From Michael Gartenberg:
Last night blogging hit this weeks episode of the West Wing. This is the first time I know of where weblogs played part in the storyline of a TV show. It was interesting how the weblogs were portrayed.
I am sure there are more, but on April 1, 2003 an episode of CBS’ Judging Amy had a character’s blog have an impact on the storyline.
Who woulda thunk Judging Amy was hipper than The West Wing?
Audion 3, an extremely versatile Mac audio player/recorder/encoder from Panic was retired today and is being made available for download free of charge. Make sure to read the true story of audion, the story behind the story. These guys not only can create great software, but I think they missed their true calling as gonzo journalists:
The feeling of being beat to market by days is an interesting one — imagine being punched in the face by a drunk kangaroo then finding five dollars while lying on the floor, a simultaneously crushing but ultimately inspiring experience.
Unofficial builds of Firefox tweaked for better speed for specific processors. Users report Firefox is much snappier when built specifically for a G5 or G4 as compared to the release version built for G3+ class machines.
BurnoutMenu 2.0 looks like an interesting productivity application for managing to dos and tasks, it integrates with iCal and your iPod too.
TaskTime3 seems to be a useful $15 app for project timing and billing…
Sean Michael Kerner writes about RSS enclosures in The RSS Enclosure Exposure for internetnews.com.
The RSS syndication format has spread like wildfire through the Internet, permeating most news sites and virtually all blogs. Now there’s a new aspect of RSS ready to enjoy the same popularity. Called RSS enclosures, they’re the next step in the RSS revolution and hold great potential.
BlogHarbor spokesman John Keegan had some things to say in the article. That guy is clued in.
Update 11/12/2004 – Noted this elsewhere but I thought it bears repeating: BlogHarbor supports not only enclosures in the main RSS newsfeed and in each category newsfeed, but Photo Albums as well have their own RSS feed which contains enclosures. You can use iPodder software to monitor a BlogHarbor Photo Album and automatically receive images as a blog is updated, making it possible to keep your iPhoto library automatically populated with images from your friends and family…
Newsday has an interesting article on bloggers generating revenue from their blogs. Great opening paragraph:
The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.
Another interesting audio application from the folks at Rogue Amoeba: Detour allows you to send audio to different output devices on an application-specific basis. So you can send iTunes to your headphones, and Quicktime Player to external audio for example…
Make Room for Podcasting is a nice summary of the phenomenon of Podcasting.
Also, Jon Gordon has posted a succinct definition of podcasting:
A podcast is a talk or music radio show that’s sent directly to an iPod or other digital music player through your computer. It’s a new take on the growing technology called RSS that pushes text-based Web content to computers. But with podcasting, a listener subscribes to audio feeds.
A new service called BlogFlix has been released, which apparently is able to take your digital images and build a movie-like (think Ken Burns effect) Flash presentation for inserting into your weblog. Here’s a snippet from their press release:
Transvector releases BlogFlix, an online service that creates and delivers videos for blog entries. BlogFlix users can convert their online photo galleries into movies, displaying them along with regular digital video clips within a small frame in a blog. Running in the Flash player found in 95% of browsers worldwide, BlogFlix movies are fully compatible with the most popular blog software hosts.
The BlogFlix authoring tool launches directly from the service’s web site
(http://www.blogflix.net). With its simple interface users can add zoom and pan movements to photographs along with text captions and audio. The tool generates a snippet of HTML text that is pasted into any blog entry to make the movie appear there.
iZotope Vinyl is a free app (requires registration) which resamples your audio as if it were being played on a record player. From the site:
The ultimate lo-fi weapon, iZotope Vinyl uses 64-bit processing and advanced filtering, modeling and resampling to create authentic “vinyl” simulation, as if the audio was a record being played on a record player.
And with Vinyl 1.7, we now provide support for Mac OS X as well as Windows. This adds the MAS and Audio Unit formats to our list which already includes HTDM, RTAS, AudioSuite, VST, and DirectX.
Ross: The real magic here is that this isn’t limited to iPod users -podcasting is limited to internet users with media devices. Podcasting builds on and extends the internet platform – the RSS/Syndication platform. Podcasting brings timeshifting to user generated content.
A few people have pointed out that the term podcasting is a bit narrow since you don’t necessarily have to have an iPod to receive a podcast, you could be using some other kind of portable mp3 player. Sure, makes sense.
What surprises me is that people think this is about portable mp3 players at all. It’s not. It’s cool to be able to take these mp3 files along with you wherever you go on a portable player, but is that really necessary or just a neat byproduct of the mp3 delivery method?
Since the iPod itself is not network enabled, a computer connected to the network is required to pull the mp3 file. While there are a great number of owners of iPod and portable mp3 players out there, they are just a small subset of the number of computer users who also happen to have a portable media player.
Why should podcasting be limited to Internet users with media devices? Radio is radio whether or not I listen to it in my car, on the porch, or in the house. Why should the definition of this new medium be limited by defining it as requiring some kind of portable media device? Is a laptop a portable media device? Is it not a podcast if I listen to the mp3 file on my desktop?
The key is that the content can be consumed wherever the user wants to. It may well be on an iPod. It could also be at the office with a pair of headphones or at home over the speakers while cleaning the house…
The color scheme generator is a killer tool that all interface designers will want to keep handy…
Another article on the tech details of podcasting: How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own) from Engadget. Similar to the Hugo Schotman instructions I linked to a few days ago.
From the website: BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on LG VX4400/VX6000 and many Sanyo Sprint cell phones. This includes the PhoneBook, Calendar, WallPapers, RingTones and the Filesystem for most Qualcomm CDMA chipset based phones.
I just got the VX6000… Why this model? Well, mainly since it was not expensive and was able to take pictures. I wasn’t looking for a handheld/celphone, since I don’t really use a phone that way. I mainly use it to make calls, not schedule my day or keep track of contact information. Though this software might make me change my mind…
Yellow Dog Linux 4.0, a Linux distribution for PowerPC-based computers, has been released. I tried Yellow Dog a while back and it installed and ran nicely on my Pismo G3 Powerbook. One of the things that would have gotten me to consider moving to it would have been dual-head support, which means in the Linux world support for multiple monitors, something I am pretty much addicted to when it is available. This new version offers dual-head support for ATI PowerBooks and Power Macs along with a whole bunch of other cool stuff for running Linux on Apple hardware.