Wednesday, June 02, 2004

FeedSweep down I bet you were wondering what happened to my audioblogging channel in the left gutter!! Daniel Henry HowDev Staff Chief Executive Officer FeedSweep down:  "Hey Guys, Dan here... First I have to apologize with not getting with the public as soon as possible regarding FeedSweep's recent issues. You guys rely on this service to drive the content of your web sites, and it was unfair at the least not to immediately contact you on the situation. I'm sorry. What's Going On? Just to let you know we are (and have been) completely aware of FeedSweep's problems (returning only service errors and not producing any sweeps). Rest assured that we have been and will continue to work around the clock to fix the problem. The debugging process has lended us to the strong belief that the catastrophic configuration error that Hostway for some reason allowed to happen on our servers--this post isn't exactly a commercial for them--has affected FeedSweep's ability to run beyond the effects of simple file system permissions, etc. How Do We Know This? In over one hundred scenarios in both development and quality assurance environments, FeedSweep performed just as it should have. However, in production (Hostway's servers), it is not. We do not have full access to the configuration of ASP.NET and IIS systems on those servers, though, so we are 98% certain (especially given recent configuration error events) that the problem lies there. What Are We Doing About It? Doing our darndest to get Hostway off their butts to solve the problem, while working on the side, continuing to search for any possible error in FeedSweep itself. Like I said, though, given that FeedSweep will not even arrive at it's first line of code before having a run-time error suggests bad configuration at the least. Rest assured you will know when we are successful in doing so." 8:49:45 PM  comment []    trackback []     The "Gillmor Gang is not an "audioblog post" First, lets make it clear that there is a definite difference between an "audioblog post" and an "audioblog show".  IMHO, The "Gillmor Gang is not an "audioblog post".  "The Gillmor Gang" and links to any other MP3 audio files available online that have a listening length of about a hour are links to audio shows or by my definition an "audioblog show".  I know it's symantics and I know there will be exceptions but it's important to understand in a conversation that mentions audioblogging the fact that an audioblog post by definition doesn't take much listening attention. When Jon and/or others solve some of the identified inefficient audioblog authoring method issues present today around the area of audioblogging "MP3 shows", audiobloggers will then have an authoring environment that efficiently assists "the audioblogger poster", the online audio show and post link gatekeeper in promoting the discovery of complete online audio shows in services like Google, Technorati and Feedster. Until that day, using the primitive methods we have available to audiobloggers today, the job remains a standardless, error prone, thankless, time consuming, tedious chore practiced only by a few.  Did I leave out unpaid?? Marc's Voice: I agree - Audioblogs require transscripts. Five guys talking. Tim Bray raises some good questions about last week's Gillmor Gang episode: First of all, a transcript would be so much better; I don't have an hour to listen and if I did it would be in my car, and even if I tried, sitting here in my office (even though the audio is excellent) my attention is continually getting pulled away by email or instant messages or red letters in NetNewsWire or whatever. If I'm writing code or a tricky position paper or reading something material or even just thinking about a hard problem I can tune out the distractions no problem, but four guys talking? The mind wanders. [ongoing] I agree. Doug Kaye is working on providing transcripts, but it's a hard problem and a thankless chore. Meanwhile, I've been exploring a middle-ground approach. I went through the first half of the show, in which various aspects of service-oriented architecture were batted around, and added a layer of indexing and annotation. The result: this SMIL presentation for the Real player. Note: Clicking an index link will seek in the audio stream and synch the annotations panel, but (at least for me) won't always actually play the audio at that location unless you click again. (Annoying. Why is that?) ... [Jon's Radio] I really think audioblogs will take off - once there are systematic transcripts provided of these conversations. Not only does that make is Google-able - but it also enables folks to zoom into what they care about.  This is what I told Noah Glass when he first shipped Audblog.com, what I told Harold Gilchrist and what I said to Doug Kaye as well. 6:48:31 AM  comment []    trackback []     Microsoft offers peek at new Media Player CNET News.com: Microsoft offers peek at new Media Player 6:41:02 AM  comment []    trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Harold Gilchrist. Last update: 7/6/2004; 1:06:44 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.