Paulo sums up what I've been wanting to post about podcasting for a long while:

I'm happy to read that according to Pew 6 million have heard podcasts [via Dan Gillmor], I appreciate the idea and the technology, but the more I hear about them, the more I realize that listening to podcasts is not for me.

In part is a matter of time. Home to office travel time is about 5 minutes, hardly time to listen to anything. I cannot listen to podcasts while I work since they tend to be long and distracting (I do check my aggregator several times a day, but it's a much lower impact activity). I do take a walk almost every day, but I do this with my wife and we talk why we walk.

Over the weekend I did some gardening, I loaded a couple of podcasts that I wanted to hear on my iPod and started working. After a few minutes I switched to music: having somebody chatting about technical stuff while mowing was quite annoying.

I must have the wrong kind of life... :-)

About the only thing I'd add to this in my opinion is that most (99%) of the podcasts I've listen to are completely and utterly boring. The podcaster needs to be engaging and very interesting to keep my attention. Only Adam Curry and few others have that ability and even then for the same reasons as Paulo I rarely if ever listen to podcasts.

This seemed like an appropriate blog entry for today:

This is what I had to say about Orb on Jan 10th:

Ok, I must not be getting something here. Why in my life time would I ever pay a monthly service fee to access my own video, photos etc from my own computer??? Just maybe I'd pay for software to do this which is likely available from a number of vendors.

Am I missing something here??? Someone, please buy me a clue.

Apparently this was in CNet's CES 2005 Top 10 next big thing awards.

Wow, look at the exciting press release. Is anyone really interested in this? If so, let me know. I can probably duplicate the software and company in about a week and my stuff wouldn't require Windows Media Center PC either. It would likely work with any version of Windows, Linux or MAC OSX.

Well, they must have signed up about 0 subscribers to their paid service because they just announced that it will now be FREE to all consumers. Here is the press release.

Here is a snippet of marketing speak from that press release:

“By eliminating subscription fees, Orb eliminates the final barrier between consumers and their digital media,” said Jim Behrens, CEO, Orb Networks. “The allure of ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to one’s digital world has proven to be exceptionally compelling to Orb subscribers thus far. In our view, a free Orb service will exponentially increase our value proposition for those customers -- and millions of new customers as well.”

Imagine, after all these years I never realized there was a barrier between myself and my own digital media. At the very least they may have more than 0 customers now that they have exponentially increased their value proposition. My guess is they are maybe in the double digits now.

Since I've announced the still unofficial KosmoBlogs here and here before I thought I might as well announce the unofficial Kosmo Business Cards as well.

Build Your Own Custom Business Cards In Minutes

• Create color custom business cards online
• Choose from 10,000+ business card backbrounds
• Design online & proof professional cards in 5 minutes
• Easy-to-use interface. No design skills required

We have

• Glossy color business cards
• Express 48 hr delivery full color cards
• Fast one color cards. Choose from 3 colors
• Metal business cards. Gold or silver color
• Post-it Notes Custom Printed Notes
• Self-inking stamps. 4 sizes in 3 colors
• Magnet business cards. Color and very magnetic
• 1 or 2 color magnetic cards.Economical magnets
• 1, 2 or full color plastic cards. .012 or .030 thickness
• Color Sticker BizCards
• Laser-safe letterhead. Premium 24lb paper.

I'll be making posts to this category from time to time with any changes we make like adding new background images etc. If you want the RSS feed for just this category you can find it here.

This Ineen thing looks pretty interesting. Unlike the hyped up Skype these guys actually use SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and other open standards rather than the being proprietary like Shype (I think I'll start calling Skype Shype from now on).

Should integrate well with current VoIP providers etc.

Seems to me Mark Cuban is clued in most of the time. The latest being, he has joined the fight to help Grokster defend their legal battle against MGM's peer-to-peer lawsuit.

If anyone can take on MGM it would be the Maverick Mark.

This is just the tail end of what he has to say here:

We are a digital company that is platform agnostic. Bits are bits. We dont care how they are distributed, just that they are. We want our content to get to the customer in the way the customer wants to receive it, when they want to receive it, at a price that is of value to them. Simple business.

Unless Grokster loses to MGM in front of the Supreme Court. If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only.

It wont be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios wont sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business. It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them.

Thats what is ahead of us if Grokster loses. Thats what happens if the RIAA is able to convince the Supreme Court of the USA that rather than the truth, which is , Software doesnt steal content, people steal content, they convince them that if it can impact the music business, it should be outlawed because somehow it will. It doesnt matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry, EVERY SINGLE TIME. It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be. So , the real reason of this blog. To let everyone know that the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. So now the truth has been told. This isnt the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me. Mark Cuban and my little content company. Its about our ability to use future innovations to compete vs their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. its that simple.

Interesting use of a computer game in the classroom:

Rylands incorporates Myst by projecting the games onto an interactive whiteboard and then sitting amongst his pupils to watch and discuss the content in a shared context. He focuses on developing their creative writing skills using the games to enhance their descriptive language, and to improve their general speaking and listening skills [article link]

Wow, it wasn't long ago (Feb 1st and 8th, 2005) I wrote about Remote Scripting, Javascript and DHTML with reference to Gmail and Google Maps.

In no time this Ajax hype has taken the web by storm. The hype was started by this article posted by Jesse James Garret. 

I was just going to point to a book about Ajax I just heard about yesterday but found this post on it today. Funny guys!

Peter-Paul Koch wrote a decent article titled "Ajax, Promise or Hype". Definitely worth the read.

I just want to quote a few things from the article here.

He explains under "old ideas":

The ideas behind Ajax are not new. Some bloggers point to Apple Dev's Remote Scripting with IFRAME (2002) as the first article to deal with data retrieval. Matthew Haughey has done some experimenting back in 2001, and is glad to see these techniques come to the fore once again. I myself could go even further back in time to some inconclusive hidden frame experiments I did in 1999.

In theory asynchronous data retrieval became possible in 1996, when Netscape 2 was released with frames and JavaScript support. Nonetheless those early browsers weren't really suited for creating smooth interfaces, and when the browsing technology became better around 2001/2, cutting edge web developers had lost much of their interest in JavaScript because much of it was so pointeldly useless.

Brent followed up with a comment there to provide a bit more historical background:

Historical footnotes:

While Eric Costello's Apple article definitely raised remote scripting's profile in 2002, Erik Hatcher's IBM Developerworks article in Feb 2001 was one of the earliest high-profile articles on the subject.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-resc/?dwzone=web

I released the iframe-and-layer-based JSRS in 2000 specifically to provide cross-platform remote scripting to those who could not limit themselves to Microsoft's Java-based Remote Scripting. At the time, I was active in many scripting and DHTML newsgroups and forums, so I built it because JSRS filled what was a void at the time. There were plenty of successors - some superior to be sure, but historically I think JSRS preceded them.

An Ipsos-Reid survey concluded that "the average weekly number of spam e-mail messages dropped from 68 per cent in 2003 to 49 per cent last year".

I'd have to dissagree because we do not see that sort of pattern whatsoever at SimpleFilter.

Here is an article and a post on the Ipsos-Reid survey.

Not that I'm saying one should follow Mark Cuban's stock picks but I thought it was interesting that he has Tucows as one of his stock picks (Ticker: TCOW.OB).

Like Mark says, do your own research.

Update: There is a discussion on Joey's blog post about this.