Blog lite: Offline until tomorrow. Note to self: If you ever get a chance to return to Annapolis for more than 20 hours, do it. And hope the weather is as beautiful as it is today. Note to joggers visiting Annapolis (and thanks to the person who told me): if you carry along a photo ID, you can jog around the perimeter of the Naval Academy, a most impressive run.

Looping: When the Christian Science Monitor ran the 2004-version of the hackneyed “product placement goes to print” story, it wasn’t news. Today, when they recycle yet again the 2005-version of the hackneyed “product placement goes to print” story, it still isn’t news. In 2006, it won’t be either.

By the way, when are the folks at the Monitor going to drop the brand name of a that religious denomination from their name as it appears to be a product placement to some observers?

Travel day: Despite my unsuccessful attempts to label all trips “unnecessary” and therefore follow presidential suggestions to cut back on travel, I am once more in the air. Which reminds me, a while back, I made an obscure reference to a small item in the September issue of Business 2.0 magazine and said something like, “it is about how I pack my underwear.” It actually is a small (brief?) item about how I pack using this Eagle Creek stuff and if you’re a subscriber, you can read it here. However, the article does not actually say anything about my underwear.

Storm porn: (From Mark Glaser’s OJR piece, “Six lessons from online coverage of Hurricane Rita”) “It’s storm porn,” Simon told me. “Quit hyping it, quit standing in the middle of it, and tell people where the shelters are and inform people. Don’t stand out there in the wind. If you’re going to do that, then get an inflatable monkey and put it out there and let it blow around. Anderson Cooper is no better than a crash-test dummy when he’s doing that.”

Here’s something we can all do to support the hurricane relief effort - eat out: On October 5, 2005, restaurants across the country are joining together in a “Dine for America” day, a national fundraising project to support the American Red Cross’ Gulf Coast hurricanes efforts. Already, over 15,000 restaurants have signed on to participate, including 20 restaurants in Nashville, with more being added daily. To find a restaurant near you that is participating, visit this directory on the Dine for America website, DineForAmerica.org.

tags: katrina, rita, dine for america

100 most misspeled, mispelled, and misspelled words: Last week, after I bragged about a team from Hammock Publishing winning the Nashville Corporate Spelling Bee, a recently retired blogger pointed out that I misspelled a word in my post. Of course, in the post I noted that one of team’s keys to victory was not inviting me to be on it.

Someone else sent me a link to Dr. Language’s “100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English.” Ironically, one of the most misspelled words is misspell (often misspelled mispell).

Rollyo - wow!: Rollyo.com is
one of those web applications that is so brilliantly obvious you can’t
believe someone hasn’t already done it. It gives you the ability to set
up a narrow search parameter of up to 25 websites of your choice (a “searchroll” — get it, like a “blogroll”), name
it, and even share it.

As a test, I’ve set up a narrow search (okay, a “searchroll”) of
some of the magazine-related web resources I use and named it
“Rexblog’s magazine resources.” Say, if you want to search for
“circulation scandal,” and you just want to search a universe of
magazine-industry related websites, it would be a good place to start.
As soon as I figure out how to, I’ll link directly to it. You can find it by going to my rollyo profile page

Rollyo
uses Yahoo! APIs for the actual search function. You can export a
blogroll and set up a search for that parameter of websites, for
example.

As search engines continue to brag about indexing
billions of sites, this takes search in the opposite direction. Just
search the 25 or fewer sites you trust (or someone who is an expert in
that topic trusts).

This is big. Actually, it’s small. Actually, it’s big because it is small.

Update: Okay, now blogger and rollyopreneur Dave Pell has blogged it and points to Gary Price’s explanation.

(via: lots of folks, but not, ironically, media blogger and Rollyo founder Dave Pell.)

tags: rollyo, web search, search, search engines

Tomorrow is the First Anniversary of the Era of Podcasting: Podcasting did not actually start one year ago tomorrow*. However, on September 28, 2004, Doc Searls presented an overview of podcasting on his IT Garage weblog in which he included a Google search of the word “podcasts” and came up with 24 results (today, that word results in over 60 million mentions).

One year.

Why is “podcasting” as a notion, as a concept, as a word, so universally used (and misused) in just 12 months?

Here are some reasons:

It is a simple notion utilizing universally available, free and open-source software: it’s merely enclosing an audio file in an RSS feed post.

It has an inspired, now-impossible-to-trademark, generic name that drafts off the trademark of one of the world’s most desired consumer electronics products among marketers’ most coveted demographic. And with unprecedented wisdom and to my amazement, the Apple lawyers didn’t sue anyone over the word “podcast.”

Most importantly: As noted here last year, the brand managers and marketing gurus and “faux garage start-ups” and VC firms and media brands, despite their near-immediate dive-in reaction time, still entered the arena too late to screw up the early weeks and months of podcasting.

Even when Apple blessed it and validated it and introduced the “outside” world to podcasting, even they were too late to screw it up (totally).

So, just for the record on this anniversary, I want to once more say:

Before the coming podcasting boom and bust, it was just a grassroots notion. Before we cycle through the inevetiable macro-myopic journey of over-expectation and disappointment, I want to say once more that podcasting is going to greatly disappoint lots of people who think it’s about the money.

To think it’s about the money is to think e-mail is a business model (it is, of course, for some, including spammers). To think it’s about the money is to think instant messaging is a business model (it is for some adullt businesses and certainly has some customer service applications). But a pure-play business model?

Podcasting will be the platform (and notion) on which some people will increase their fortunes and new fortunes will be created. But not likely in a way you’ll see on a business plan. Podcasting has the potential to destroy other existing fortunes. There will be podcasting marvels and scams and spams and scandals (payola?). Podcasting will lead to things we haven’t even thought about today.

One thing is certain: Podcasting (RSS feeds with enclosed media files) is a notion that will be in the DNA of generations of future media. Including the kind where it’s just a few people sharing a conversation.

Happy anniversary.

*The “birthdate” of podcasting is one of those topics that is best debated someplace likeWikipedia. In other words, not here. Here on the rexblog I will continue to call September 28, 2004 the beginning of the “era of podcasting” to mark a date related to when the awareness trajectory of podcasting turned skyward. As for the actual birthday, I need no debates. For me, it’s whatever date Dave Winer says it is.

tags: podcasting

The life of a professional blogger: If you were a fulltime, professional blogger like Brittney, you could go hang out at Centennial Park looking for someone with a laptop who has discovered the city’s most amazing free hotspot. And then you could post to your blog from the park. Ain’t life grand when you’re a professional blogger?

What Matt McAlister said: “It’s no surprise then that people jumped to RSS to control information flow. We are telling the creators of information that we want filters, we want flow control, and we want those controls in our own hands. It’s the era of syndication and subscriptions. I’ll tell you what information I want, and then you come find me with the right data in the right place at the right time. “

Dixie Chicks respond: All the proceeds from the sale of I Hope (iTunes link), which is only available via download, will be donated to Habitat For Humanity and the American Federation of Musicians Gulf Coast Relief Fund. Also available at: Sony Connect, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, SonyMusicStore.com, MSN and Napster.

The former quarterback controversy update: Larry Woody, writing this morning in the Tennessean, has an understatement-for-the-ages from head coach Phil Fulmer about Rick Clausen’s performance in last night’s game: “I may have underestimated him a lot. Obviously.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tennessee football, here is the quote Fulmer should have provided the press: “I’d like to get down on my knees and thank Rick because he’s the only reason I won’t find a ‘For Sale’ sign on my front lawn tomorrow morning. I’ve decided to name him starting quarterback for life. Oh, did I mention retiring his jersey?”

A marketing idea: The Great American Country cable company has announced it is re-locating from Denver to Nashville.

As the brand “The Nashville Network” has been abandoned by Viacom, perhaps “GAC” can lay claim to it.

If that fails, I think they should purchase the naming rights to the arena and rename it “The Great American Country” Center. That way, people could stop calling it the GEC (Gaylord Entertainment Center - a sponsorship that has ended), and start calling it the GACC.

Actually, I think it would be a dumb idea for them to purchase naming rights of the arena, however I think it would be great idea for everyone to start calling the arena, the GACC anyway.

How many pages does Google search? I’m guessing 9,620,000,000: Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org points to this NYT story by John Markoff who reports that Google has removed from its front page the number of pages it searches.

Quote:

“…the company is challenging users to guess the number of pages the service searches after phasing in a larger index and has removed the latest number ‘8,168,684,336′ from the home page.

Okay. I accept the challenge.

First, I’ll search for a random series of letters that don’t exist on any page. For example, “stacikramer*paidcontent” (except in my test search, I left out the asterik so that when Google indexes this page, my demo will still work).

Okay, now that I know those series of letters return no results - in other words, there are zero pages with that series of letters appearing on it, I will do a “negative search” on the series: “-stacikramer*paidcontent”

In theory, the number of pages that Google can find without that series of letters is equal to all of the pages it searches: 9,620,000,000 as of a few minutes ago.

Or, at least, that’s the theory. However, multiple searches reveal different totals ranging from 9,580,000,000 to 9, 620,000,000.

Credit for me learning about this goofy hack goes to Tara Carishan who credits these folks.

Fantasy league: According to USA Today, the NFL suspension of Travis Henry provides salary cap relief so that the Titans can find a replacement. Ed-deee. Ed-deee.

I’m sorry, I was just swept up in the sports cliché of the previous post.