article appeared within the first 25 pages (250 results.) ...

I spoke at length about this at the BlogOn conference last summer. I think Adam's point is a salient one -- and I know that editors at online newspapers and magazines are well aware of the dilemma.

Each publication must make its own decision. But there had better be a good financial reason to opt for irrelevance in cyberspace.

Disclosure: Adam quotes me briefly here.

How to podcast

In the March issue of Wired magazine: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star.

Also in the March issue is this little nugget by Paul Boutin. It's not online (though should be); it's on page 131:

Podcasting at a glance

How it works:

1. The podcaster records a show as an audio file.
2. Then, he adds a hyperlink for the show to an RSS feed on a Web server.
3. The listener's podcast software checks RSS feeds at set intervals, downloading and adding new shows to a playlist.
4. When the listener docks his portable player, it updates with the latest shows.

How to get it.

To download podcasts to any portable (not just the iPod), start with the right software. Wired's pick: iPodder.

How to make your own podcast:

1. Plug a USB headset with earphone and microphone into your computer.
2. Install the free Audacity MP3 recorder for Windows, Mac or Linux. Make a recording, then save it as an MP3 file.
3. Upload the MP3 file to your Web site or blog. Follow the instructions at ipodder.org to create an RSS feed on your site.

What's next

Ourmedia (ourmedia.org), a grassroots media project backed by the Internet Archive, will provide free podcasting tools and permanent hosting for podcasts beginning in mid-2005. Also, broadcasters such as the Canadian Broadcasting Company, BBC and NPR are currently experimenting with podcasting.

Oh, yes. Ourmedia will provide free hosting for audio files sooner than mid-2005. Much sooner.

As it happens, today's San Jose Merc ran a story by Michael Bazeley, Sports-talk providers get in on podcast game, that contained a sidebar: How to tune into a podcast.

1. Download software that reads RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosed audio files from sites like www.iPodderX.com for Macs, or iPodder.NET for PCs.

2. This software automatically downloads audio files to your computer and moves the tracks to iTunes or other music management software for transfer to your iPod or another digital music player.

3. Subscribe to the feeds you want. Sites such as www.iPodder.org, www.iPodder.net, www.Podcasters .org or www.Podcast.net are good places to start your search. Your computer does the rest. It will automatically search for the latest podcasts and move the audio files into iTunes or other media jukebox software.

4. Synchronize your iPod or other portable digital music player with the computer to transfer the podcast.

5. If your media-management software doesn't automatically download the podcast to your digital music player, you can drag the audio file directly into the player, as you would any MP3 music track..

Slimming cure for digital videos

PhysOrg.com: Slimming cure for digital videos.

The future, high-speed DSL lines will no longer be the sole preserve of computer users. The TV set will also become a multimedia device, capable of downloading videos for instant viewing via telephone cables. Up until now the required data volumes have been too large for transmission with good picture quality. Researchers from Siemens and MainConcept have now developed a system applying the latest video standards to compress the huge streams of video data.

Thanks to unmediated for the pointer.

On BBC's DigiLab

Om Malik points to this posting by James Enck at Eurotelcoblog about what's going on with the BBC DigiLab, following up on an interview he had late last year with Euan Semple. (Unfortunately, there's no link to the DigiLab, so I don't know if it has a Web address.) Excerpt:

The second tool we put in is a social networking tool that lets users set up a page of info about themselves and can then be searched for particular skills or interests. It also allows users to establish interest groups which are becoming a really effective way of identifying and supporting various communities within the BBC. We are in the process of combining the bulletin board and the networking tool and once we have that I think things will really take off. ...

Getting a good RSS aggregator is going to become more important as the volume of activity increases. It is important to get what is being written seen by the right people to give contributors the oxygen that makes it worth continuing. ...

We'll have social networking and RSS baked in to Ourmedia, so I'll have to take a look at what they're doing over at DigiLab. Luckily, I met Daniel Meadows of Capture Wales last summer at the Digital Storytelling Festival.

'Podcasting is going to be freakin' huge'

John Markoff in the New York Times reports on a new startup called Odeo founded by ex-Google guy Evan Williams and Noah Glass. (Ev, a famed blogger, is a friend.) From the story:

The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web's next big thing. ...

In podcasting, there are already a number of small commercial efforts to create audio programs especially for listening to as mobile downloads. And there are both hardware and software systems that make it possible to convert over-the-air and Internet radio broadcasts for mobile storage and listening on MP3 players. One recent example is Radio Shark, a small device that sells for $70 and enables users of Macintosh computers to automatically record over-the-air radio programs and convert them to MP3 files for later, on-the-go playback. ...

While still too much in its infancy to be considered an immediate threat to the radio industry, podcasting does present the prospect of a growing army of iPod-toting commuters who take programming decisions out of the hands of broadcasters and customize their own listening.

Here is Ev today on How Odeo happened:

One day, Biz Stone and I were driving home from work, it all clicked for us. We were talking about how Audioblogger was great, but we didn't tend to actually listen to the posts much, when we came across them on the web. However, there I was, paying for and downloaded spoken-word audio from the web to listen to on my iPod. Why, we thought, couldn't you get the interesting, new audio-blogged posts on your iPod when you synched it and listen to them where it made sense?

Ding-ding-ding-ding! ...

The simple idea that, even though people had been putting audio on the web for years, a little piece of software on the client, some RSS, and the ubiquity of iPods (and like-devices, and broadband), could create a killer new distribution channel for a whole new genre of content was hot. ...

I'm super-excited to see where this goes. Podcasting is going to be freakin' huge. I don't have time in this post, because it's 2am and I gotta be on stage at 8am, to give my pitch for why. But it's the same story as blogging (with several unique charastics of its own), but in a whole new medium that is much bigger than people think. And it'll happen much, much faster.

It's about personal media, time-shifting, and the long, long tail. And I love that shit. Amazing things are going to be created.

Absolutely true. And it's the same driving force behind Ourmedia.org (coming very soon). I'll be talking with Ev about it next week, because Ourmedia is offering podcasters free storage and free bandwidth.

By the way, I registered the domain name podworld.org a while back, if anyone wants to acquire it for the right cause. :~)

Bloggers add video to their musings

Sandeep Junnarkar in Thursday's NY Times Circuits section: Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings. Software for creating and maintaining Web logs now offers tools for adding audio, photos and video - and even updates by cellphone. A look at the latest offerings.

The blog obsession

Tuesday's San Jose Merc carried a package by K. Oanh Ha about blogging, especially valuable to newbies. A few of my friends were featured.

Bloggers' Internet obsession

Political blog becomes paying job: A few minutes with Berkeley's Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, who says he's pulling down six figures from blogging.

An Internet gallery of city images: For artist Heather Powazek Champ, her blog is her canvas.

Finding novelty, sharing it online: The fearless foursome at BoingBoing.