How many information sources for an Afghani village?

George Packer, "Knowing the Enemy," The New Yorker, December 18, 2006.

Article about Dr. David Kilcullen, Lt Col, Australian Army, author of “Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,� and others. Kilcullen "...calculated how many sources of information existed for a Vietnamese villager in 1966 and for an Afghan villager in 2006. He concluded that the former had ten, almost half under government control, such as Saigon radio and local officials; the latter has twenty-five (counting the Internet as only one), of which just five are controlled by the government. Most of the rest—including e-mail, satellite phone, and text messaging—are independent but more easily exploited by insurgents than by the Afghan government."

The article also mentions the Army and Marine Corps' first new counterinsurgency field manual in more than two decades, FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5 (final draft, June 2006) which begins, "This manual is designed to fill a doctrinal gap. It has been 20 years since the U.S. Army published a manual devoted to counterinsurgency operations, and 25 since the Marine Corps published its last such manual."

(See also: Robby Kennedy, "Army writing new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Army News service March 3, 2006.)

This means the U.S. went to war on a counterinsurgency field manual written before the Web, first publicized by CERN August 6, 1991 (compare: Internet).

Has Maxell released holographic storage?

In September 2005, Maxell announced it would release its first holographic storage product in late 2006.

Is Riken's MDGrape-3 the fastest official supercomputer in the world?

As noted here earlier this year, the 28th list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world is announced at SC06 Tampa, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. One important question about the list is whether the MDGrape-3 has qualified. Whether or not it is deemed a supercomputer according to the keepers of the list, it's achieved a remarkable advance in speed, economy and power consumption, at three times faster and one-tenth the cost per calculation of the next fastest computer in the world.

Cine Gear Miami

Google news search: "Cine Gear Expo"
Cine Gear Expo Miami, November 10-12, 2006.

RSS TV

RSS TV spec1.1 released Oct 6

NAB New York announcements

Google news search: NAB "New York"

networks target TiVo

CBS and TiVo have agreed to offer the premiere episode of a new CBS sitcom, "The Class," to 4.4 million TiVo subscribers three full weeks ahead of its broadcast debut, September 18.

Stuart Elliott, "In a TiVo World, Television Turns Marketing Efforts to New Media," New York Times September 5, 2006.

open source radio

CBS Radio is gathering listener podcasts from around the world, which are broadcast on 1550 AM KYCY in San Francisco and streamed at www.kyouradio.com.

a review of bandwidth in some countries around the world

Alan Stafford, "Broadband Abroad: Internet Connectivity Outside the United States," PC World, August 23, 2006.

see also: wikipedia: broadband worldwide

What's YouTube worth?

Sony paid $65 million for Grouper, which has less than 1% market share of online video, according to traffic-tracking firm YouTube could be a steal at $1 billion," c|net news, August 24, 2006.

if it's paid for...

Greg Sandoval, "Studios to OK copying movie downloads to disc," c|net news, August 10, 2006.

amicus curiae in Capitol Records v. Deborah Foster

amicus curiae filed by EFF, AALL, ACLU

video: picture of a person every day for three years

by Ahree Lee

What's the word from Jobs?

Google news search: "steve jobs" iTunes movies WWDC

solar wireless

Green WiFi: solar panel, battery, router.

From slashdot.

Everyone has their doppelgänger.

I once entered a cafe and saw my father reading at a table near the back. I approached him to sit down and talk and got quite close before realizing it wasn't him.

Christian Küsters and Mischa Haller are looking for four people who look like this.

Jane Perrone, "Are you alike?" The Guardian, August 1, 2006.

MDGrape-3 breaks petaflop barrier

The MDGrape-3 supercomputer at Riken in Yokohama, Japan has been clocked at one petaflop (one quadrillion calculations) per second, three times faster than IBM's BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore.

The MDGrape-3 was not announced in time for the official summer 2006 list of top 500 supercomputer sites and, because of a technicality, might not be eligible for future editions of that list, but has likely set a new standard not only for speed but also for economy and energy consumption. Riken estimates MDGrape-3 costs $15 per gigaflop, compared with BlueGene/L at $140 per gigaflop.

Newsfactor magazine, "Japan Bests IBM in Supercomputer Stakes," July 26, 2006, from Slashdot.

YouTube demographics

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, weekly U.S. Web traffic to youtube.com grew from 7.3 to 12.8 million unique visitors the week ending July 16. Between January and June 2006, a larger audience spent more time looking at more YouTube pages. The YouTube audience is currently 60/40 male. Visitors between 12-17 years of age are nearly 1.5 times more likely to visit YouTube than the average Web user.

Neilsen/Netratings, "YouTube U.S. Web Traffic Grows 75 Percent Week over Week," July 21, 2006.

more podcasting demographics

9.2 million people in the U.S have downloaded a podcast.
5.6 million people in the U.S. have downloaded a vodcast.
Web users age 18-24 are twice as likely to download a podcast as Web users on whole. Web users 25-34 and 35-44 were also more likely than Web users on whole to download a podcast. Web users above age 45 were less likely to download a podcast.
Vodcasting trends slightly older than podcasting.

Nielsen/NetRatings, "Podcasting Gains an Important Foothold Among U.S. Adult Online Population, According to Nielsen/NetRatings," July 12, 2006.

podcasting demographics

An agency connecting podcasters and advertisers has hired Taylor Nelson Sofres to survey listeners.

new development in French music-related IP law

Thomas Crampton, "Parts of French 'iPod Law' Struck Down," The New York Times, July 28, 2006.

TiVo to measure tivoing past the ads

TiVo's new Audience Research and Measurement divison will show ad-viewing patterns (but not, initially, issue ratings for individual ads) based on a sample 20,000 out of its 4.4 million units.
The article forecasts 15% of U.S. homes to have a digital video recorder (DVR) by end of 2006.

David Lieberman and Laura Petrecca, New TiVo service to measure its ad-zapping fallout, USA Today, July 26, 2006.

very early edge: HD-DVD

The author of this highly informative piece has reviewed three dozen HD-DVDs and 11 Blu-ray discs and gives a slight overall edge to HD-DVD, including market factors, not just resolution and perfomance. It's still way too early to tell.

Peter M. Bracke, "Blu-ray vs. HD DVD: Round One," High-Def Digest, July 3, 2006.

See also: Jessica Wolf, DVD Producers Straddle Mature, Emerging Markets," Home Media Retailing July 24, 2006.

Netflix and Cinflix: compare and contrast

You've heard of (or maybe subscribe to) Netflix; here's Cinflix, devoted to titles from Korea, Hong Kong, India and Japan.

YouTube, Phanfare and current.tv: compare and contrast

Blog of Phanfare, a site with a different business model than YouTube. See also: current.tv.

more rental, fewer theatrical viewings

"Among those who saw fewer movies in the first half of this year than the first half of last year, ticket prices (49%) and time (40%) are big factors affecting their theatre-going behaviors. More than a third says DVDs come out so quickly so they are willing to wait (36%) and that they are watching more movies that they rent on DVD (35%) — while one-third (33%) say the reason is that the movies this year aren’t as good."

from HarrisInteractive. "Surging Rental Market Contributes to Slouching Box Office,"The Harris Poll, no. 62, August 11, 2005 (conducted July 12-18, 2005).

flexible, multi-layered, very thin processors

University of Wisconsin, Madison

It's the wild west out there.

Frank Ahrens, "Networks' Nervous Foray Online," Washington Post, July 23, 2006.

YouTube exposure revives sitcom pilot

NBC ordered six scripts of "Nobody's Watching," a WB comedy pilot from last year, less than a month after the episode emerged on YouTube.

Josef Adalian, NBC revives 'Watching'," Variety, July 20, 2006.

from slashdot

Microsoft ipod

Carly Mayberry, "Microsoft confirms plan to take on iPod," The Hollywood Reporter, July 22, 2006.

video at Google and YouTube

Brad Cook, "Microsoft Confirms It Originated iPod Box Parody," the iPod observer, March 14, 2006.

The following story cites NPD research that claims Apple's iPod currently has over 50% market share of all digital music players:
Bary Alyssa Johnson, "Microsoft Announces Its Own iPod Competitor," PC Magazine, July 24, 2006.

How much does it cost to build a smart phone?

Motorola Q tops Blackberry with features.

Arik Hesseldahl, "Unmaking Motorola's Q Phone," Business Week, July 20, 2006, from Slashdot.

Making Good Film and Television for No Money

discussion with Sean Covel, Chris Wyatt and Ari Fishman; moderated by Bill Rude, Walker Art Center, July 18, 2006.

ads on bags...

...parts one and two, MIT Advertising Lab (news feed)

see also: ad-land

rumor: iTunes movie rentals?

Supposedly, Apple will announce a deal with major studios at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) August 7 to allow consumers to rent (not buy) movies from iTunes.

Ryan Katz, "WWDC surprise: Apple to announe iTunes movie rentals," Think Secret, July 18, 2006.

Two Macworld editors continue the speculation:
Philip Michaels and Jim Dalyrimple, "Are movie rentals in iTunes' future?" Macworld, July 20, 2006.

Consumers care less about consumer electronics brand name than ever before.

29% of respondents in a Vertis survey this year said brand name was the most important factor in consumer electronics purchases. This is down from 50% in 1998 and 40% in 2004.

Laura Blackwell, "Brand Name Influence for Consumer Electronics Losing Luster," PC World, July 11, 2006.

proof of concept: Memory Spot

HP announced a very small chip (4 millimeters square or smaller; compare Compact Flash which is about 40 mm on a side) called Memory Spot. It currently holds between 32 and 512 kilobytes (KB) and has a small processor on board, powered by the magnetic field of a read/write device held at very close range. (Contrast RFID tags which hold less but can be read at greater distances, say, 30 feet.) The chip has a transfer speed of 1.25 megabytes per second (MB/sec).

512 kilobytes (KB), or half a megabyte (MB), is enough to hold basic personal information on a small town's worth of people (see: "How much space does a lot of data take?"), or a one-minute .MP3 greeting (64 kbps).

The transfer speed is fast enough for office productivity purposes, playback of compressed media and recording of source-quality audio, but currently only about a third the speed necessary to record even standard definition video (or HDV) at 3.6 MB/sec. The latest (133x) Compact Flash cards claim sustained write speeds of up to 20 MB/sec.

One source speculated that Memory Spot cost could be ten cents per unit when production reaches scale, or about four times the cost per gigabyte of Compact Flash today. A dime for 512 KB works out to about $200 per GB, while the lowest legitimate price on today's latest Compact Flash card is $116 for 2 GB, or about $58 per GB. Hard drives are still the most economical for the moment; a LaCie d2 external hard drive is $189 for 250 GB, or about $0.75 per GB.

sources
Press release. " HP Unveils Revolutionary Wireless Chip That Links the Digital and Physical Worlds; Grain-Sized Chip Could Be Attached to Almost Any Object, Making Information More Ubiquitous," July 17, 2006.

John Markoff, "H.P. to Unveil Radio Chips to Store Data," New York Times, July 17, 2006.

Jack Schofield, "HP Memory Spot chip adds digital content to physical world," The Guardian, July 17, 2006.

proof of concept: magnetic chips

Existing types of memory:
-dynamic random access memory (DRAM): cheap -- $5 for 512 megabits (mb), or about $80 per gigabyte (GB) -- stores a lot, but loses information when it loses power
-static random access memory (SRAM): fastest, but also loses information when it loses power
-flash memory: retains information without power, but is relatively slow

New possibility:
-magnetic random access memory (MRAM): wildly expensive at the moment -- $25 for four megabits (mb), or about $50,000 per gigabyte (GB) -- but faster than DRAM and as fast as some SRAM; retains information without power, can store information indefinitely

Don Clark, "Freescale Brings Chip to Market Based on Magnetic Technology." Wall Street Journal July 10, 2006.

TiVo past the ads...?

What will happen to television advertising if viewers can skip it on TiVo? One strategy is for ads to get shorter: five seconds, and even one second, in duration. Can they stand on their own? I think viewers are ready for anything.

Laura Petrecca, "Five-second ads try to counter TiVo," USA Today, July 6, 2006.

The article cites Forrester Research statistic that, at the end of 2005, 12.2% of U.S. households had DVRs, such as TiVo, and their estimate that the figure will grow to half of all U.S. households by the end 2010.

1 in 5 Americans age 12 and older owns a digital music player

Ipsos research indicates 1 in 5 Americans age 12 and older owns a digital music player, up from 1 in 10 three years ago.

Future Tense, June 30, 2006.

Federal guidelines for security on mobile devices

The Office of Management and Budget released new federal policy for all federal agencies:

Brian Krebs, "OMB Sets Guidelines for Federal Employee Laptop Security," Washington Post, June 27, 2006.

"RSS" vs "news feeds"

Nielsen found "RSS" has poor name-recognition and recommends referring to "news feeds" instead.

interview with Lee Gomes, http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115075895691584597-J7Zkgfyy0QteJpjOz_Obi7mmUH0_20060627.html?mod=blogs>Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2006.

Why buy ads when you can sponsor the whole station?

Snapple has sponsored an entire radio station (WFNX Boston) for 40 days. For two million dollars, DJs will discuss Snapple-sponsored events, but the station will air 55 minutes of music per hour and no ads.

Jim Sullivan, "Boston radio station cuts down ad 'clutter' - to one sponsor," Christian Science Monitor, June 15, 2006.

See also: August 22, 2005 issue of The New Yorker.

Netflix vs. TV?

Netflix appears to be considering delivering video over IP.
Paul Bond, The Hollywood Reporter, June 15, 2006.

Nielsens to include mobile and other video along with TV

The Nielsen ratings will integrate TV with digital viewing habits, including Internet, iPods and cell phones, and include out-of-home television viewing in its figures.

Paul J. Gough, "Nielsen ratings digitized," The Hollywood Reporter, June 15. 2006.

see also: Arbitron's Portable People Meter
"Four Leading Radio Groups Sign Agreements For Arbitron PPM," Radio Ink, June 6, 2006.

Fun's over when the power runs out. (proof of concept: nanotube capacitor battery)

Disposable batteries are bad for the environment. Rechargeable batteries die eventually and take time to recharge. (Rapid chargers shorten long-term battery life.) Shooting video and stills and recording audio in the field, not to mention mobile computing, lasts only as long as the batteries powering the gear. Good people at MIT might have a real advance in mobile power supply based on a capacitor made of nanotubes, each 30,000 thinner than a human hair:

super Battery, ScieCentral News, June 8, 2006.

This is second only to a safe way to make power travel through the air. :) Could be good for hybrid vehicles too.

Family hard drive purchased at flea market

Couple's Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased In Chicago, Yahoo! News, June 1, 2006.

iPod. More popular than beer.

Associated Press, "Survey: College Kids Like IPods Better Than Beer, Fox News, June 8, 2006.

Apple surpasses beer on college campuses, CNN News, June 8, 2006.

Mike Snider, "iPods knock over beer mugs," USA Today, June 7, 2006.

Student Monitor found that 73% of 1200 U.S. undergraduate students said Apple iPod was "in," up from 59% the previous year.

iPods: 73% of students (Hispanic students: 77%*; women: 76%)
drinking beer: 71%
facebook.com: 71%
drinking other alcohol: 67%
text messaging: 66%
downloading music: 66%
going to clubs: 65%
instant messaging: 63%
working out: 62%
coffee: 60%

* see: "podcasting demographics" from Pew Center for Internet and American Life, as of Jan-Mar 2005, digital music player (DMP) ownership by race and ethnicity:
16% of African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos
9% of non-Latino whites

more podcasting demographics

Jason van Orden, New Podcasting Demographics from Podtrac May 31, 2006.

Author summarizes new Podtrac poll suggesting the presence of over 22 million podcast listeners and viewers:

56% use content on computers; the rest use portable devices
88% listen to or view the entire program
41% of adults online at the end of 06Q1 were aware of the term "podcasting," up from 32% 05Q4.
75% of podcast listeners come from iTunes

Podtrac claims a db of over 55,000 detailed demographic records of podcast users.

Ellis G.

Artist Ellis G. uses sidewalk chalk to trace silhouettes of signs and other objects on New York sidewalks.

John Carluccio, dir., "The Life of a Shadow," current.tv, April 19, 2006.

one estimate of current world podcasting audience

Dana Gardner claims current audience of 10-15 million for podcasting worldwide.

E3

Google news search: expo "Los Angeles"

Electronic Entertainment Expo

no moving parts

Maxell plans to launch its first holographic storage product September 2006 with 300 GB capacity and 20 MB/sec throughput. When throughput improves, this could eventually lead to direct-to-edit recorders with no moving parts.

"Maxell Introduces the Future of Optical Storage Media With Holographic Recording Technology" (press release), Maxell Corporation of America, November 18, 2005.

Colin Barker, "Maxell focuses on holographic storage," c|net news, November 28, 2005.

How much space does a lot of data take?

Paper files get lost all the time. It's been reported several times that file cabinets auctioned for surplus were discovered to contain records with real people's social security numbers. Any new technology is disruptive. Automation, particularly in the form of electronic data, makes the problem of accidental mishandling of sensitive information acute.

A county public health worker accidentally e-mailed the names of thousands of people who are HIV-positive to nearly a thousand colleagues. It's difficult to imagine a co-worker making and distributing a thousand photocopies without noticing the highly sensitive information on them (although a newspaper recently re-used paper in its newsstand distribution materials that had been used once to print subscriber billing information, including customer credit card information).

When a laptop with personal information on it is stolen from an employee's home or car, the numbers of people affected is often staggering -- in the hundreds of thousands, or more.

Here are two simple calculations to help people understand the magnitude of the problem.

1. How much text fits on a jump drive?
Let's make some reasonable assumptions and see how the math plays out.
1 GB space on disc
filled with a number of three-page Microsoft Word documents
1" margins all around
12 point Times font, single-spaced
printed single-sided
(This is the same as double-spaced text printed double-sided.)
A 1 GB jump drive can hold about 50,000 pages of text.

2. How much space on disc would you need to represent basic data about the entire U.S. population?
allow the following number of characters for each of these fields:
30 name
20 e-mail
60 address
8 date of birth
10 phone
9 social security number
137 possible characters per record
1 byte per character
137 bytes per record
300,000,000 U.S. population (population clock)
Basic personal information on everyone in the U.S. would fit in 38 GB.
Basic personal information on everyone in the world would fit in 829 GB.

There are methods arguments to make along the way. At the moment, one gigabyte seems to be the most popular denomination for jump drives, although this can change rapidly. In the first example, document page length is an important assumption. I have no data on the average page length of a Word document, but three pages seems reasonable. I created mock-up MS Word documents (see: www.lipsum.com) of widely differing page lengths and checked the file size of each. MS Word exacts a toll in file size for each document created. Once the document is created it can have a little or a lot of information in it for a regular additional amount of file size. So hundred-page documents are a more efficient way to store large amounts of text than one-page documents (although not necessarily a pleasure to work with).

The estimate in the second example works better in the U.S. Of course, people outside the U.S. don't have social security numbers, although they might have a national identifier of similar character length. Even here, not everyone has an e-mail address. It would be interesting to hear an estimate of how many people in the world have no fixed land address. Allow 20 characters for a national ID, and the recordset could still be represented in 896 GB. The point is, with missing data points, that's the maximum space on disc such a recordset would require given today's population.

Turn the method on credit card transactions, as the payment industry surely has done. How many characters to represent an entire credit card transaction? How many transactions per day in a country? On the Internet? In the world? How much space on disc to represent the information? Not as much as you'd think.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and am open to debate if you run any of the numbers yourself.

biometric vulnerabilities

Clarkson University professor Stephanie C. Schuckers has fooled most fingerprint recognition devices with Play-doh molds.

Science Daily, "Clarkson Engineer And 'Spoofing' Expert Looks To Outwit High-Tech Identity Fraud, December 20, 2005.

see also:
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE)

update
Biometric security measures based on iris scans, facial recognition and especially fingerprints, are susceptible to spoofing in most current versions.

Steve Ranger, "Crime of the future--biometric spoofing?" ZDNEt Asia from Slashdot

Whenever, wherever.

Stephen Soderbergh released his latest film, Bubble, in theaters, and on DVD and cable all on the same day.
At the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (held January 5-8), News Corp. announced it intends to release movies in high definition 60 days after theatrical release, on cable or disc or by download. (The time from theatrical to rental release in the U.S. was six months in 1994 and four months in 2004.)
Rainbow Media, a division of Cablevision, plans to release 18 to 24 films per year on cable the same day as they open in theaters.

sources
Gary Gentile, "'Bubble' hits theaters, TV, DVD on same day," USA Today, January 18, 2006.

Georg Szalai, "News Corp. exploring high-def film rentals," The Hollywood Reporter, March 1, 2006.

Anders Bylund, ars technica, January 12, 2006.

more podcasting demographics

Nino Marchetti, "The Demographics of Podcasting," Digital Trends December 27, 2005.

Article summarizes a survey commissioned by Podtrac, a podcast advertising and measurement service, conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres in December 2005.

32% of respondents were familiar with the term "podcast"
about 11% had listened to a podcast; of those, about two in five had done so in the past week

78% of those who had ever listened to a podcast were male, but 51% of the respondents who had listened in the last week were female.

podcasting demographics

Podcasts and RSS news feeds are subscription-based technology elements. A person reading the Web can read a story on, say, a newspaper's Web site, or that person can subscribe to the newspaper's RSS news feed and have a synopsis of the story included in an index of as many other such stories as they like. The result is a Web page that serves as a real-time index of personal interest. Pretty cool.
A person listening to the Web can go find a piece of audio, either by browsing a Web site or buying it from a service such as iTunes, or that person can subscribe to a podcast and have new audio segments pushed to them as they are released, without having to go looking. Very cool.
By coincidence, a podcast is built on an RSS news feed. Happy synergy.

Widgets are currently limited to users of Mac OS X 10.4 and users of Dashboard on OS X up to 10.3, but when Microsoft releases Longhorn (likely next year) widget-makers will have a broad new platform for which to develop.

demographics
iPod is a brand name; the generic name for the kind of thing that it is would be digital music player or MP3 player. Digital music player might be the better term for the long run.
So who uses digital music players? Who uses podcasts? In January through March of this year, the Pew Internet and American Life Project conducted two national surveys. Here are their estimated results, dated 4/3/2005:

36 million Americans download music or video files.
22 million U.S. adults (11% of the population) now carry digital music players (DMPs).
14% of Internet users and 3% of non-Internet users have DMPs. Those with six or more years of Internet experience are twice as likely as those with less than three years of Internet experience to have a DMP.

more about Apple iPods and other digital music players (DMPs)
Of U.S. adults, the following have DMPs:
-by gender
9% of females
14% of males

-by Internet access
25% of those with broadband both at home and at work
21% of those with broadband at home
10% of those with dial-up access at home

-by household income
18% of those living in households earning more than $75,000/year
13% $50,000 to $75,000/year
9% $30,000 to $50,000/year
7% of those living in households earning less than $30,000/year
although 20% of respondents did not share information about household income with the researchers.

-by age and residence of children
15% of parents living with children under age 18 in the home
8% of parents who don't have children living at home

-by age
19% of those ages 18-28
14% of those ages 29-40
11% of those ages 41-50
6% of those ages 51-59
1% of those age 70 or older

-by race and ethnicity
16% of African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos
9% of non-Latino whites

So there's considerable nuance to the demographics of DMP ownership, but this seems like an audience we're be interested.

podcasting
Of American adults who own DMPs (est. 22 million), 29% (est. six million) have used podcasts.

gender
Men and women who own DMPs are equally likely to have used podcasts.

Internet access
33% of DMP owners who have broadband at home have used podcasts.
28% of DMP owners who have dial-up access at home have used podcasts.

age
Half of DMP owners between age 18-28 have used podcasts.
A fifth of DMP owners over age 29 have used podcasts.

How many DMPs are there in the world? CIO Today March 16, 2005 reported 36.8 million digital music players sold in 2004 alongside a market research firm's projection of 132 million annual sales by 2009.

What other small, portable devices can play digital audio? A 2004 Net Imperative article cites a market analyst predicting 25.3 million MP3-enabled phones to be sold in 2005, and up to 116 million sold in 2008.
Motorola and Apple announced a version of iTunes software for the Moto line of mobile phones. Nokia has partnered with LoudEye to use Windows Media Player on their phones for the same purpose. The Nokia N91 phone (pending FCC approval for sale in the U.S.) has a 4 GB hard drive and comes preconfigured for Visual Radio.

podcast basics

Q.: I have had some experience with Macintosh's annoying proprietary coding of .mp3 files. Does the RSS format mean we're not just targeting iPods?

A.: We never were targeting only iPods (and not other brands of digital music players), but let me break that one down.
An Apple brand iPod can be used with iTunes software on a PC.
By default, iTunes software encodes your stuff as .AAC. An .AAC is basically an .MP4 (next, incremental version of MP3 codec), but with enough differences in the header to keep the files from playing anywhere else. Definitely annoying.
All music purchased through iTunes online music store are .AAC-encoded. When ripping music from audio CDs you already own, you can tell your iTunes software to use .AAC, .MP3, or .AIF encoding, although I haven't horsed around with this.

RSS is an XML-based way of aggregating content, not an audio codec. A podcast is just an RSS feed that aggregates audio (and a few bits of descriptor text) as content. RSS doesn�t care what files get aggregated, although .MP3s are the weapon of choice. They are the weapon of choice for two reasons: one, iTunes software (and the Apple brand iPod that routinely docks with it) can play .MP3s, and Apple brand iPods have huge market share right now; and, two, because most, if not all, the other brands of digital music players are built to use .MP3s.
Podcasting does not require an Apple brand iPod, any more than blowing one's nose requires Kleenex brand facial tissue. Someone about to sneeze might well say, "Pass me a kleenex." The brand name has become the name for its generic form. Apple's iPod has such huge market share right now that it is common to hear all digital music player referred to as iPods.
Podcasting does require one of several podcast aggregators, such as iPodder, to keep track of subscriptions, check for new files, and download them. For people who do use an Apple brand iPod, podcast aggregration has just been incorporated as a feature in iTunes version 4.9. (This saves the step of having to drag files into iTunes before updating their iPod.) Convenience is everything, so this will be one of three big boosts to podcasting in the coming months.
Another big boost to podcasting will be the rumored introduction of widgets into Longhorn, the new Windows operating system from Microsoft. Widgets, currently available in Dashboard for Mac OS X (up to 10.3) and integrated into Tiger (Mac OS 10.4), are little pieces of code that run all the time and sit inconspicuously near the bottom of your screen and, among many other useful things, can aggregate podcast content for you.

Q.: New phones/PDAish devices permit podcast download, yes?

A.: Yes. Devices to watch:
Nokia N91
Motorola E1000

Motorola has partnered with iTunes and Nokia has partnered with a (WinMed-based) company to deliver music on phones. Introduction in the U.S. of these MP3-enabled phones will be the third big boost to podcasting. Industry projections suggest sales of MP3-enabled phones will match sales of stand-alone digital music players.