Want to make your very own podcast?

First, listen to Technology Review's first podcast on how to podcast and then create one using the beta version of Odeo (The software is not quite out yet, but if you email them and tell them what you want to podcast about, they will give you access to the beta version).

Beyond being just the best place to fulfill your listening needs, Odeo makes it easy for everyone to create and publish podcasts.—whether you're a professional broadcaster or just an individual with something to say. These tools
include:

• Odeo Studio - A browser-based tool that makes it easy to record and publish audio. With the Studio, and a cheap microphone (or even the one built into your laptop), you have everything you need.
• Phone Posting - If you can leave a voicemail, you'll be able to podcast, with Odeo's phone-posting service—a quick and easy way to put your voice on the web (and in people's
  ears).
• Feed Creation and Hosting - If you already have audio, and you just want to get it into podcasting form, Odeo provides the turnkey way to do that. Just upload your MP3s, and you're done.

RSS Feeds Must Be on Candidate Sites

In class this evening, we had a few representatives from Campaign Solutions come speak. Though, I think they do well on their sites, I must say, I think they are completely missing the ball on RSS feeds for campaign sites, due to the simple fact they do not understand their value.

It does not matter how small your campaign is or how rare the news portion is updated, YOU NEED TO HAVE RSS FEED ABILITY ON YOUR CAMPIAGN SITE!

• Speaker: We don’t put RSS feeds on our clients’ sites because most of our clients don’t update their news content often enough.

RSS feeds are essential for sites that do not update often. If you are not updating your site information daily I highly doubt you have people coming to your site on a regular basis. If you don’t have people coming to your site on a regular basis, many are missing your message when you finally do update your site. With an RSS feed you nullify this problem. As Aaron said:

Conventional web-publishing wisdom says that the way to grow and maintain your audience is to publish often. This is in part because people actually have to remember to visit your site... If all your readers are subscribed to your RSS feed, they don't have to remember to check your site.

Why make it hard on the user? Again, it is ALL about your user!

• Speaker: Another reason we don’t do RSS feeds is because we want to bring people to our site instead.

You can set up your RSS feed to only show the title and the first sentence followed by an ellipsis. Interested readers are then required to click on the article, which takes them to your site, to continue reading.

RSS for your Mobile

Too busy to sit in front of your computer every night and go through your RSS reader? Start sending your feeds to your mobile devices.

Here are a few readers:

• 49PM's NewsReader: Read any RSS or Atom newsfeed and view the photos formatted exactly to the size of your mobile display! You can save downloaded photos to your phone and show them to your friends later. And when you check a newsfeed, only the newest posts are downloaded. You can add any newsfeed you like, it'll even find the feed if you enter the web location of a weblog or newsfeed page.



• Bloggo - an RSS feed reader for WAP 2.0-capable phones.



• FoCuS - FoCuS extracts the newest published items from RSS feeds (through the corresponding URLs), and displays them to the user. FoCus is fully compliant to RSS 2.0 specifications, up to 8 feeds storable, automatic buffering of downloaded items, and it
  supports both English and Italian.



• FreeNews - delivers the essentials of the world wide web directly to your mobile phone. Using RSS, FreeNews gathers the information you care about from the web, putting it on your phone so you can read it anywhere, anytime.



• i-feed.de - collects newsfeeds and provides content specific rendering of nearly all types of devices such as mobile phones (WAP or i-mode), PDAs or webbrowsers.



• LiteFeeds - provide custom mobile RSS readers for any Java Phone/SmartPhone, Blackberry, Palm or PocketPC which synchronizes with your online subscriptions. New features include : viewing full text articles (not just RSS), viewing Flickr/Buzznet images, and the ability to clip articles to your online clipboard and share it as an RSS feed.



• Mobile RSS Reader - allows you to read RSS feeds with your mobile phone. The service includes a downloadable application for your mobile phone and a web service, which allows you to download RSS feed urls. Requires MIDP 1.0.



• Mobilerss.net - an online/offline news aggrator that focuses on mobile devices and produces optimized output for a wide variety of them. Users can view their content online or synchronize feeds for offline viewing. OPML import/export and search in syndic8 is also supported.



• mReader - a light-weight Mobile RSS Reader (Aggregator) designed to be compatible with J2ME midp devices including Mobile Phones, PDAs and Blackberry.



• News Lite - a free RSS news reader, developed in Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1 technology and asp.NET for server side components. The software is designed for all "flash-enabled" S60 smart-phones.



• nextBLAST - Supports English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Croatian, Russian, and Chinese.



• RSSHome.com - created to simply the reading of RSS and Atom feeds from mobile devices like Microsoft SmartPhone, Sony P800/P900, Handspring, Palm, PPC, etc. as well as WAP enabled mobiles and desktop browsers. To minimize data traffic to the mobile device, a proxy server is used behind the scenes to filter, verify and catalog all RSS feeds content. The proxy server then sends the minimal amount of data to the mobile device so the device can display the RSS feeds.



• Yahoo! Mobile - allows you to read the RSS news feeds that you've subscribed to in your My Yahoo! page from your mobile phone's minibrowser.

*List complied at All RSS.

The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics

It’s that time of year again… when we vote for those Who are Changing the World of Internet and Politics on Politics Online. I would like to point out that The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) is on the top 20 list and of course I highly recommend voting for us!

During its six years' existence, the Institute has established a national and international reputation as the premier center for the study of the Internet's effect on politics, producing practical studies that address the larger questions about the Internet and politics. IPDI's staff have developed materials during that time that have helped academics, advocates, and practitioners understand the potential power of this new and evolving technology. The variety of scholars, real world political operatives and the Politics On Line Conference make them on of the most unique and comprehensive actors in the field of politics and the Internet. The Institute provides a balance of dreamers and data driven realists who tell us what we know and help push us to contemplate a variety of ideas and concepts we should get to know.

You can vote for us here.

Quick! Where can I find the nearest vlogger?

Vlogmap.org is using Google Maps plot where registered world wide vloggers are located. If you have a vlog, it is easy to join the community, just register by filling out this form.

Vlogmap

Check out Rocketboom, a vlog based in NYC. Friday’s vlog has a drinking game played to the Karl Rove ongoing investigation from The White House press briefing by Scott McClellan.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure

Have an old computer just sitting around taking up space?

American Recycler

Help close the digital divide and send your slow old machine to World Computer Exchange. They collect, clean, refurbish, and send computers to economically challenged places in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

End-of-life PCs are obsolete to our society but are incredibly valuable to areas where 99% of students graduate without every touching a computer. As pupil Elizabeth Momanyi described:

"In terms of employment it has also improved a lot. After you finish High School it's easier to get a job with knowledge of computers."

Viral Measuring Tool

“Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs” With about 12 million blogs in existence and 10 new ones created every second, it is fairly hard to keep track of what is being said on everyone.

A few years ago, Web search was revolutionized by a simple but profound idea — that the relevance of a site can be determined by the number of other sites that link to it, and thus consider it 'important.' In the world of blogs, hyperlinks are even more significant, since bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, which creates the sense of timeliness and connectedness one would have in a conversation. So Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations.

Is it art? Is it even mine?

Art is an expression of creativity rendered through demanding technical skills... or is it?

Dada art raises a few eyebrows and in my opinion a few ownership questions. My absolute favorite example is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Basically, Duchamp ordered a urinal, wrote “R. Mutt 1917” on it, and called it his art. Is it though? Does that make it his work? He surly did not put the effort and craftsmanship into the piece. He simply wrote a piece of graffito on it.

Fountain

I see this piece as the gateway into the today’s postmodern toolbox. Average people today, with no artistic ability, can take existing pictures, videos, and music and refashion them into “art” using such tools as Photoshop, Apple Garage Band, and Apple Final Cut Studio. With as much distaste as I have for Duchamp’s Readymades, I will give him credit for his creative thinking and his support of remixing of old common objects into “art”.

Creative Control: A Legal Matter

Copyright laws are set in place to protect the work of artists. Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford argues that these restrictions destroy innovation because they do not allow people to build upon the past.

As Lessig explains in The Future of Ideas, a director of a movie must clear absolutely everything on the set with lawyers before showing the film. This includes items in the background that are never brought to the attention of the viewer but still may recognized.

The lawyers insist upon this control because the legal system has taught them how costly less control can be.

• The film Twelve Monkeys was stopped by a court twenty-eight days after its release because an artist claimed a chair in the movie resembled a sketch of a piece of furniture that he had designed.

• The movie Batman Forever was threatened because the Batmobile drove through an allegedly copyrighted courtyard and the original architect demanded money before the film could be released.

• In 1998, a judge stopped the release of The Devil’s Advocate for two days because a sculptor claimed his art was used in the background. These events teach the lawyers that they must control the filmmakers. They convince studios that creative control is ultimately a legal matter.

Interestingly enough, the main topic of Wired this month is remixing.

Everywhere you look, pop culture has been digitized, resequenced, and eassembled. Remixed. It started in music with hip hop samples and extended dance versions. It moved to movies, with director's cuts and Tarantino-style swipes from other films. Now it's spread to TV, games, music videos - even cars and fashion. From Kill Bill to Gorillaz, from custom Nikes to Pimp My Ride, this is the age of the remix.

Can we have an age of remix with the current Copyright Laws? Are these laws holding back the possibilities and envisionments of artists? Let’s not forget that even Picasso created master pieces from recycled newspaper and glue! ©

Pass Day

Open Source News

BBC News 24 capture

Mobile technology is changing the world as we know it. It's pretty incredible to think that such technological advances like camera phones can give people such immense power to truly share their experiences with others. 3G phones give users the ability to become pocket journalists, creating and sending images and videos almost immediately.

In the case of the recent London bombings, everyday people captured and shared their experiences on mobile phones by posting on the Internet (via Flickr and We Are Not Afraid) as well as sending their images to main stream media outlets like the BBC.

"It is a gear change," said the BBC director of news, Helen Boaden, of the public's contribution to the corporation's coverage of the events.

"Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public and we had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful.”

These amateur images give outside viewers powerful and emotionally charged glimpses into the disaster much more so than a typical polished news clip. Witnesses were able to catch images TV crews, because of their complex set-ups, could never capture. This is the first significant account of open source news.

The Digital Divide: Treating the Disabled as People

Life is hard enough for people with sight and motor disabilities, why should the Internet make it harder?

Jacob Nielsen conducted a test on 19 websites; observing 84 users who were either blind or had low vision or motor impairments. His results concluded that general websites treat the disabled 3 times worse than the average user.

Here are a few suggestions when considering web design for disabled users according to NetMechanic:

1. Text Equivalent: Always provide a text equivalent to any information you present with graphics, videos, applets, etc. Use the text to describe the content and/or function, not merely to describe the graphic. If you include a chart that illustrates how company sales rose 300% in only a year, use that descriptive text in your ALT tag ('Sales Up 300% in FY2000!') instead of merely labeling it 'sales chart graphic.'

2. Alternate Navigation: Always provide a text links somewhere on your page if you rely mainly on image maps for site navigation.

3. Color: Don't use color as a primary means to impart information. If you display sale items in red text, try to group them together under a text section header that says: "Sale-Priced Items!" Choose colors and color combinations carefully too: as many as 1 in 12 white males have some sort of color blindness.

4. Links: Clearly label your links as links and describe the destination. Be particularly careful with this if you're using an image as an important link. A graphic of a shopping cart should clearly indicate that it links to the shopping cart page: 'View the contents of your shopping cart' and not merely 'Shopping Cart.'

5. JavaScript Alternative: Remember that some browsers don't support JavaScript or that users may have it disabled. Provide JavaScript alternatives to any critical functions on your Web page.

When you are finished coding, you may check your site for “quality, accessibility, and privacy issues” at Watchfire WebXACT by simply typing in the URL.

Youth Text 2004

Youth Text 2004 is a political tool developed by The Dominion Institute and the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) that began on April 19, 2004. It provides people the ability to engage in politics through their mobile phones via short code numbers for 4 (Conservative, Green, Liberal, and the New Democrats) of the 9 registered political parties in Canada.

Through this initiative, Canadians can interact with the parties and express their views on important political issues. Send a text message to the political movers and shakers of Canada and tell them what you think!

The beauty of a text message campaign is the fact that it is a medium in which responses can be instantaneous. If users, such as blogger Gene Smith don’t get a response right away, the whole premise losses its appeal and most likely discourages youth participation instead of attracting it. There is simply no reason for the Conservatives and the Liberals not to respond as agreed within the 48 hour allotted time period.

To get the 4 main Canadian political parties truly involved, Nokia teamed up with the major party leaders a designated a day, when Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper, Green Party leader Jim Harris, NDP leader Jack Layton and Liberal Party leader Paul Martin personally answered text messages. This does fix the instantaneous problem Gene faced, but only for one day.

I think it would have been better if each party set up a bot to answer text messages by searching within each question for keywords. It would be easier, quicker, and better for the users.

Some Games Never Die

I wanted to share with you a new download available on Orange network phones in the UK. Orange network users are now able to download the Ohio Art Company toy Etch-A-Sketch to their mobile phones. The fun does not stop with drawing and saving one’s masterpieces, the true highlight emulates the notable shaking of the toy to erase the drawing. Mobile phone users simply press 0 button to erase their drawing and the phone vibrates.

You may laugh, but I do have a connection to politics with this. I was speaking with a gentleman the other day about mobile technology use on campaigns and he was describing his experiences pitching candidates the idea of using PDAs when cutting turf. One client thought PDAs were just a glorified Etch-A-Sketches. The story just cracked me up!

For those using computers who are so jealous of these Orange network users, worry not, you can play with Etch-A-Sketch here… and they even have a nice little script to erase the drawing.

Never Be Lost Again!

Have a Java J2ME- enabled mobile phone or other device? If so, you are in luck! Google has rolled out its new Mobile GMaps, which is a free piece of software to throw on your mobile device. It basically allows your device to display the famous Google Maps and keynote satellite imagery.

I foresee technology like this getting people out to the polls. Imagine, on Election Day, a campaign sending people detailed directions and maps to their phones directing them from preciously where they are standing to their precinct station. It may clear up the problem of people getting lost or going to the wrong station and offer a friendly voting reminder for those on the go.

First Mobile Phone to use iTunes?

Engadget

This could very well be a picture of the first phone to be using iTunes Mobile 1.0 ever.

A few anxious Apple fans noticed several new resource files on iTunes 4.9 that provide instructions for possible mobile phone use. I for one very much like what was found.

I’m sorry, I just can’t put down my phone

After reading Change is in the Air in the March 10th edition of The Economist I was frustrated by the fact that when flying I am still told to turn off my phone. The article corrects the misconception of cellular phones interfere with the aircraft’s avionic systems.

Instead, the problem is that airborne mobile phones disrupt mobile networks on the ground. An airliner with 500 phones on board, whizzing across a city, would befuddle the network as the phones busily hopped from one base-station to the next.

Fortunately, someone is doing something about this. Next year the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing plans to lift the ban of mobile phone use on flights.

I know you all are just so excited to over hear my phone conversations on our next flight together.

iTunes Podcasting Update

As of Saturday, June 30th, two days after the release of iTunes 4.9, customers have subscribed to over 1 million Podcasts through its new feature.

I will admit, I really knocked podcasting in the past because I felt it required too much effort on the part of its users and not nearly enough people owned ipods. I do not think iTunes 4.9 quite solves those problems, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“Podcasting is like cappuccino,” said August Trometer, developer of iPodderX. “Gourmet coffee was around for a long time, but it took Starbucks to put it on the map. Apple is like the Starbucks of Podcasting and advertisers will take us more seriously now.”

iTunes 4.9 still requires users to sync their iPods with their computers daily to get the latest Podcasts. I foresee a day when we will be able to break free from our wired world. I want my Podcasts to update my iPod automatically, while I am sleeping, without a physical connection and perhaps also allow content to be sent to other devices like my cell phone.

Bottom Line, Equal Access is not the same as Equal Participation.

Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT stated that

Like many white liberals, I had viewed the absence of explicit racial markers in cyberspace with some optimism-seeing the emerging "virtual communities" as
perhaps our best hope ever of achieving a truly color-blind society.

Though race cannot be determined through an email or web address it does not mean the playing ground is equal.

Some have argued that class, rather than race, may be the strongest indicator of who has access-though we need to recognize that in a society where the average black family income is roughly half that of the average white family income, race and class are not easily separable.

What may look like race inequalities are in actuality inequalities in class, which is also known as the digital divide when speaking about Internet connectivity.

Like Jenkins, I have faith in an emerging technological area, mobile technology. Wired Magazine reported that 24% of African American households are cell phone only and in many cases that phone also serves as the only source of an internet connection. Mobile technology is more affordable and prevalent and therefore increases access.

3 Things That Will Help Make a Text Message Campaign Catch On

1- Encourage interaction. Reward people for using it by providing a coupon, contest, or an invitation to an event.

2- Use a Short Code that is relevant to the context of the campaign. Make it easy on the user.

3- Make signing up and opting-out seamless. Again, make it easy on the user.

RB and His New Digs

My favorite, Russell Buckley, has left the Mobile Technology Weblog and has started a new blog called MobHappy.