DefinitiveInk

A  post by Brent Gustafason on the Walker Art Center blog about wrestling with the definition of podcasts. He seems to have reached some of the same conclusions about the term as I have;

I kept getting stuck in the notion that if the idea of podcasting was to broadcast new “radio shows”, then letting someone randomly select artist interviews to listen to wasn’t the same as a podcast. But really all a podcast is is a list of MP3s one can download, they don’t neccesarily have to be in order, or flow together, or be time sensitive. When thought of like this it makes more sense. We can publish our entire list of available artist stops online in our podcast RSS, and people can then select which works interest them, and only download those specific MP3s. So the idea still works.

But we don’t want to limit the ability to recieve these MP3s to podcasts or podcast software. So in addition to building a podcast RSS feed for people to use, we’re going to build an index list online in the Art on Call website, for people to check off which work MP3s they want to download and then let them take those files and put it into their iPod from the web itself. This gives people without a podcast reader, or iTunes, or even an iPod, a way to get the same audio from our website. In reality, we’re just distributing MP3s, so why not give people some different options on how to recieve them?

Hmm, he also seems to be building something that sounds familiar but that is happily not the same as something I am building...

Museum Audio Tours

Article about cellphone based audio tours for museums.

More on this as Acoustiguide offers cells phone tour service. They are not down for the count in this space.

The Walker Art Center's blog posts on the development of their Art on Call service. It follows the emerging space very well.

Derek Powazeks's excellent post makes a great point. User Generated Content sucks...as a term to describe ways for online communities to express themselves.  The term "user " offends people, it has always been problematic. I don't know how I feel about Derek's proffered term "authentic media" nor Susan Mernit's  "participatory media" nor the "amateur media" offered by a commenter on her blog.  "Participatory media" is pretty good but is it broad enough to capture the act of communal filtering that makes the best content float to the top? Does it capture the essence of creating, contributing and, rating? (via Susan Mernit)

 

Whoa Nellie - The NYT launches a redesign. Wow, so many nice things - major headlines on the left as opposed to a newspaper, topics pages, MyTimes, tab's on top, most popular tab shows - most blogged, most e-mailed, top searches, seems brighter, cleaner, w i d e r...nice.

 

Update - Jack Shafer of Slate agrees big time. I'm going to keep my sub. to the Sunday paper as we like to do the crossword together sitting on the couch and a powerbook just isn't the same. My wife also does the diagramless, the cryptic, and the acrostic (she is much smarter than me) which don't have great online equivalents.

Scott Heiferman's: 50 reasons Why People Aren't Using Your Website
Caterin's: 9 reason's why people will *love* your website (shorter list but more explanation)
(both links via BuzzMachine)

So here is an April Fool's day round up of pages from Yahoo about how much work it is to buy up Web 2.0 companies, and Google's beta of their contextualized personals search engine. Both not real yet also somewhat true.

Would you rather owe money to GMAC or to Cerberus Capital, which is named after the three headed monster who guards that gates of hell? And they say all the good names are gone.

AllRecipes was just bought by Reader's Digest for 66 milliion. For that money RD is not only  getting a strong community but a community that has bought hundreds of thousands of books printed from recipes the users have contributed,  a business that white labels the recipe finders for major supermarket chains, one that has a very unique database so that users can scale recipes, and one that is the the power behind e-diets and other premium products. Since RD is an extremely successful direct marketer it should open up some interesting opportunities. (via PaidContent.org)

Went to the great  William Wegman show at the Brooklyn Museum yesterday. Lots of wonderful videos like this one:

CNET to use monkeys for product reviews

CNET seems to be experiementing with outsourcing their short video reviews to monkeys. They are still working on getting the monkeys to perfect their grammar, but it is a fascinating industry move. What's next, rapping ostriches?

A List of the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes .