Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Podcast (and Firefox) imperfect "Evil Genius" Dave Slusher has issues with podcasting clients: iPodders. I'm getting kind of fed up with both iPodderX and iPodder. I had been using the former until I did an upgrade to one of the 2.2.1 series that went completely haywire and redownloaded things over and over. I backtracked to an older version, which worked for a few days and then just stopped. . . (etc.).  [Evil Genius Chronicles] Um, well, yes, I've had my issues with these tools as well. Each new rev adds a feature or two, and seems to break something else. Some of their behavior is just a mystery to me, like what happens to the list of downloaded files after an upgrade. If I could make some coherent sense out of what happens I would report it to the developers. But really, I'm not convinced that I've missed anything important, podcast-wise, and I don't have time to listen to everything I'm downloading anyway, so what the heck, I'm not complaining. However, I am disappointed with Firefox. As much as I love the browser, I've found that the 1.0 Preview Release actually works better than the official 1.0 release. For instance: 1.0 fails to display some sites properly, including my blogging interface (Radio), the news aggregator in Radio, and the overstock.com site. What could have happened between preview and release? I don't know, but I rolled back to the preview version, and I'm a happy camper again. Well, I would be a happy camper if my routers were behaving. But that's another story. 6:45:49 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

I am not a content provider Why we hate "content:" The short answer is No. Sheila Lennon, as so often, nails it with Does the message need the medium?, about the Online News Association event in Hollywood that Dave reported on as well. . . While this may be news to some in mainstream media, I immediately think of Cluetrain's Doc Searls, who hates the term "content." This snip of Doc at a Jabber conference (original link has vanished) explains it, Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other content, Geeks see the Net as a place - a commons - where people can make culture and do business. Ask, "Who creates this 'content'?" and you've bridged the divide. Ask, "Who finances the creation of this 'content'?" and another problem emerges.  [The Doc Searls Weblog] There's much more in Doc's post, which you can read yourself. The part that hits home for me is this distaste for the word "content." Too many times, it's part of the phrase "content provider," which places the emphasis on the providers instead of on the creators of the content. It demeans those of use who create. It reduces our creative output to so much sludge passing through the plumbing, and pays the plumbers, not the creators. I don't produce content. I write. 5:46:12 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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