A NYT reporter meanders through an explanation of podcasting: Despite not quite understanding that syndication via RSS enclosure is the special sauce that makes podcasting podcasting, a NYT reporter attempts to overview the basics of podcasting in Thursday’s paper.

Quote:

Ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, podcasts are essentially do-it-yourself recorded radio programs posted online. Anyone can download them free, and, using special software, listeners can subscribe to favorite shows and even have them automatically downloaded to a portable digital music player.

The first part of that definition, the recording and posting online part, is nothing new. Been around since the birth of the web. Mark Cuban pocketed $1 billion+ for a directory of online audio — okay, it was for a little more than a directory, but my point is, it’s not news, but history, that online audio is available.

Only when you get to the “and even have them automatically downloaded to a portable digital music player” part is the “next, new thingness” of podcasting revealed.

Okay. Perhaps that is too nuanced for the general reader, but, frankly, it’s unfair to all those web radio folks who’ve been doing DIY web-based programming for years.

Also, I guess it is no surprise that a NYT reporter can’t pass up the chance to take a dig at blogging, even when the topic is something else:

Podcasts are the natural technological offspring of Web logs or blogs, those endlessly meandering personal Web musings that now seem to be everywhere online.

I’ll stop my endless meandering there.

I’m loving it: The Not Quite Perfect McDonalds outlet restaurant.

(From The Onion, of course, via Lena, who, for the record, was not quite perfect in her prediction of who’d be booted from American Idol tonight.)

Bill’s cool tools: Editor-extraordinaire Hudge (the reigning North American champion trucking writer, who comments often on the rexblog, and who has put up with me for the past 17 years) is not really the techo-luddite he pretends to be. Why just this evening he recommended one of these hipster gizmos, the Barbie USB, to me (which means Dave Barry probably mentioned it on his blog).

Echostar invests $10 million in Archos: It’s probably because this guy I know keeps showing how cool his Archos 400 is.

(via: Om Malik by way of PaidContent.org)

Google acquires(?) Dodgeball.com: But really…When a public company with a market cap of $64.1 billion “acquires” a two-personcompany, isn’t that more like a “hire” with a signing bonus?

Update: Okay. I’ve come up with the term:

Acq-hire

Update II: I apologize but my seo radar suggests I should include in this post a definition of acqhire:

Acqhire - When a large company “purchases” a small company with no employees other than
its founders, typically to obtain some special talent or a cool concept. (See, also: NFL first round draft signing bonus; book publishing “advance” after publisher bidding-war.)

(via PaidContent)

Speaking of Mr. Roboto: If Brittney really was keeping up the blog scene in Nashville, she’d find an answer to the question that really has Nashville talking these days: Why did Thursday Night Fever replace the image that I’m guessing was artwork from the Louvre with a photo of Barbara Billingsley?

Brittney, queen of all media: Not only is she the world’s first paid full-time local TV blogger (until someone corrects me), she wrote the cover story of this week’s Nashville Scene. (Clarification: No one was “hired” to moderate any sessions at BlogNashville. Everyone voluntered.)

Also, I’m right there with Mr. Roboto — “I am never again typing the word BlogNashville” — except one last time…

Technorati Tags: blognashville

Some sort of promotion for next week’s episode of 24, perhaps? “Fighter jets and a Black Hawk helicopter were scrambled to intercept a high-wing Cessna,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

I predict Marwan is behind it.

Chill out: It’s not cool being hot under the collar, so I’d like to suggest that all my blogging friends stop by Wendy’s this weekend for a free Frosty (no purchase necessary).

(Rexblog trivia: Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas’ first name was Rex.)

Format change? The comment thread on yesterday’s Roboto cam post
is way more entertaining than the usual stuff on the rexblog. It’s
making me think I should convert over to a Live Journal site.