Jim Says His Piece

I doubt I get sufficient traffic to send enough readers Jim's way to scare him off his manifesto, so I think this is safe to post. Jim Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio is working on writing out the result of an epiphany he had recently about podcasting. The second installment of this treatise/essay/diatribe (I hesitate to say "rant") explains the "beginning" of podcasting (at least under the name "podcasting") as only Jim can:

Any gardener knows that even if you have great soil, you're screwed if you plant stale seeds with a low germination rate. You need fresh, viable seeds with a happenin' foofy hairdo to make it all come together. Enter Adam Curry. With his background in media and his interest in computers, his "let's all have a party!" attitude, his MTV fame and (I assume from what I've read) his financial wherewithal, you've got one whoppingly viable seed. Plant that sucker in fertile ground and you'll have a real live Jack-In-The-Beanstalk story before you can close your eyes, click your heels three times and whisper "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."

I encourage anyone interested in podcasting—particularly members of the media planning to write about it, if any happen to be reading—to read the whole thing (it's a set of blog entries, so they're in reverse order on the page). I'm not entirely certain where he's going with it, but I'm eager to find out.

My Mr. Picassohead(s)

I'm kind of proud of this:Check it out in the gallery or see what others have made or make one yourself. It's actually a lot of fun. Unfortunately, you can't control where your name is signed, so I had to leave it technically anonymous. I managed to work in my signature anyhow.

Podcasting for the people

I just had a great experience. I was in the computer lab. looking up a phone number online, when the custodian came in (it's evening). He said hi, I said hi. We struck up a conversation. We talked about the weather, then where I'm from (Massachusetts), which led to sports. Honestly, he did most of the talking, but he had more to say. I really didn't understand a lot of the sports talk, so a said a lot of "Uh-huh"s and "yeah"s. He might have been putting me on with some of it. I know he was trying to get my goat over the Yankees, but I didn't know enough to say much more than "Sure was a hell of a game." But he kept talking. And he clearly had plenty to say, even without much response from me. This poor guy comes in every night to clean up after us and usually has no one to share his thoughts with. If this guy's not a podcast waiting to happen, I don't know what is.

Skype is broken: Why Jon Gordon is silly and Adam Curry is justified

I podcatch Future Tense from American Public Media. Usually, it's pretty good. This story, though, about VoIP, made me wonder about the host, Jon Gordon, and by extension most of the technology-exposed world (tech-literate or not) and how it views VoIP. The following is from the show, an interview with the VoIP Security Alliance's David Endler:

JG: What about the potential threat of voice spam and, for lack of a better term, "audio phishing" where a fraudster pretends to be from some legitimate company when they're not? DE: I don't think right now that's the most extreme threat. I think voice spam is really just an evolution in general marketing for any mass communication. If you look at bulk fax email, if you look at telemarketing, if you look at email spam, I think voice spam is just a natural evolution into that area. Quite frankly I think there are bigger threats to look at right now.

Voice spam? Voice spam? You're joking, right? Tell me this some sort of overly subtle irony. We've had "voice spam" for years, before email, before the Internet. We just usually call it "telemarketing". There's no difference between the two. True, VoIP calls could be made automatically with recorded messages...but wait, that's how most telemarketers do it these days! I'd say these two had never heard of telemarketing if David Endler hadn't actually used the word in his answer... But Gordon and Endler certainly aren't stupid. So why the discrepancy? I think it points to a fundamental flaw in the way we approach VoIP. Consider Skype. Adam Curry is always getting frustrated with Skype on the Source Code because once he's online, every one sees him, unless he sets up blocking and other strange things which he doesn't want either. What does he want? He wants a telephone. That's right, a plain old telephone, hooked up to his computer (or running as software on it). Skype, despite repeated references to "telephony", is not a telephone service. They like to pretend it is by licensing Skype USB phones (which, granted, are very cool), but it doesn't act like a telephone does. It's not a telephone service. It's a voice messaging service. It's AIM with voice, just like iChat AV. Yes, it works better, but it's a messaging service, and it needs to accept that. If Skype were a telephone service, no one would know if you're online. If someone called you when you weren't home, it would just ring. Maybe an answering machine or voicemail system would pick up. You could screen your calls. You could let your cousin leave you a message and never let him know you were home, but pick up the phone when your wife calls from the office. We like that. Sometimes more information is not a good thing. The theory was that knowing who's on and who's not would be more convenient. Unfortunately, the act of coming online (even being online) is enough of a reason these days to strike up a conversation. If you really want to talk to someone, you'll call them up and find out if they're there. That's my ideal vision of VoIP: a true telephone paradigm running over the Internet. Looking at it that way, "voice spam" sounds as silly as "cell spam". It's not a new kind of phone, just a new kind of phone line.

Poor confused spammer...

Ok, here's another one. I just got a spam message from "Eligibility Verification" bearing the subject line "Enclosed Check May Be Yours." Here's the only problem: You can't enclose a check in an email. Surely anyone who can open the email, let alone follow the instructions therein, would realize the physical impossibility of enclosing a check in an electronic message. As for the body of the message, the spammer is kind enough to state bluntly:

This advertisement was sent to you by LuckySurf. For subscription changes, see the bottom of this message.

And sure enough, at the bottom is a standard "click here to unsubscribe and let us know that someone's reading so we can sell your address to others for lots of money" link (but not in so many words). But below this, it actually says:

To unsubscribe via U.S. postal mail, please send all inquires to the follow address: LuckySurf.com, Inc. 395 Oyster Point Blvd, Suite 110 South San Francisco Ca. 94080

Great. So if you prefer to pay 37 cents to get more spam, LuckySurf.com is kind enough to give you that opportunity. Chalk one up for my faith in humanity.

How Not to Be Seen: Lesson One

A page on a site I can't quite grok (I think it's unfinished) has put up some pictures of the new Disneyia Nextelius, that is, the Nextel cell towers "cleverly" diguised at trees. I admit, most of them at least look nicer, but this one embodies absurdity of Pythonian proportion:Nice work, guys. No one will ever notice it now. *sigh* [via the Disney Blog, via Boing Boing, via MacHelp from Maui]

Spam: How do people make money from this?

I don't get how spamming can be worthwhile. I just got this in my inbox. Tell me: who would click this link?

Subject: Coddled and dissolvable lozenges for serious fellows These tablets are just equal typical tablets but they are specially formulated to be soft and dissolvable below the tongue. The pills is sorbed at the rima oris and gets in the bloodstream in real time rather of acting through the tummytum. This effects in a speedy more potent issue which yet up to 41 hours! [Link]

Even if you were dumb enough not throw it out without another thought, how would you know you wanted what the email is selling? Even if you read through the googlespeak translation, all it's advertising is lozenges. What idiot is clicking on these links and ruining email for the rest of us?

Ok, so I'm an idiot.

I've been using Blogger's "BlogThis!" feature lately, and wishing there were an easier way to make hyperlinks than typing out all the HTML (since the point of "BlogThis!" is to be fast and convenient). Writing the last post, I looked up and noticed...There will be a hand-shaped mark on my forehead for a long time...

Sharing Skype

I just tried to share Skype with a friend. The form that came up said said:

Send a message to a friend and give them your Skype Name. You can also attach a gift like a viral or a souvenir to the email if you want to be extra nice.

Viral? Something tells me someone's been getting help from Google with their translations...

Hey, they *do* have this: FoIP

All right, so some people are actually on the ball sometimes. I was just thinking about Voice and Fax over Internet Protocol (V/FoIP). All that puzzles me is that they seem to just be packaging traditional analog fax data into VoIP packets. True this allows for better compatability, but to me that seems like the same thing as plugging a fax machine into a VoIP phone. What's new? And check this out: we're converting analog print into digital image into analog sound into digital sound into IP packets into digital sound into analog sound into digital image and back to analog print. Does this seem silly to anyone else? I know! Let's run cheap dial-up ISPs overseas, then save costs for US clients by using MoIP: Modem over IP! That'll get people online for cheap, so they can use VoIP over that connection for all their calls and dump their regular telephone service! It's all cheaper and easier this way! I'm sure we'll see it soon. Let's see how that prediction turns out.

The things you hear in a dorm hallway

Walking out of my friend's room just now, I happened to catch the following conversation:

A: It smells like pot out here. B: You mean like someone cooking something in a pot? A: Yeah, like that. B: Let's go make an artificial butter substitute.

Upon hearing this, the student was enlightened.