Godin: Sober thoughts about podcasting
A gut-check overview about why we shouldn't have unrealistic expectations of podcasting.
A gut-check overview about why we shouldn't have unrealistic expectations of podcasting.
Possibly useful thoughts collected throughout May:
Sorry about the point release, but we had a tiny regression bug between RC4 and 2.0 which was only noticeable under rare circumstances in old versions of Mozilla. It is now fixed, and the update, as usual, requires only the swapping of your sifr.js file. Head over to the Official sIFR Landing Page for the download.
I’ve always loved Mike Doughty’s lyrics and vocals but could never figure out what I didn’t quite like about his former group Soul Coughing. Now I know. The rest of the band. I went to Doughty’s show in Seattle earlier this month, and it blew me away. Usually when singers leave bands to go solo, they get worse, but Doughty has not only gotten better as a singer, he’s a better songwriter as well. More soul, less coughing, as one magazine puts it. The guy loves touring too. Before the Seattle show, he stood on the streetcorner outside the club with his acoustic guitar taking requests from fans and cracking John Curley jokes. I’ve never seen anything like it. Oh, and not only does the man play for free on streetcorners, but he’s a Movable Type user as well. How can you not love that? *Note to Doughty’s IT guy: The man gives you music. Please get him onto MT 3 or WordPress already.
Their latest album “Picaresque” is my Album of the Year so far. The band’s previous release “Her Majesty the Decemberists” never did a lot for me, but this effort is epic. Long live folksy pirate music.
Croftie may not like live music but I do. As a result, I’ve found myself downloading a ton of shows lately off of Archive.org. It’s a bit frustrating that most shows are only available in lossless (see: overkill) formats like SHN and FLAC, but you can convert these to MP3s with a program like xACT. Can someone please point me in the direction of an app which automatically tags your converted MP3 files from a playlist file or something? Manually entering song info for each track you download is a pain and a half. Is there an AppleScript perhaps (or Automator workflow maybe?) which will convert an entire folder of FLAC/SHN files to MP3 and then tag them? That would be of incredible use.
If anyone is in the market for a good city bike, I just picked up a Marin Fairfax and I love it. Hybrid bikes are usually either heavy, ugly, or both, but this thing is only slightly heavier than a road bike and made of brushed aluminum and carbon fiber. I got mine for $599 at a local shop, but you can get the 2004 model for $329 online at REI if you don’t mind different components and a few other details.
Thank god the end of good TV season coincides with the beginning of summer. This year, we had some great reality shows and some dud dramas. Survivor made a strong comeback from last year’s miserable season proving that it’s still the king of all reality shows. The Apprentice was entertaining, if not much better than the previous two seasons, and finally The Donald hired someone who isn’t a white male. Surreal Life was its normal entertaining self, making you embarrassed to be a human being, in a good way. And the newcomer, The Contender, proved to be a great addition to Mark Burnett’s lineup, despite Sylvester Stallone’s and Sugar Ray Leonard’s complete incompetence as hosts. On the flip side, I’m sad to say that the hitherto spectacular show 24 appears to be on its last legs. This season went south after about the 8th episode when the plot climaxed prematurely, the most interesting characters were killed off, and the least interesting (a.k.a. Tony Almeida) were brought back. The most pathetic episode saw mild-mannered Chloe O’Brien wielding a machine gun and shooting up a Jeep. Ummm, yeah. Time to put this show to rest. Quit while you’re ahead Fox. Somehow I don’t think they’ll listen to me, and somehow I’m sure I’ll still watch season five.
Haagen Dazs Creme Bruleé. I can’t believe it took this long to invent this flavor… or maybe it just took me this long to find out about it.
I’m not too concerned with getting off of coffee, but if you’re looking to kick your Coke and Pepsi habit instead, I highly recommend replacing your thirst for fizz with high quality mineral water. I didn’t drink mineral water for the first 20-something years of my life, but I’ve really taken a liking to it lately and have been virtually pop-free for about six months now. I recommend San Pellegrino especially if you’re new to the stuff. It’s a lot milder on the fizz than most other brands.
Visibone's cut-out style cheatsheet to help you out with those tough RegExes.
Just a quick note to let all Mike Industries readers know that the Walt Disney Internet Group is looking to fill over 80 positions in our North Hollywood and Seattle offices right now. These are mostly technical positions ranging from the creative side of things to the engineering side of things, and I can tell you from the over four years I’ve worked here that it’s a great place to get your groove on.
To list every position available in this blog entry would take quite some time, but just in the Seattle office, I know we’re looking for engineers, technical producers, designers, managers, Java people, SQL people, project managers, and a handful of other positions. The North Hollywood office has other openings as well.
If you’re a talented, motivated person who is interested in working for Disney, please check out the Walt Disney Internet Group job site and submit your information through there, or also feel free to send me your stuff through “disneyjobs at mikeindustries.com”. I’m not sure every opening is listed on the WDIG Jobs Site so if you’re a talented web professional, send us your stuff and we’ll try and see if there’s a fit.
UPDATE: If you’re interested in WDIG jobs out of the Orlando office, there are some openings there as well.
"The Box Office". This is spectacular. A PHP-based tool which creates empty divs to help you achieve ragged text-wrapping automatically.
Picked up by the New York Times, Toronto Star, San Jose Mercury News, Kottke.org, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Popular Mechanics among others, the first installment of the Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition was a bigger-than-expected hullaballoo. Thanks again to all who entered.
For the second installment, we’re going with a nostaglic theme: Great iPods in History. As is the case with all of these competitions, the person who suggested the theme will win one iPod Shuffle, and the person who wins the actual contest will take home the other (suggestion pool still open through the end of the year). Congratulations to “Getmeparu” for suggesting this contest… as soon as I figure out who you are, a Shuffle will be forthcoming.
As is illustrated by the slightly modified 1945 Alfred Eisenstadt photo to the left, the aim of this contest is to place an iPod Shuffle into notable historical context. You can modify famous photos, upload audio narratives, shoot video, or even design a mini-site. I expect most of the entries to be altered photos, which works well for this particular contest, but I just wanted to remind everyone that rules can always be broken. You are free to submit anything you like, as long as it’s yours and it was created specifically for this contest.
This contest, along with the remaining seven, will run for two weeks. The deadline for entries is midnight, May 31st.
Submission rules are as follows, and cannot be broken:
<img src="yourimage.jpg" /> tag to enter it into the comments section below. Please also keep your filesizes reasonable (as small as possible, but definitely under 80k or so).Good luck!

UPDATE #2: Maybe the big red exclamation mark will help here — all images must be EXACTLY 418 pixels tall by 418 pixels wide. Not 418×200. Not 500×500. It is not a “maximum width”. 418×418 please. The management thanks you.

UPDATE #3: iPodLounge.com has just offered to send a pair of $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds and a sportcase to the eventual winner. Thanks iPodLounge!
What is a musical baton?
I don’t know, but my beard idol Rob Weychert and my Google-juice idol Keith Robinson just passed me one. I will now waive it over my head and tell you all sorts of things you never asked about!
18.05 GB… Mostly from actual pressed CDs
“The Runaway Found” by The Veils
“Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley
* Honorable mention: Any of Inman’s favorites from the “Video Game Beeping” genre.
Have you noticed me bugging you a lot over Instant Messenger these days? If so, you’re not alone. Over the last two weeks, I’ve finally discovered something hundreds of thousands of Mac users already know about: Adium.
Adium is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client which lets you connect to all of your peeps on MSN, iChat, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, and a few others. I’d tried Adium in the past but found it too riddled with bugs and incompatibilities for everyday use, but I’m happy to report that as of version 0.81 (can I get a 1.0 please? have some confidence in your product!), Adium is most clearly the best instant messaging client in existence, and dare I say, one of the nicest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
I tend to judge software on its details. Most programs these days can do the big tasks correctly, or else no one would use them, but the true test of a great app is how it handles the little things. How does it look on screen? How does it react to certain clicks and drags? How does it alert you? How customizable is it? These are the very things Adium excels at. Here are some particularly nice examples:
First and foremost, Adium offers a beautiful customizable interface. I hate iChat’s bubbly chrome look. I hate MSN’s bloated windows. I hate Yahoo’s 1993 design sensibilities. Adium lets you choose from hundreds of design themes, almost all of which are better than what MSN, Apple, and Yahoo force upon you. My personal favorite is “Decay” (shown to the right), which combines a nice transparent black chromeless window with Kottke’s space-efficient Silkscreen typeface.
Adium also lets you customize the look of your message windows. I use the built-in “Plastic” theme (shown also to the right) which features subtle shadowing and rounded corners.
Adium uses Growl alerts. Those of you in the Windows world have this nice little built-in system notification called Toast. Whenever an application wants to notify you of something, it can pop up a Toast message from your taskbar. OS X does not have such a notification system built-in, but an add-on called Growl enables this functionality and in a much more beautiful and customizable way than Toast. Adium can be configured to fade in Growl alerts upon almost any event. The result is shown to the right.All in all, I only have two complaints about Adium:
If you’d like to give Adium a try, here are some links to get you going. Everything is free of course:
A Forrester study on the coming growth of the online advertising market.
Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!
Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.
The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.
I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.
I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.
Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.
Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.
This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)
Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???
New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).
Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)