Monday, February 28, 2005

Hip Profits Yahoo's Legacy: Profits are Possible on the Internet. The search portal's tenth anniversary has netizens reliving the go-go garage days that helped transform the country's economy. By (Michael Liedtke ). [Technology Review Feed v2.1] 8:07:43 PM

Cosmic List Online Community Set To Leap Beyond Solar System craigslist users to be first to transmit internet postings into deep space San Francisco, CA (USA) : Today craigslist, global leader in local classifieds and online community, announced plans to offer its users the opportunity to have their postings transmitted trillions of miles beyond the confines of the Solar System. craigslist currently handles 5 million earthly postings each month, from 8 million humans, in 99 cities and 19 countries on the planetary surface. "It looks like we're gonna hit 2 billion page views per month in March here on Earth," noted craigslist customer service rep and founder, Craig Newmark. "We wanted to be the first to offer free job postings, apartment listings, personals and other classifieds to the extraterrestrial community. We believe there could be an infinite market opportunity," chuckled Craig as he turned back to his computer screen to respond to craigslist customer service emails. craigslist announced their ambitious plan after CEO Jim Buckmaster won an auction on eBay for the first private communication to be transmitted into deep space by Deep Space Communications Network, of Cape Canaveral, Florida. Noting that such transmissions have long been the exclusive domain of military and research institutions, Buckmaster said "We're thrilled to offer our users this historic opportunity", and added that negotiations were ongoing with DSCN for transmission capacity orders of magnitude beyond those offered in the original auction, to accommodate the interstellar messaging needs of the mammoth online community. Effective immediately, all earthlings posting to craigslist will have an opportunity to earmark their message for inclusion in the historic transmission from Cape Canaveral, immediately following the launch of the Discovery Space Shuttle - currently scheduled for May 15, 2005. Deep Space Communications Network will transmit the postings, along with a personal video message from Craig, and a clip from the documentary "24 Hours on craigslist" light years into space, for the benefit and edification of potential future craigslist community members in the great beyond. When asked about the reason for using the Deep Space Communication Network to get the word out intergalactically, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist noted, "We checked into doing a direct mailing but the postage rates are just out of this world, and getting a carrier to commit to delivery verification was impossible. We know that SETI is working on securing a good list of contacts but we didn't feel right about waiting any longer. Why not just put the service out there, doesn't have to be perfect at first, and let folks respond with feedback on how we can make it better" About craigslist Founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark, craigslist is known worldwide as an archetype of online community - a democratic, trustworthy, and efficient platform for fulfilling basic human needs, as guided by real world communities everywhere. craigslist includes classified listings for jobs, housing, goods and services, personals, events, and community, plus a wide variety of discussion forums. About Deep Space Communications Network Deep Space Communications Network was launched in January 2005 by a group of respected professionals with over 20 years of experience providing satellite communications and video production and programming services to the government and commercial space programs. http://www.deepspacecom.net Media Contacts craigslist: Susan MacTavish Best, 415-505-0301 Deep Space Communications Network: Susan Kohl, 209-586-5887 7:33:04 PM

Sound of the Day Sound of the Day - February 28 2005 - OpenPodcast.org #1144. URL - http://soundoftheday.blogspot.com/ [OpenPodcast.org] 7:13:29 PM

Keeping Clean Elections Dear Gary, Clean Elections, the voter-approved system of public financing for candidates seeking statewide and legislative offices, is under attack in Arizona. Last Monday, the Senate Judiciary committee voted 5-3 to approve SCR 1036 which would prohibit public funding of any campaign for legislative or statewide office, effectively killing Clean Elections. This bill is will be voted on in Arizona State Senate in a matter of days, so we need to act fast. Please contact your State Senator and ask him or her to Vote No on SCR 1036: http://www.commoncause.org/DefendCleanElections Arizona is a national leader in reducing the influence of special interest money in politics and empowering voters in the political process - in this regard, it is a state we should all be proud of. The Clean Elections system has been so successful that 10 of 11 statewide officeholders (including Governor Janet Napolitano), 35 of 60 in the House and 7 of 30 in the Senate were elected without taking a dime of special interest money and are only beholden to you! Don't let these few nay-sayers of Democracy allow this system to be taken away from the Arizona voters: http://www.commoncause.org/DefendCleanElections Common Cause works all across the country to pass public financing systems like the one used in Arizona. A roll-back in Arizona would have a chilling effect on exciting ongoing efforts to pass public financing and other state-level campaign finance reforms. Please contact your State Senator today and urge them to Vote No on SCR 1036: http://www.commoncause.org/DefendCleanElections We need less private (corporate) money in politics and more policies that are focused on the interests of all voters, not just big money contributors. Please take a moment today to contact your State Senator on this important issue: http://www.commoncause.org/DefendCleanElections Thanks for all that you do! Sincerely, Jon Goldin-Dubois Director of State Program Development Support Common Cause/AZ: http://www.commoncause.org/SupportYourState 7:01:30 PM

Sedona International Film Festival, March 3-6 Arizona Event: Sedona International Film Festival. March 3-6, 2005 - Sedona International Film Festival - Sedona, Arizona SEDONA -- Nearly 120 independent films, including films by or featurin.. (803 words) [Arizona Reporter Newswire] 6:43:48 PM

What Changed in August 2004? An alternate history of podcasting. During the birth of podcasting, the excitement was about a new set of factors -- RSS enclosures, talk MP3s posted freely on the internet, iPods, software to glue these things together. In five years, though, the iPod will be as exciting as a toaster; RSS enclosures will be just one of many vectors for URLs of talk audio; the dominant form of talk MP3s will not be shows longer than 30 minutes, it will be clips. If you needed to describe the landscape in terms of the story that exploded across the upper blogosphere in August 2004, words would fail you, because the things gluing it all together, then as now, will be hypertext, URIs, HTTP, and social customs. What changed in August 2004? Until that moment, the overwhelming majority of internet audio was still in the style established during the 90s bubble. The customers for this style were the television, radio, music, and movie businesses. The providers for this style were a few large players -- Microsoft, Real, Apple, Macromedia. This style featured proprietary, expensive, and user-hostile technology like URLs that changed constantly, Internet-Explorer-only HTML, and dedicated media servers like RealServer. After the podcasting moment, internet standards became the basis. The customers were talkers making audio in their spare time with cheap hardware and existing software, the providers were hackers making tools in their spare time with low-cost tools. If not for that change there would be no change at all. Podcasting would have no talkers if they needed Windows Media Server rather than Apache, and it would have no listeners if the old practice of obfuscating URLs was still followed. But Apache was nothing new this summer, and this begs the question of why podcasting happened then and not before. There were two factors, neither of which had enough juice on its own. One factor was that all the dominoes were ready -- consensus for web standards was overwhelming among developers, there were people skilled in the practice of audioblogging, blogging was a well known narrative frame. The other factor was that there was an excellent new name -- Podcasting -- connecting the dominoes to a compelling current event, the iPod's peak as a cultural icon. When the upper blogosphere, in all its attention-deficit glory, jumped on the podcasting meme, it inspired talented and energetic people to become podcasters. While this very first generation of podcasters were telling themselves an origin story adopted from the upper blogosphere, they were accidentally doing all the right things to make the dominoes fall to their advantage. The first generation did what it did based on features of the origin story -- There was a story about the need to transfer files to an iPod. This story was false -- podcast listeners are overwhelmingly office workers or students using desktop computers. However, following this story got content makers to abandon the developer-hostile RTSP protocol and to embrace the user-friendly MP3 format. There was a story about feed formats like RSS being needed to pre-fetch large files. In reality download time had become a non-factor since the perception was established in the mid-90s, but few people knew it. Though the use of feed formats to control download times was pixie dust, it was just the right pixie dust to clear the perception that online audio was too slow to use. There was a story about RSS 2.0 enclosures being necessary to allow integration with blog readers, even though the most popular blog readers were (and are) web applications which can't do anything more with an enclosure link than they can with any other link. What blog readers really needed was an open format to free them from the quicksand (like ASX and RAM) that audio and video were trapped in before podcasting. It didn't matter whether the link was in an enclosure element, it was crucial that the link was in an open data format. The podcasters did all the right things and more, despite having canon that made no sense. License metadata, for example, was not a part of the founding myth, yet podcasters embraced open licensing from the beginning because they needed it, had the street smarts to know they needed it, and had the chops to pick between open licenses. The reason all this happened at that moment is because of the podcasters, but not for the reasons they thought. The people who created podcasting were early adopters, not just of RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures pointing to talk MP3s, but also of web standards, and the need for web standards was the main thing holding back internet audio/video when podcasting came along in August 2004. In five years, the things that defined podcasting during its birth in late summer of 2004 will be forgotten. Podcasters will not do 40-minute sets, they will not use feed formats any more than they will use HTML or playlist formats, they will consider the need to actively copy URLs to a disconnected device like an iPod astoundingly primitive. What will remain are the things that the first generation took for granted and yet, in reality, pioneered -- URLs, open wrapper formats, open protocols, open media formats, and open licensing. [the weblog of Lucas Gonze] 7:39:31 AM