Sunday, November 10, 2002

Audioblogging News for 11-10-2002.  7:22:08 AM  comment []       Audioblogging post - Click Icon ->    ->  John Robb's Radio Weblog -> "Why don't I publish an audio or video weblog?  It costs too much." John my question is why does it costs too much?  And can anything be done by the weblog content management vendors to help drive the costs down? If we base our opinions on the model that we will continue to pay someone else to host our audio and video files I agree.  In my opinion I believe this model is not the right model for the future of weblogging and will limit where we can go in the next 5 years with integrating multimedia in weblogs.  I believe the extra costs associated with this model are just another scaling problem in the centralized weblogging model.  If we continue with this model the majority of webloggers will be forced to only produce text/graphics based weblogs for the next 5 years.  As Dave would say "We need to route around the outage and boot strap a solution." In my opinion I think we need to store our audio and video files ourselves, on our own hard drives, safely behind our routers.  With our always on DSL and Cable Modems we need to expand the model of sharing a drive of files that contain content we own with the web.  We need to work with and tell the phone companies and the cable companies that this is the model we what their systems to work with. Weblogging vendors need to to support this feature and recognize and see that large file sized multimedia file types integration is  "The Next Big Thing" in the evolution of their weblog content management systems.  Features need to be added to lower the costs of doing this so the users can further create compelling uses of the weblogging technology. If peer-to-peer software like Napster was able to use your hard drive to share strangers multimedia files and use the bandwidth you payed for to do it, someone should be able to figure out a way for you to use your own hard drive and bandwidth to share your own mutimedia files without adding extra monthly expenses. One model that could be a solution is an Internet appliance that costs under $200.00 that sits behind your router that supports streaming (maybe rev 2 or 3).  The text of your weblog could be hosted elsewhere with links to the multimedia files.  The bandwidth would be free as we are already paying for it.   Outages?  Well I think I can deal with the tradeoff of sometimes down versus none at all. 4:57:16 AM  comment []       Audioblogging post - Click Icon ->    RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing -> The biggest evolution in years? " Bill Gates told an audience at the launch of the tablet PC that the new Windows-based tablet PCs are "the biggest evolution in the PC for many, many years." He lays out the whole case in his speech at the launch. Hardly able to contain myself, I went out yesterday and tried a Tablet PC, looking at both the Toshiba and the ViewSonic gadgets. They are remarkably short steps from a spec called WinPad that Microsoft developed back in 1993. What has changed is Windows--it's grown from a clunky interface to a much better one in the interim--but the basic functionality is largely identical. My quick take is that I like the standard laptop with Tablet capabilities better than the plain slate versions with no keyboard. The pen is handy and dandy, but it doesn't make fast entry of data easy enough to really edit without a keyboard. So, while Amy Tam and Rob Lowe may use their tablets to mark up manuscripts and texts, I cannot imagine Amy actually writes using a pen these days. I liked the way the Tablet digitized ink and made it both translatable into ASCII text or a graphic that could be copied and pasted elsewhere, but it did not seem to add much in the way of flexibility to the interface. You still need to go from one application to another, taking the document you've marked up along with you in order to do much with the data. It would be much better if the tablet collapsed a series of commands for communication into the "click-tap" command that opens a pop-up menu, rather than just replicated the old copy-and-paste model. Of course, this critique comes with the caveat that the slowboys at CompUSA may have made the Tablet seem less inviting than it really is. "   The more I read about the tablet PC the more I'm convinced this is a new notebook feature with the "biggest evolution" of the feature and integration with other applications to follow.  The research has really just begun on this one. 4:52:50 AM  comment []

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