CTO Connection podcast #2: Jon Williams

Update: Wanted to note again that the podcast feed is here.

I am excited to roll out the second CTO Connection podcast, featuring Jon Williams, CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions and co-founder (with Igor Shindel) of the NY CTO Club. In this podcast, Jon and I talk about the "breakthrough" required to become a CTO, what it takes to move from being a pure hands-on technologist to more of a manager, the story behind the NY CTO Club and how to start your own, and finally, a bit about guitar-playing (something both Jon and I enjoy). I always enjoy talking with Jon and I'm really glad you will be able to hear his distinctive Aussie voice for yourself (he's also shown up in a couple of my columns over the past year: here and here). I'm really pleased with how this one came out (aside from some unfortunate Skype garble).

For those of you who missed the first CTO Connection podcast with Mike Dunn of Hearst Interactive and want more detail on my technical setup, my experience with properly licensing "podsafe" music, etc, be sure to read the background. I kept the same technical setup for this one as the first one.

One technical note: I've concluded that while Skype is really great for informal phone calls, using it as the platform for recorded interviews is simply ill-advised. I'm pretty sure this will be the last interview I do with Skype. Frankly, the people I'm interviewing (and planning to interview) are too busy to repeat the key moments that are ruined by Skype jitter/flutter and I feel like I'm insulting busy listeners if I force them to listen to garbled conversation (even when it is very sporadic). I haven't gotten any specific complaints about this from listeners or interviewees, it's just something that bugs me about the first two. This is one area where the Principle of Good Enough doesn't apply -- either you hear words clearly, or you don't.

Podcast vertigo

As I've gotten deeper into podcasting (both listening and producing my own CTO Connection podcast), I've realized that I simply don't have the same blogosphere bearings I've grown to rely on so much -- those key bearings that allow me to participate in the conversation. You know, the trackbacks, the backlinks, my Technorati cosmos, my PubSub subscription. . . and as the absolute last resort, the occasional decidedly old-school Google search. As it stands, I'm suffering from a serious case of podcast vertigo.

I don't even exist on Podscope (at least as of this writing). Through a stroke of PubSub subscription luck and the undying love of easily-searched textual metadata from diligent podcast producers, I was able to divine that Shel Holtz had mentioned my name on the latest "For Immediate Release" podcast, but I would have missed it without their well-annotated show notes that were so gracefully indexed by PubSub, and I still had to listen to a good chunk of the 75-minute podcast to get the context. Fashioning a response to this mention (and it was merely a passing mention relating to this column, but I still appreciate it) would have meant re-listening to the relevant section, transcribing it, putting it into context myself (textually), then offering my own input into the conversation. That's a lot more work than noticing that someone linked back to me via my Technorati or PubSub ego feed and typing out a thoughtful response.

I think what Dave wrote today about how podcasts differ from blogs is really illuminating: Podcasts can go deep. If blogs are the noisy college bar where dozens of people are vying for your attention all at once, podcasts are the intense one-on-one 3am conversations in your dorm room that require your full attention. Maybe the tools don't exist just yet to reach deep into podcasts so we can keyword search and find mentions of our own names and pull quotes out of context to comment on them and find out what people are saying about our products. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- maybe the beauty of podcasts is that we are forced to step away from our hyper-efficient RSS news aggregator world and actually listen for once.

Advertising -- pay attention!

If you've ever worked in a business that gives you an up-close view of the behind-the-scenes machinery of the world of advertising/marketing/branding/etc., this Onion story should provide a few knowing chuckles. The headline is National Advertising Board launches 'Advertising: Get the Message!' campaign:

NEW YORK -- In an effort to raise the individual American's awareness of and interest in advertising, the National Advertising Board launched a $32-million "Advertising: Get The Message!" campaign in major markets across the country Monday.

"From lifesaving drugs to new diet beverages, advertising keeps you informed about the products and services you want to buy," a spokeswoman said in a 30-second spot titled "Keep An Eye Out For Ads." "But advertising can't work for you if you don't pay attention!"

Read the rest (and if you're in advertising and this story isn't actually funny, I have a book you should read).

Forrester numbers on podcasting

From Charlene Li at Forrester:

I realized that I hadn't written about Forrester's podcasting forecast. It makes a little appearance in The Future Of Digital Audio report that my colleague, Ted Schadler wrote in March (available to clients only). He looks at podcasting as a "time-shifted audio experience" with adoption driven by a combination of broadband penetration and MP3 ownership. 2005 forecast is 300,000 US households using, rising to 12.3 million US households by 2010. This feels about right -- that will be 36% of all MP3 owners in 2010 that also use podcasts.

Those are significant numbers -- when any of my traditional media colleagues ask me why I am "playing" with podcasts, they should think about those numbers (I also remember that my traditional media colleagues were asking me why I was "playing" with the Internet back in '93).

Incidentally, with the consistent praise being heaped upon "time-shifting" technologies and products, it's interesting to note that a recent ESPN study suggests that most people (or at least "non-early-adopters") don't want DVRs for various reasons. (According to Tivo's 8-K filed in March 2004, there are only 1.3 million subscribers to the service. . . I say "only" because I can not imagine living without mine).

Speaking of podcasts, expect the next installment of my CTO Connection podcast by the end of the week.

Web services: hype vs. reality

From Barry Briggs, a quote from an interview with Harvard Business School Associate Professor Andrew P. McAfee regarding the hype and reality of web services:

...the hype is unrealistic. It is in fact getting easier to integrate applications, but it's never going to be easy. There are two reasons for this: one technical; one organizational.

The technical problem is that any two applications are virtually guaranteed to contain dissimilar data and execute dissimilar business processes. One might store dates as DD/MM/YYYY and put the date first in the purchase orders it sends out; the other might store dates in the MM/DD/YYYY format and expect the date to be the first field in any electronic purchase order it receives. Before any systems integration can take place, these dissimilarities need to be resolved. There is no magic bullet in the Web services toolkit that does this automatically or quickly.

The organizational challenge comes as all stakeholders get together and hammer out common definitions. This might not seem like the kind of work that leads to disputes, but it is. In most companies, questions like the following would lead to heated discussions:

• Who's got the real customer contact information? Who gets to access it? Who gets to update it?
  
• What's the last day for bookings in each quarter? Is it the same all around the world?

• Do we have to do a credit check before scheduling every order for production?

• Who gets to certify approved vendors? What's the process for adding a vendor to the list?
  

I'm tempted to fully quote Barry's thoughts on the matter right here, but then you probably wouldn't go to his blog and read his thoughts directly (and then subscribe to his RSS feed ). Bottom line: web services and SOA are good, but they do nothing to help with the most difficult IT problems, which all deal with the thorny issues of semantics.

Repeat after me: no silver bullet.

Syndicate - Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting panel notes

Update: Nathan Weinberg recaps the panel.

One interesting tidbit sticks out from the Beyond Words panel I moderated a little while ago. Since we had David Payne (GM of CNN.com) on the panel and we were talking about new ways of distributing multimedia content (principally podcasts), I decided to ask him what he thought about BitTorrent. Before I did that, I asked the audience to raise their hands if they had seen the infamous Jon Stewart episode of Crossfire. Then I asked how many people saw it on their computers via BitTorrent or other non-TV means of distribution -- pretty much everyone in the room. Not really a surprise, but worth noting.

Syndicate - Voices from Within panel notes

The Voices from Within panel here at Syndicate is done -- Doc liked it and raised an interesting question as Tim Bray talked about Sun's broad blogging initiatives: If it had been available, would we have seen blogging at Microsoft or Sun back in the days when those companies were "winning?". Interesting perspective. The consensus in the room was "probably not."

I really enjoyed this panel from my moderator's vantage point on the stage (just couldn't blog and moderate at the same time), but I was particularly pleased that the audience jumped in with questions early on and we had some real conversation among the panelists as well as between the panelists and the audience. It wasn't perfect, but I hope it generally avoided the panel-itis that Mary Hodder described a few weeks ago.

Syndicate - Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting

My second panel on Wednesday at Syndicate is Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting with David Berlind of ZDNet (blogs here, here, and here), David Payne of CNN.com, Mike Dunn from Hearst Interactive (blog here, vlog here, and more here), and Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! Search. (Mike already blogged a bit about our pre-panel call last week -- thanks, Mike). I'm particularly excited about this one, since I launched my own CTO Connection podcast last week and personally immersed myself in many of the issues we will be discussing in this panel. (Important note: this session isn't going to be just about podcasting because the concepts behind RSS distribution of podcasts apply more broadly to other forms of multimedia.)

First, if you are new to podcasting, I'll pass along a couple of recommendations from Mike Dunn that were useful to me: Bloggercon III - Podcasting Session by Adam Curry and the SXSW Podcasting Session, both from IT Conversations.

Some of the areas we will likely touch on:

What is a podcast? Why this is different from radio and vanilla mp3 files -- touch briefly on the relationship of RSS, enclosures, podcatcher, and player (would like to emphasize that we're not just talking about iPods here). I don't want this session to get too deep into technical minutiae, but also want to demystify the technical concept a bit so we can move on from it.

Why is podcasting a threat to traditional media? Time-shifted media versus streaming, control issues, audience measurement, etc. As David Berlind said recently, "Time is a zero-sum game."

Who is the audience for podcasts? As serious consumers of podcasts, I'm sure Mike Dunn and David Berlind will have plenty to say about this topic.

Blogs vs. podcasts. Right now, we have the first generation of tools (Technorati, PubSub, et. al.) that help bloggers determine who is linking to their sites, what is being said about their blogs, etc. How (and when) do we get there with audio and video content?

Quality. Podcasting is "easy" and the barriers to entry are lower than ever. Does quality and editing still matter? Can quality be a differentiator? What kind of money does it take to produce high-quality audio? (Just today, I listened to David Berlind being interviewed about the challenges of podcasting -- we might reprise some of what David said in that podcast).

BitTorrent. What does it mean that Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire was reportedly seen by more people via iFilm and BitTorrent than on CNN, the actual broadcast network?

Subscription models for rich media. Just today, CNN.com announced that it will make its formerly for-pay video clips free, so I hope David will talk a bit about the thinking behind that decision in terms of what it suggests for the business models of video providers like CNN.

Video search and standards: Barely two weeks ago, Video Search graduated from beta to its 1.0 release. Yahoo! is developing the Media RSS spec to make indexing and retrieval of video content easier (Media RSS FAQ here and post on the subject to Yahoo! Search Blog from Jeremy Zawodny here). Expect Bradley Horowitz to talk a bit about how Yahoo is leveraging Media RSS and their search crawler technologies to index multimedia content from traditional media companies all the way down to the thinnest end of the long tail -- and what that means.

Who is going to make money with podcasts, and how? Or will people make money because of their podcasts (as Doc Searls suggests with blogs?)

I'm looking forward to it -- should be a lot of fun.

Syndicate - Voices From Within: Harnessing the Power of the Individual

As I wrote before, I'm moderating two panels at the Syndicate conference on Wednesday. I won't be able to make it to the sessions on Tuesday, because InfoWorld is having its second SOA Executive Forum just uptown at the Parker Meridien and I'm doing the CTO Reality Check panel there.

The first Syndicate panel for me is Voices from Within: Harnessing the Power of the Individual, where I will be joined by Jon Udell, Tim Bray, and JD Lasica (congrats to JD on the release of his new book, Darknet). Below are some thoughts on where the panel might go, keeping in mind that the purpose of Syndicate according to the conference planners is "for senior publishing executives, corporate marketing professionals and related professionals (advertising, public relations, intellectual property experts) to learn about these emerging technologies [e.g. RSS, Atom, OPML, et. al.], understand the social trends driving syndication, and inform their business strategies to take advantage of new opportunities." I can't promise we'll cover all of these or that they won't change completely by the time we do our panel.

[Update: When Denise Howell linked back to this post and noted that I was going to talk about many of the issues she had been discussing, I realized that I forgot to mention that I listened to her IT Conversations podcast about corporate blogging (with guests George Lenard, Steve Rubel and Jeff Seul) for inspiration when preparing for the panel. Definitely check it out if this subject is of interest to you. Thanks, Denise!]

When and why did you start blogging? How blogging helps you in your work, helps you as a journalist / software developer / etc.

Tools of the trade: Walk us through a specific experience where you used a collection of the new tools to accomplish something important to you and your company that would not have been possible before you were blogging.

Corporate blogging policies. Tim helped draft a policy for Sun. Jon took the "just do it" approach to blogs, i.e. we gave him space on the server to move his existing blog and he started publishing to InfoWorld. Big law firms are issuing legal alerts to employers about blogging. The EFF is urging employees to blog anonymously. What is to be made of all this?

Blogging at Sun: Among large public companies, Sun seems to be uniquely blog-friendly, with the rare company President (Jonathan Schwartz) blogging regularly. Schwartz posted first in late June 2004, just weeks after Tim posted the draft of the corporate blogging policy mentioned above. What happened inside Sun between the time Tim was hired on March 15 and the time Jonathan Schwartz started blogging in June?

Criticizing one's employer in a blog. On April 22, Tim wished the "The Wrath of Heaven" upon vendors who use the word "solution" to describe "disk drives, network routers, printers, computers, or pretty well anything that contains silicon and plugs." Generic enough, but then Tim took Sun to task: ". . . I looked at our front page and it still contains four instances of that vile word “solution”, plus more in the menus, plus it infests the rest of the site like aphids on a rose-bush. Bah. Dear world, take it from me: at Sun we sell actual real computers and networks and consulting and infrastructure services and software subscriptions; you can safely ignore the marketing-speak." I'd like to hear more from Tim about how the culture at Sun developed to a point where this level of frankness was not only tolerated, but (presumably) encouraged.

Starting corporate blogging: content and tone. OK, so your company has decided that it needs to start blogging. What makes a good blog, and what type of content and tone should be avoided? To me, an example of a not-so-good corporate blog is the Google blog, which seems a little forced and disingenuous at times. On the positive side, the GM Fastlane blog can be surprisingly candid, like this recent post. There’s no denying that we’re going through some tough times right now. It seems like every day I read or hear news stories that focus on the negative. I won’t say that it’s all undeserved. However, every once in a while there’s a good news story that I wish would get a little more attention. There it is: that mix of pride and we-could-do-better feeling that real employees of real companies seem to share.

Grassroots media: What can businesses learn from the kind of grassroots efforts we are seeing via sites like Ourmedia?

Wikipedia: This panel is about harnessing the power of the individual, and Wikipedia is a unique phenomenon in this regard. Why is Wikipedia significant to this audience?

Blogs as recruiting tools: Finding talent is as difficult as ever. How have you used blogs to help your company attract employees, evaluate business partners, etc.?

What are your 2-3 favorite blogs and why? What companies are doing a good job in respect to employee blogs?

If anyone has any thoughts on these topics, wants to shoot them down or add your own, send them my way. (chad_dickerson at infoworld dot com).

My Mac's biggest usability problem

I can't tell you how annoying it is when the CD eject on my G5 doesn't work. I have nothing in my CD drive -- I'm just trying to open it to burn a CD. The eject button on the top right doesn't work (I've got an Apple keyboard), then when I go into iTunes, the "Eject" command in the Controls menu does nothing.

I've got the latest-and-greatest Mac running a thoroughly-updated Panther that can engage in all sorts of magical wizardry, but I can't make my CD drive eject. This is truly lame (whatever happened to that old paper clip trick on old Macs?)

A reboot always seems to do the trick, but that's a silly solution. . . but here goes anyway.

(I'm sure someone is going to write to me and say, "Just do this, you dummy," but really, should ejecting a CD require any voodoo whatsoever?)

Update: My former CNN colleague and old friend Paul Beard sent me an e-mail (subject line: "voodoo") to point me to a useful command line tool that is available on my Panther machine (check the man page if you want more details):

drutil tray eject | open | close

Thanks, Paul (but can't Apple do better than this?)

CTO Connection: the audio edition launches!

Several weeks ago, both I and Mike Dunn hinted at something we had in the works, and the time has come to launch a new venture I am really excited about: CTO Connection, the audio edition. The first installment is an interview with Mike, and you can download the audio here, or subscribe to my new podcast feed (more on how I built the feed later). The fact that I still consider this project to be "in beta" with a few jagged edges might obscure the hours and hours I put into creating it, but in the end, I decided to accept some of the nagging imperfections and surface this experiment to get the feedback loop going.

I explain the thinking behind my new podcast series in this week's InfoWorld column (quoted in full below for your RSS full-text feed-reading pleasure):

When I think about my early introduction to Linux more than 10 years ago, the specific steps required to compile the kernel on an old 486 escape me, but I very clearly remember spirited late-night talks over coffee with the helpful co-worker who introduced me to Linux. In my current role at InfoWorld, my regular conversations with other CTOs continue to mold my thinking, both in terms of strategic technology and personal growth. Aside from small nuggets of those conversations in my weekly column and in my Weblog, much of the content of those conversations has been lost to unrecorded history, even though I'm certain you'd find many of these dialogues every bit as enlightening as I have. But I've decided to change all that.

Thanks to the relatively new phenomenon of podcasting, I'm now able to capture and distribute those conversations with other CTOs and share them with you on a regular basis. For the uninitiated, Wikipedia defines podcasting as "a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically."

After four years of writing this column for the magazine and the Web, I'm pleased to announce that I'm launching an audio edition of CTO Connection, an interview series where I sit down with a working CTO and discuss the business of running and managing IT, career issues, and the mindset required to be a successful CTO. I'm hoping that this audio series will give you a peek into the kinds of behind-the-scenes conversations I have with CTOs so you can learn from them in the same way I have during the past four years. I'm looking forward to sharing the thoughts of CTOs in their own words with you.

We won't be talking about technology alone, because I don't think the path to being a successful CTO is paved purely through technical proficiency -- a balanced point-of-view is essential. CTOs are multidimensional people with passions and interests that extend beyond technology, so expect to hear a little about what CTOs do for fun.

For the first installment of the audio edition of CTO Connection, I spoke with Mike Dunn, vice president of interactive media at Hearst Interactive, a founding member of InfoWorld's CTO Advisory Council and an enthusiastic blogger. Mike's career includes stints as the CTO of Time Warner and as the first CTO of Dell's (Profile, Products, Articles) category-leading online business.

As a fellow media CTO, Mike has given me excellent advice on a number of occasions about everything from content management to collaboration technologies and techniques. As an avid consumer and sometimes-producer of podcasts, Mike inspired me to make the leap into audio and diligently worked with me to get this series off the ground.

In our conversation, Mike and I talk about how to make the transition from hands-on technologist to CTO, what Mike is learning from the ways that his kids use technology, why podcasting is important, and a little about snowboarding -- one of Mike's passions (and a personal failure of mine). You can download the 40-minute interview as an MP3 file from my Weblog. Thanks for reading -- and now, listening.

Here is some more background on the podcasting process, at least as it developed for me.

My prior experience with audio

First, a little background on my experience with audio production. While I don't consider myself a pro by any means, I have probably dabbled in audio production a bit more than the average person. Going into this process, I had some high-end headphones (Sennheiser HD280 Pro), a couple of Shure SM57 mics with all the assorted cables and adapters, mic stands, a USB audio interface (the M-Audio MobilePre), a basic sense of setting line levels, and some experience with multi-track recording, first with the Roland VS-880 (a hardware unit with which I have struggled mightily over the years) and more recently with Logic Express on OS X. For summer vacation last year, I spent a few days fooling around with recording equipment -- and I considered it an absolutely superb vacation. This is what I consider "fun."

Interview setup

When I started the process, I initially decided that I wanted to go for the "easy" and "simple" approach so that when I released the podcast, my effort would serve as a model for quick-and-dirty podcasting. As I got deeper, I found myself growing more dissatisfied with the production quality. Since the core of my podcast was going to be the interview with Mike, I decided to capture the interview first and build around it, adding elements like background music and voice-overs later on. I knew that Mike used Skype and I had a cheap Telex USB headset, so I decided to use that to conduct the interview, following Glenn Fleishman's very thorough and excellent explanation of how to capture Skype audio with OS X (also, be sure to take a look at Hugh Schotman for more detail on this kind of setup). As you will hear, the interview audio, though a bit "tinny" at times, is generally not that bad considering the inexpensive setup I was using. There are occasional bits of Skype-related distortion and the levels of my and Mike's voices aren't quite what I would like always. Occasionally, you'll hear me unconsciously exhale a bit harshly into my cheap Telex mic, which can be annoying to the listener (especially to the listener who is editing the audio, i.e. me.) I am hoping that the hours spent listening to and editing the interview audio have mostly cured me of that tendency (the second interview I did -- to be announced later -- does sound better in that regard).

Music

I'm an obsessive music fan, and when I first started thinking about this podcast, theme music was surprisingly high up on the list of problems to solve. I was driving around one day listening to Deee-Lite's World Clique album (known mostly for the cut "Groove is in the Heart," which is indeed a song for the ages) and decided that a sample from the song "E.S.P" would be perfect (the section between 0:15 to 0:30), though I knew that licensing would be difficult. I decided to check out licensing through traditional channels like ASCAP. Whoa. Since InfoWorld.com is a revenue-producing entity, I was looking at a license fee in the mid five-figures (or higher) which was too high a price to pay for what amounted to an experiment. Not satisfied to have no music, I began some Google digging and came across Doug Kaye's posts about the subject (here and here) and that nudged me towards Magnatune, an innovative Internet-based record label (read founder John Buckman's "Why I Created Magnatune Records" for the full scoop). For those of you not familiar with Magnatune, their tagline is "we are not evil," and when I sent an e-mail to John inquiring about licensing Magnatune music for my "commercial" podcast ("commercial" in all ways but the critical "making money" part), I got a decidedly non-evil response with an extremely reasonable offer to license the music, which I accepted (be sure to listen to the IT Conversations interview with John Buckman here). The deal with John and Magnatune set off a binge of music-listening that eventually led me to sample a bit of Electric Frankenstein's song "New Rage" for the lead-in music to my podcast. Ultimately, I would have liked to have spent more time listening to the eclectic Magnatune catalog and working music into my podcast more fluidly, but it was starting to distract me from my original intention: producing a compelling interview show. In any case, I came away from my dealings with Magnatune utterly impressed -- I encourage any music fan out there to support them. Not only did John deal with my request quickly and thoughtfully, he freely gave me a lot of detail about a presentation he is giving at RedHat Summit 2005 on June 1st entitled "Surviving Slashdot" in which he describes some the limitations of the LAMP platform from his experiences with Magnatune (John is also CEO of Lyris, probably the oldest and best-known commercial provider of high-performance e-mail list management software and services). [Update: John Buckman wrote to let me know that he sold Lyris on Monday. Congrats!]

Editing, voice-overs, and mixing

I wanted to do some simple editing of the audio I had gathered in the interview, and a few searches led me to Amadeus, a simple waveform editor for OS X. Amadeus turned out to be a nice tool for quickly snipping out bits of audio. (I found the sample editor in Logic to be a little too slow for my tastes.) Unfortunately, Amadeus only accepts AIFF files for editing, so I had to convert my lossy mp3 file from my Skype session to AIFF, which is far less than ideal. Live and learn, right? In any case, by the time I had completed the interview portion and got deep into editing it, I decided that I was no longer satisfied with the sound provided by my cheap Telex USB headset, so I recorded the parts before and after the interview with the Shure SM57 mics running through my M-Audio MobilePre going into Logic Express. I could go on endlessly about mics (try this if you're interested), but I have always heard over the years that the SM57 is a good all-purpose mic, and I just happened to have a couple on hand. There are better mics, of course, and I'm actively evaluating a few options. I'll save that discussion for later. In any case, the voice-overs with the SM57 setup are superior to what you will hear with the Telex USB headset setup I used for the interview. I dumped the edited AIFF file of the interview with Mike into one track on Logic Express.

Overall, I ended up with six tracks of audio: 1) the intro music, 2) my voice-over with the intro music saying "You're listening to CTO Connection. . . ", 3) my voice intro about the interview with Mike, 4) the interview itself (both my and Mike's voice were on the same track because of the Skype setup, 5) the outro music, and 6) my closing comments on the interview. I did some minimal mixing on the tracks and bounced it to the stereo 96kbps mp3 you will hear as the final podcast.

Posting the final product

As luck would have it, we're still running Movable Type 2.63 here at InfoWorld, which doesn't natively support RSS enclosures out of the box (check out MT-Enclosures for one option). While upgrading to 3.x is on our list, I decided it would be simpler to run my current RSS feed through Feedburner's SmartCast service, which converts the first link to an audio file into an enclosure. My Feedburner SmartCast podcast feed is therefore at http://feeds.feedburner.com/infoworld/dickerson/podcasts.

Looking ahead

Serendipitously, I had the pleasure of being invited to a lunch with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations a few weeks ago, right after I had done the first interview with Mike Dunn (Kevin McKean, our CEO, had been talking to Doug about helping us produce InfoWorld-related audio content). I explained to Doug some of the trouble I had with my Skype setup and he suggested that I take a look at a "digital hybrid," a piece of hardware that separates the audio from two sides of a phone conversation into separate tracks. Digital hybrids are used by call-in radio shows with either regular analog lines or PBX systems. As I understand it, when you separate the two sides of the conversations into separate tracks, it makes it much easier to clean up either side of the conversation, adjust the levels, clean up noise, etc. Also, one side of the conversation (usually the person on the other end of the phone) is usually quieter, and digital hybrids help you adjust for that. I'll be checking out at least one digital hybrid very soon, so look for another post on that subject. Doug also gave me some advice on microphones and other equipment and pointed me to the public IT Conversations wiki. As I get deeper into production quality issues, I'll post my thoughts as I get my hands dirtier and dirtier.

Finally, I'm tagging interesting podcasting items in del.icio.us with the tag podcasting. Many of these items point to particular pieces of gear, and some point to content, but all have been useful to me in some way as I've been working on this project.

I never thought I would say this in my role at InfoWorld, but "enjoy the show" -- and let me know what you think.

Syndicate conference in NY next week

Over the past several months, I've been enjoying helping out the IDG World Expo staff as a member of their advisory board for the upcoming Syndicate conference, serving as the track chairperson for day two of the New Syndication Technologies and Publishing track (Scott Rafer of Feedster is chairing day one).

As part of those duties, I'm moderating two panels on May 18: Voices From Within: Harnessing the Power of the Individual with Jon Udell, Tim Bray, and JD Lasica) and Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting with David Berlind of ZDNet (blogs here, here, and here), David Payne of CNN.com, Mike Dunn from Hearst Interactive (blog here, vlog here, and more here), and Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! Search.

I don't think it's going to be difficult to get an interesting discussion going for either panel and while many of the usual suspects are involved in the conference as speakers and advisory board members, I think this conference will very deliberately reach outside of the blogging echo chamber. I agree with Stephen Baker of Business Week's new Blogspotting blog when he writes: The knowledge gap between the blog world's insiders and outsiders is wide enough for six lanes of Hummer traffic.. Scoble links to the BW post above and writes: I'm finding this too. When I talk with audiences I either find people who are very familiar with the blog world (if you know what Technorati is, for instance, you are probably one of those people), while most people just don't know much about our little world at all. Hopefully this conference will help narrow that knowledge gap.

I'll be posting more thoughts on the the conference and my panels as the conference approaches. . . . very much looking forward to it. The potential for some interesting social theater only adds to the sense of anticipation! (Registration is here).

SOA Executive Forum recap

Update: copies of the keynote presentations are here.

Our SOA Executive Forum yesterday went extremely well. I would have blogged more of it, but it seemed like every session I went to was standing room only and I'm not very productive with a laptop standing up (note to self: another reason to get a Tablet PC). The only time my seat was guaranteed was when I moderated the CTO Reality Check panel at the end of the day (report from Ephraim Schwartz here).

Toby Redshaw, CTO of Motorola, was the star of the day in my book. Toby kicked off the day with a keynote (PowerPoint), and I was extremely fortunate to have him on my panel to close the day. You can read the summary of his keynote here, thanks to Phil Windley, and the InfoWorld story here. Toby's presentation style contained useful information, but I admired his delivery, which was peppered with truly funny impromptu asides and a broad range of references to politics, history, sports, and of course, technology. If you need a presenter who entertains and informs, Toby is your guy.

More on the conference:

Keynote (Mark Carges, BEA "Taking SOA from Pilot to Production with Service Infrastructure" (PowerPoint): Phil Windley, InfoWorld.com

"Defining the SOA Platform", "Building Applications on an SOA Platform": InfoWorld TechWatch

"Extending Your Business With SOA": InfoWorld TechWatch, Jeffrey McManus (one of the panelists)

"Defining Business Agility": InfoWorld TechWatch

"Pervasive SOA": InfoWorld TechWatch

"Opportunities and Challenges for the Agile Enterprise": InfoWorld.com

"Services and Contracts": InfoWorld.com, Phil Windley (who moderated the panel)

The SOA Executive Forum hits the east coast in two weeks -- May 17 in NY. Register here.