Say goodbye to Twinkies?

Today’s Trade Secrets begins with some bad news about Twinkies, and ends with an idea about an aggregator for Netflix use. More comments and links here later.

The MP3 is ready go go…

I got the top story of the day.
Hi everybody, this is uh… Trade Secrets! I’m Adam Curry, coming to you from Belgium and somewhere on another computer is Dave Weiner.
Trade Secrets, man, here we are . We’re in Seattle talking like we’re… Well, it ain’t exactly like Jamaica, but it’s close. It’s close. It’s like 60 degrees Fahrenheit here, man.
Oh really? What is that centigrade? Here it’s like 14 centigrade, so that’s in the 50 s.
It’s cold and rainy and damp and messy here.
Just like home. Just like home.
Just like it is here. Down home in Seattle.
Where you’re still residing.
How was your first week there, Dave? I don’t know. It was kind of Seattle-like. I changed the… I just changed this morning the time zone for something.
We’re now back in the Pacific time zone officially.
Oh, so wait a minute. So you had… I want to point out to our listeners that even though we’re both very capable, very intelligent human beings, with special skills, Dave’s an excellent developer. I can fly helicopter, sophisticated machinery.
Somehow it was very difficult for the two of us to figure out nine hours time difference.
We’re going to do better next time. You know that.
Yeah, that’s for sure. He’s going to be much better.
So trade secrets. Here we are.
This is our second show.
Dave and I just spoke briefly.
I was on my way back from a conference in the car.
You officially knighted me. You said, “Oh, whatever. You’re the producer on all this stuff. " Which means it’s my responsibility if it all fucks up, right? Well, listen, absolutely. And all the credit goes to you. I was listening to your daily source code thing on one of my walks where… By the way, I love the term " podcasting. " Isn’t that great? Isn’t that fantastic? Yeah. Good term. I did a Google on it and Ben Hammersley seems to have the first use of it.
Ben Hammersley has appropriated almost everything. I’m glad to be able to return the favor to him.
Hey, Ben, if you can hear this, thanks a lot.
Don’t worry. I looked at the server logs and people are listening, Dave. Definitely.
Are they really? Yeah. I saw more than 600 downloads.
Yeah. Well, this one will be even better, I think.
Sorry for today. Are you there? Yeah, I’m listening.
When you say “oops,” stop.
There’s this magic six-minute thing coming up any minute now.
No, no, no. I think we’re going to be okay. It should be all right.
Yeah. You know, it would be great if you took a picture of this sort of all this spaghetti wiring stuff.
I’d love to see what it looks like.
Okay. I’ll do that as we speak.
Anyway, the big news today is Twinkies Maker files for bankruptcy.
And this is something I didn’t know that they employ about 34, 000 people.
Holy crap.
And it says the maker of Hustis Twinkies and Wonder Bread is seeking bankruptcy court protection from its creditors, which is kind of weird, I think . You know, I guess it’s good.
No, what do you think? Well, first of all, I’m shocked . I’m shocked.
This is not just one, but two American icons. Ladies, please, don’t squeeze squeeze in the Wonder Bread.
Wow, that’s outrageous. Does it mention what the problem is? Is this the Enron of snack foods? Is that what we’re at now? It doesn’t say. It doesn’t say.
I’ll tell you one thing. It’s probably not on the acting side .
So, you know, Krispy Kreme is kind of having the same problem . They were riding really, really high and it was sort of like, you’d have to wait for 15, 20 minutes to get your donut at Krispy Kreme, but it was like a party, you know.
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden.
Is it Chapter 11 that they filed? Or is that it? Yeah.
Okay. Well, so then I guess there’s a– So you could probably pick it up.
Yeah, we could pick it up cheap , you know.
For $10 billion, you get all the Twinkies you can eat.
Cool. I would have liked that when I was 12. I was really big into Twinkies. I can’t remember the last time I had a Twinkies.
Well, you know, do you know that there are no Twinkies of all places in the Netherlands that have never heard of a Tw inkie? Really? And I predict that if they find out about Twinkies in the coffee shops of Amsterdam, then we can pull that company out of bankruptcy in no time.
Yeah. Well, and then doing a search on this, they found out there’s like all these different aftermarket products with Twinkies.
Like, you know, there’s deep fried Twinkies, which looks really good.
The trick there is you freeze them before you deep fry them, and that sort of helps the– it not get all like, you know, crazy on the inside.
And then there are women who dress up and go out on the town , and they call themselves Twink ies, and they sort of dress like Twinkies, and it’s nice.
They dress like Twinkies.
They dress like Twinkies.
And they found, you know, not such a bad thing, you know. It looked pretty good. And one of them– one of them– I’ll post this picture on www. scripps. com in a little bit.
But one of them has a little food stain on the front of her dress.
Oh, no.
Now, maybe that’s Twinkies.
Yeah, wow, there’s a little story going on there.
Anyway, all right, so which– by the way, hearing an echo is not really that cool.
Really? Let me just check, see if I can do something about that.
No, it’s probably– you know, I ’ll just turn down my headphones . It’s probably just you coming back through my headphones, which I have.
I like to have them loud. That ’s a DJ problem.
Yeah, it’s a real DJ tick. You turn it up as loud as you can.
And of course, we all go deaf, you know.
Okay, that’s cool. So it’s pretty amazing this works.
Yeah, although once in a while when you really talk loudly, when you modulate, then it cuts out just a little bit.
So I’m wondering if maybe if you just pull back your mic gain or anything, you could change there? Not really. Well, I mean, it can, but– Yeah, okay, well– Wait, there’s a volume control system.
A volume control? Here, one, two, three, four, five. Is it going down? Yeah, this is good. Okay, leave it like that.
So the way we’re connecting as we did with the first show, and this is– it’s pretty cutting- edge stuff.
What we’re doing is I’m using i Chat AV, and we’ve set up a call with AOL’s Instant Messenger.
Now, what’s interesting is that you can’t just use the talk feature.
In fact, it’ll say that, you know, that I don’t support the talk feature.
So we have to actually open up the webcam.
I figured out a way so we have a one-way video chat, so that way I’m pushing out a little bit of bandwidth, and I have my camera covered. I just took a picture, Dave, with a dish rag.
So we’re using as few bits as possible on video connection, just using the audio.
And, you know, I’m routing everything around, and everything seems to be okay.
I’ll knock on wood because my Mac has not been happy since I ’ve been doing all the– I think when you do this audio stuff, it messes up the hard drive somehow, and sectors get real.
Yeah, messed up. And now my computer won’t wake up from sleep.
It’ll wake up and– it’s literally, you know, how your Mac has a personality.
And so it wakes up and it goes, “Oh, I don’t think so. " Click.
It turns off.
Yeah, my Windows machine has personality, too.
Unfortunately, it’s a really shitty personality.
[laughter] And I had the same exact thing happen.
I tried to play The Sims 2, which I got– managed to get it to boot up for like– and run for like one minute or two minutes.
Enough to know that I’m really going to love it, but every time I try to run that thing, it just totally hangs up my system.
Yeah, and I have to reboot twice.
Rebooting once isn’t enough, so you have to like reboot, and then sort of like watch the machine suffer and then reboot again, and then you get your machine back.
And every time something like that happens, the machine gets further and further away from being anything that you want to deal with.
And then what do you eventually wind up doing? I mean, I know what happens with me is I usually wind up getting so frustrated and like, “Oh, time for a new laptop,” and it gets passed down in line.
Exactly.
This machine was the result of a Sony Vio getting into that state, which is now sitting in a little container in my parents' garage in New York City.
I can tell this one’s going there too.
Well, unfortunately, yeah, well the same thing happened to my server.
I tried to run some software up on the new server I put together, and now I can’t bring Frontier to the front without it crashing.
Oh, shoot.
So basically, yeah, it’s one of those situations.
So everything basically has to do that.
So you’re using WebEdit to make changes.
WebEdit, that’s right.
I’m doing all my stuff through WebEdit, which is good discipline.
It sort of keeps my visualization ability active.
Unfortunately, I finally have a NetConnection that is good enough.
In Seattle here, I have a Cable Modem NetConnection, which is pretty good.
And it’s good enough for me to VPN or whatever they call it into that machine.
But now I can’t use it.
Oh, man.
That’s just the way it goes.
Well, maybe once we get Front ier open sourced, we can start addressing some of those kinds of issues and get some good debugging environment in there.
Regarding the Sims, on itcon versations. com, there is– I’m trying to think if maybe I can find it– there’s a whole speech by– what’s the guy’s name? The creator of the Sims? Will Wright.
Will Wright? It could be Will Wright.
And I listened to it.
It’s one of those hour-long deals.
And it was really good.
I mean, because he talked about all the challenges and how they figured it all out.
It was just unbelievable.
Yeah, Will Wright.
Damn.
An hour and 40 minutes.
That’s captivating stuff.
Yeah.
Well, he’s got a lot to say.
I mean, you can see that they spend a little bit more than an hour and 44 minutes putting that game together.
Yeah, it’s also– It’s not really a game.
So, SimXXX has never been about games.
They’re sort of like worlds where you play God.
And you can have a lot of fun.
I read a comment on my blog a year ago.
And it was just after my uncle died.
And I was obviously in a pretty Sims mode at the time.
So, in his honor, I basically called my Sims and I put them in a room.
And I built a– I took out all the doors and windows.
And I let them die.
I didn’t torture them.
I let them starve.
Oh, no.
If I could have– if I could have, I would have cut their heads off slowly.
Oh, man.
And watch them– yeah, it’s like what we want to do with the Zarkali.
Man, is this some fucked up shit or what? Well, they know how to push our buttons, that’s for sure.
Yeah, but it’s not working.
It’s not working.
No one’s going to give into that except– was it Poland? I think not Poland.
One country said we’re out after they were threatened.
Yeah.
Well, I don’t think it’s the threats that are going to get us.
But I think that it’s hard to ignore.
I mean, it’s amazing how, look at this, the argument for being in Iraq is that, you know, we’re there to bring democracy.
And Bush is putting down Kerry because Kerry said, according to Bush, that they would be better off of Saddam Hussein.
And of course, Kerry said, " Does it stay?” And I mean, it’s like– this whole way of arguing is like, I ’m going to put some words in your mouth and then I’m going to just– Oh, did we lose you day-to-day? Hello? Here.
Oh, yeah, you’re back.
Hello.
Yeah.
Okay.
Some guy named Juan Cole, I think was his name.
I’ve pointed to it today.
He wrote a piece that sort of put what’s going on in Iraq in perspective for people in the United States, which is that, you know, if Iraq was doing to us what we were doing to them, they would have 1. 6 million troops in the United States.
And every– You say they don’t already have that number ready.
Sleepy.
Well, I don’t think they do.
I think the Iraqis basically are pretty, you know, they’re pretty screwed.
They got screwed under Hussein and they’re getting screwed pretty badly right now.
A lot of them are dying.
And if you took the proportions , you know, 300 Iraqis are dying every week.
And if you multiply that by 11, which is the ratio of the population of the U. S. to the population of Iraq, that would mean 3,300 Americans would be dying every week, which is just about the number of people who died in 9/11.
But that would be happening every week, weekend, weekend.
How long do you think we could put up with that here? Well, I feel pretty qualified to talk about this, having been in Iraq for 10 days.
And I met and spoke every single day with different Iraq is from a different part of the Southwestern region.
And at the time, they were just so happy to see, you know, to see the troops because, you know, I saw the rebuilding.
I saw the training of the Iraqi police force, the ICBC, which is the cooperative defense force.
I saw work being done on water facilities, A school, A library , but okay, you know, it was a start.
And I think that, you know, exactly what you said is they ’re just fucking tired of this shit already.
You know, thanks.
You know, the Saddam Hussein thing was great.
But now they’re just flipping out.
This has got to stop.
Every person that’s killed, you know, six degrees of separation .
I mean, I know at least two people personally who died in the World Trade Center because that’s how vast it is.
You know, and you said if you have 300 people a week dying, then just keep multiplying that by six and to the, you know, whatever factor X it has to be.
And everyone, you know, is affected by this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don’t know.
I mean, you know, they always say, you know, Kerry doesn’t have a plan to get us out.
And I would, you know, let’s have a serious, first of all, you know, how could, if Kerry had a plan, it’s like he’s kind of like in a situation.
Let’s suppose he did have a plan to get us out.
It would be irresponsible for him to talk about it publicly.
Yeah, of course.
You know, he’s not the president.
And so basically it would be the government if he did this.
Yeah, Bush gives him so much shit for having voted in favor of it, but, you know, he voted to support the president.
So it’s like you’re complaining because I supported you.
I mean, geez.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don’t know.
It’s all fucked up.
The United States isn’t making decisions in any kind of a reasonable way.
And, you know, the concern is that our army is being dec imated right now.
And that, you know, give it, give it a little bit longer.
Basically, we just simply won’t be the superpower we once were.
And whether that’s good or bad is another question.
We certainly won’t be the super financial power, that’s for sure.
No, we’re spending our wealth right now.
And the only thing we have left , and this is the scary thing, the only thing we have left are the nukes.
And the world doesn’t want a world where the United States only has one option, which is to push the button.
Because, you know, especially with a guy like Bush who really has not, it seems like the kind of guy who could do it, you know? Yeah.
So, let’s have fun with this radio show.
You can tell me, you’re bumming me out, Weiner.
Yeah.
I’m saying you’re bumming me out.
Anyway, so let’s go.
You’re bumming me out.
All right, all right, all right .
Let’s play your song.
Oh, I have good news.
I have good news.
I have good news.
We have a house in England.
Yeah.
Whoa.
How did that happen? Yeah, well, Patricia went over Monday morning with her sister, and they’ve been house hunting.
And we’d already looked at some stuff online.
So we, you know, we had picked out some candidates.
And as she called me last night , she said, “Well, I’m going to look on the inside tomorrow morning. " And this morning she called, and we got a house.
So beginning of December, we move.
What’s it like? What’s the house like? It’s a 1930s English country home.
It’s got lots of property in back.
Yeah.
You know what? I’ll be sure to take pictures.
I really don’t know enough about it.
Okay.
I just trust her.
We’ll hear more about it.
I’ll be sure to take pictures.
I said, “A, you have to get a house that I can stand upright in because especially in the countryside in the UK, it’s really low for those really short English people. " It’s going to take you.
Oops.
Number two, it has to have an airport within 15 minutes drive because I am a pilot.
And number three, it has to have broadband capability.
And otherwise, I don’t care about en suite bathrooms at all .
Right on.
You can let that sort of happen and you don’t have to get too involved in it.
It’s beautiful.
It’s absolutely beautiful.
I love that.
So what’s you’ve been working on, Big Dave? Well, I’m working on BloggerCon .
I mean, I’m working on Blogger Con.
I’m sort of networking here in Seattle.
It was funny.
I was having problems with email.
So I wasn’t hearing back.
I had sent like 15 emails into Microsoft just to sort of set up some meetings that might go out over a period of weeks because I’ve never been here for weeks.
And it’s just sort of an interesting opportunity.
And it was funny.
I got no responses back.
Zero.
Absolutely zero.
Oh, that must be an email problem.
Well, that’s part of it.
You sort of have this, maybe I didn’t take a bath or maybe it was something I said.
You know what I mean? It’s like, he’s watching.
Go read real scripting news.
Fuck, what did I say? Yeah, what did I say? I mean, anything unusually.
You were talking about Scoble’s boss.
That’s what it was, man.
That’s from last time.
It probably was.
Yeah, Scoble’s boss.
Anyway, and so, you know, but it turns out there’s some, I have to do something with my email because, you know, finally one of the guys called me and said, “How can we not respond to any of our emails?” And I go, “Well, well, that’s a relief. " And they can hear that, you know, I have a future.
And Microsoft determines that whether you have a future or not? No, of course not.
I’m just being a little facet ious.
But, you know, it’s a weird situation where on the whole they’re sort of like the monster company in the technology industry, but as individuals, they can be very, you know, very cool people to hang out with.
I mean, it’s been through a lot , you know.
So, anyway, so that’s cool.
And Bargher Khan’s coming together.
Today we released the first session description.
This one was for Rosenberg who ’s going to do, what is, let’s see, I have to go back and look.
You know, he came up with a really cool way of phrasing it.
Let’s see.
That’s the, you know, border crossing.
Yeah, border crossing.
Oh, border crossing.
That’s good.
Border crossings.
That’s off with a premise that I don’t totally want to ask.
I do want to ask.
Oops.
Hello, Dave.
Yeah, I was waiting for that to happen.
Okay, let’s see if we can get Dave back on the horn.
And yeah, yeah, we’re here.
Yeah, we’re back.
Yeah, we have a little outage there.
So, I love that thing that you had on, you know, daily source code about TV.
Watch me over here.
Oh, isn’t it great? Oh my God.
But you got to listen to that audio book because it is so good.
I am going to.
It’s filled with performances and some of them are so fucking my, I mean, sorry for using these words, but so mind blowing.
Yeah.
They’re like, God damn, this is good.
Yeah.
Well, you would like Confeder acy of Dunstice too because it’s got a lot of that.
It’s Artie Johnson who was from Martin’s left.
It’s probably your time.
That was like 1968.
But, and he’s got to be like in his 80s now, but it’s.
Hey, Dave.
Yeah.
Hold on one second.
Let me just check something.
Hold on one second.
But we’re back, ladies and gentlemen.
Yes.
Okay.
We’ve wasted three.
I feel crappy.
I feel crappy.
No, you sound wonderful.
Here I sound crappy.
Somebody was telling me.
No, no, no, you don’t sound crappy.
You sound wonderful.
No, really.
Okay.
Now let’s get back on track here, Dave.
What are we talking about? I think we were talking about the swift boat veterans for truth and whether or not George Bush actually has to go to the National Guard.
No, please.
Please.
Let’s talk about that forever.
No, please.
No, let’s not.
Let’s not.
Well, we were talking about Scott Rosenberg’s description of his session, which was.
For BlagerCon.
For BlagerCon called Border Crossings.
And of course I mentioned that really to sort of drop a hint to you that it’s, we really need to go in on the description for your session at BlagerCon.
And what I was thinking is it, is it not appropriate to do that on trade secrets? Well, it’s totally appropriate to do it wherever you want.
Whatever form you want to do it in, but it’s got to end up being a blog post on www. blager con. org.
Yeah, I understand.
You know, yeah.
I mean, I think, yeah, go ahead .
No, what you’re saying is would you please hurry up and write the description of the discussion you’re leading? Or, I mean, you know, what happened with Scott wrote a description and I said, well, that completely lacks any passion or blood.
And if I saw that description, I would never go to that session.
Why don’t you tell me what you think first? Right.
And he said, really, you want to know what I think? And I said, yeah, because then people will get some idea about , you know, they’ll start thinking if they don’t agree with you, believe me, you’re going to hear it from them, right? And so when you try to, so, you know, so that’s where you start .
I mean, what do you think? I mean, this whole idea of the blogosphere, I guess it’s the blogosphere extending into the audience of the world.
I think it’s two separate things.
I think it’s almost unrelated, although it’s totally not.
Well, since this is called a blogger con, we kind of have to relate it.
No, no, no.
I understand what you’re saying .
But my perspective, as a user, I’m coming from a different place than from blogging for this.
I mean, that’s got to be clear.
But we’re using all the same technology.
And we’re just beginning to figure out how the two work together.
I think that’s – Well, why do you say you’re coming from a different place? Why do you say you’re coming from a different place? I mean, because right now I’m viewing iPodder and enclosures and the way we’re getting all this out there and distributed purely as that, as an antenna.
And I’m sitting here, and I could be doing a radio show.
I could be doing a top 30 countdown show.
I like doing this because this is just – We can do whatever the hell we want.
No program director is going to get mad at us if we sound like total baboons.
But isn’t that – okay, in all seriousness, though, doesn’t that have a lot to do with blog ging? I mean, for me, the quality of blogging – When I started blogging, I immediately went and took a job at Wired because they liked my writing.
And they said, “Let’s hire this guy. " And I said, “Sure. " I thought it was like, “Okay, that’s a move up. " And then I learned pretty quickly, although the people there were excellent, that it wasn’t really a move up .
It was a move in a different direction.
So it seems to me that this has a lot to do with blogging in that – Like you said, there’s no – the whole freedom thing where there’s nobody to tell you what you can and can’t say.
You’re not trying to achieve some other results than just sort of like filling time with your ideas.
That’s what a blog is.
Yes, so then I agree with you 100%.
And I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re using the same protocols and systems to distribute text or audio.
That doesn’t make a difference.
Don’t focus on the technology.
Adam, don’t focus on the technology.
Because while you have to solve the technological problems to get anything to happen, ultimately it’s what the result is with the person who is influenced by what you’re saying.
Right. Well, it’s freedom of speech.
Of course.
I just want to talk some shit and I want to get something done.
And of course, it’s exactly like blogging.
And the difference – here’s the difference.
When you went to work for Wired , your profession probably wasn ’t a writer.
A writer of English prose.
You were a writer of code.
No, absolutely.
Right. No, it’s a new thing.
Okay, so here’s the difference.
I am a broadcaster.
I am an audio guy.
So this to me is like all of a sudden, the cookie jar has been opened and I have free access.
And so I think I have a very different experience.
And I can tell.
I can hear people trying to figure out a format, how they want to do this, what is a blog post, how long should it be? Do I need to attach URLs? No, I’m coming from a very different van.
I’m like, whoa, you know, finally got my own transmitter, everybody. Hello.
Yeah, no, it’s great to hear you do that.
You’re sort of evangelist and sort of guiding light.
I don’t want to like float your ego or anything.
Keep going, baby.
Come on, man.
I think you can kind of see where this is going, right? Well, it’s working, Dave.
Where it’s going is – Yeah, no, it’s what – I get that.
Yeah, it’s fucking – But for a guy like me, I’m not exactly sure where we’re going.
I mean, you said something yesterday in Daily Tests, which made an impression, which is that basically, you know, you don’t have to do the whole thing.
You can just do part of it.
You can be, you know, have a five-second sound bite.
And if it’s an interesting enough five-second sound bite, then it, you know, becomes a whole thing, you know, part of the whole thing.
Right. And whereas I don’t think it’s – That guy, what was his name? What was his name? Pete Produre – Right.
He actually did – Oh, hold on a second.
You got to hear this.
It’s going to trip you out.
Hold on.
He did one for me.
Where do I have Pete here? He’s been around.
That guy has been posting on various mail lists for quite some time.
He’s – Maybe he’s very familiar.
I like him.
Okay, now I’m going to do something really tricky here.
I’m going to switch your input so you can hear what he did as well.
So don’t talk.
Please.
I won’t talk.
Okay, you may get a little bit of echo or whatever, but we’ll see how it works.
Hold on.
Here we go.
This is Rest Web Audio for September 22, 2004, slightly after a minute.
On top, it could be the weather in Montclair, New Jersey.
The current conditions for Mont clair, New Jersey.
[Laughter] Oh, my God.
How cool is that? That is on a scale of 1 to 10.
I’m telling you, I’m telling you.
You must have heard that a million times.
Oh, my God.
Basically, I was successful in setting up a software sound loop there.
Yeah, well, many, many loops going on.
And while, of course, you told me to be quiet while all that was happening.
Not only was I defying with laughter, but my phone rang, too.
Oh, no.
So, talk about the real world in our seating.
Great.
And I can’t wait until we get the hardware thing all settled so that it’s just a matter so that we can do time shift.
It should be really easy for me just to – it should be like creating an email message.
Exactly.
To create an audio blog post.
It shouldn’t be anything more than that.
And we’re very close.
We’re so close to getting that done.
And already everyone – so now on iPodder, basically, there’s one client that is emerging.
And there’s a GUI for – and it ’s like three or four teams have now come together and they’ve put all their code into one source forge project.
And they even have BitTorrent working.
I mean, it’s going so fast.
Yeah, I saw that.
It’s unbelievable how fast it’s going.
So, I think – Go ahead.
No, it’s also starting to get congested, too.
You have so many people on my list that you’ve had some stop energy has showed up there.
Sure.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
And I encourage you to just sort of kick back.
That’s what I’m going to do.
I mean, it’s tempting for me to come in and say, “Okay, well, here’s how you simplify the thought process here so that you don’t get all stuck on these questions. " But it never works.
That never, ever, ever works.
No, and – Because – Yeah.
Because you have people there who want to get stuck.
Yeah.
Otherwise, if they do want to get stuck, they could get unst uck so easily.
I mean, sure, you want to put multiple enclosures on a RSS item.
Well, the spec doesn’t really say you can’t do that, actually .
No.
It doesn’t say that there’s only one – and that’s been a flaw in the spec.
It would be nice if the spec said you could have many, or if the spec said you could only have one, that would sort of end the discussion.
But you know that you can have one, right? Right.
The spec allows for one, so why not just keep it simple and just have one, you know? Right.
So some people need to make a philosophical battle where there’s none.
I mean, can you create another item that has no description and no title? Well, and here’s the thing.
The entire conversation was based upon the question of, you know, now that people are also using iPodder for BitTorrents, you should be able to have multiple enclosures.
So you have the regular audio file and then you have the BitT orrent file.
Whereas I said, well, you know, it’s probably much simpler for now.
Let’s bookmark this here just to publish two different feeds.
You know, it’s a lot less confusing for, you know, trying to figure out what the feed is doing and all the issues of, as you just said, you know? Well, aside from that, isn’t the whole point of having BitT orrents that you don’t want to expose the original? Yeah, well, this is, of course it is. Of course. Of course.
So, stick to your guns.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, when people start being theoretical about things, say, “Whoa, it would be nice to have this,” there was this great piece that Frank Lakey wrote yesterday that I pointed to about a similar discussion that’s happening on the photo RSS mail list.
That’s not the name of the list , but that’s the problem that they’re trying to deal with.
And, you know, he’s been through this loop apparently to its complete utter resolution, which is no resolution at all.
And, you know, it says that there’s a face-off between people who want to discuss eleg ance and keep putting that solution off as far as they can , and the people who just want to do some programming work today and get something out there working.
Okay, those people shouldn’t be on the same mailing list.
Exactly.
This really sucks. I mean, I had a call from, there’s something going on with stalk ers.
Stalkers? Stalkers. Total gear shift change here. I’ve met three different women here in Seattle , all of whom won’t use their last names on their mailboxes and their e-mail addresses.
Oh, because they’re afraid of them being stalked? They are being stalked.
Whoa, you’re kidding.
Yeah, and no, I’m not kidding.
This is actually, you know, it is more to it than just they’re being stalked, because that also affects the blogosphere.
I mean, you know, people will not have blogs, or if they have blogs, there are certain things they can’t talk about or else they’ll be found, and they’re hiding, you know? And they’re not guilty of anything.
That’s, but is this particular to Seattle, or is it? I don’t know, but I’ve only seen, I don’t know, but I’ve only, it’s only just tripped over.
I mean, I don’t want to, like, give too much away here, but somebody had their last name appear somewhere, and she was very upset about it.
And that was what one of my calls was about in between, and , you know, so, there’s been a lot of, I mean, we’ve been having glitches, people at home should know.
We’ve been having glitches here , so.
Yeah.
What was the last glitch about, you know? I have no idea.
I was smart enough to record an AIFF, which basically it writes it to the file, and, you know, a nuke can go off, and whatever is there is there, and you can still play it.
I think the earlier glitch might have, there’s two things that I found.
One is I accidentally had kicked the adapter to the laptop out of the wall socket, so it was probably running on a lower processor speed trying to conserve battery power.
That’s probably a big one.
Oh, that old problem, that happened to me all the time.
Windows has this basic problem, same problem.
Here’s a problem you don’t have .
I checked Christina’s computer, and she was running LimeWire.
Oh, my God.
So that’s where the bandwidth is going.
Yep.
She’s got her own little ISP here.
Yeah, M&M down loads across the world, worldwide.
It’s Good Charlotte, man.
That’s what it’s about.
Good Charlotte.
Oh, sorry, Good Charlotte.
But they’ll do I know about it.
If you live with me, you know a hell of a lot about it.
I guess, yeah.
We could be thankful for little things, I guess.
Anyway, so what else is okay? Well, we were talking about how not to get all wrapped up in development.
In development conversation about stuff that she just maybe shouldn’t be.
Well, you don’t have to get engaged in all the crap that goes on.
No.
There will be probably more as you go forward.
There’ll be more, which is, you know, but it’s been remarkably successful.
Your, you know, your evangelism has been very effective.
And God, there’s so much content.
I can’t keep up with it.
And what’s crazy is, you know, I went the last yard and then actually, I think I looked at that.
You know, your virtual bandwidth piece.
And the only mistake I made, because we’ve been doing, we’ve been, I’ve been at this for what, four or five years.
Yeah.
And the only mistake I made is I was concentrating on video and the machines aren’t ready for it.
We don’t have the horsepower.
We don’t have the bandwidth.
We don’t have the disk space.
You know, just it’s too early for anything of any scale.
And just, and even now with audio, we’re just on the edge of being able to do this stuff.
It also reaffirmation of the P ied Piper theory of evangelism is that you can’t get anywhere by asking other people to do it .
You have to do it yourself.
Yeah.
And then they’ll, you know, as, and then they’ll do what you do .
And if it’s any good, I mean, if it’s fun.
Yeah.
If I had known that, if I, if I had known, I would have done that so long ago.
Well, you know, you live in, you know, fine.
Of course.
Yeah.
But you’re, but it’s happening now.
So that’s good.
I mean, there were all these times like I did it with Chris Leiden, right? Last year and, you know, it was closed, but no cigar.
It did not generate a lot of other people doing it.
What went wrong there? Because the setup was good.
You had a professional radio guy.
Nothing went wrong.
The stuff was great.
I mean, you know, it’s hard to say that that was a failure because it wasn’t.
There was a lot, it’s to this day, I think those are seminal, you know, sort of snapshots in time of the development of the blogging world.
Where did it break down? Why did he stop? Because I’m still subscribed to his feed in the hope that one day, actually during the, the DNC, two interviews came in to.
Yeah, but they really, I only heard the William Buckley one.
Yes, I’m sorry.
It was William Buckley.
Yeah, you’re right.
It was only one.
Yeah, you’re right.
It was a crappy interview.
It was a horrible interview.
He was feeling drunk.
Do you know, do you know that my cousin, my first cousin is married to Christopher Buckley? No, I didn’t know that, but I thought William Buckley was great.
He was awesome.
He was drunk.
I thought, yeah, Chris Leiden was Adam’s, what were you doing ? It sounded like Chris Leiden had a pet theory and he wanted William Buckley to sort of go off on, you know, but yet I don ’t remember.
What was it? I did some sort of aristocracy of the Republican party and the big turns running the world.
And you know, that kind of thing.
Oh, yeah, who gives a shit? I mean, I don’t know what happened.
I mean, I think that Chris would be the guy to talk to, but maybe we should get Chris on here one time and ask him.
I mean, you know, it’s the thing somebody was, somebody once said about Chris, I don’t want to go like too deep into this, but he’s good at it.
He never helps people on their way up.
And so the people that he brought in to the conversation were his regulars from his hard days.
And, you know, once you’ve run through all the regulars, then well, where do you go? And there was plenty.
There was also all the people he brought in from the Fisher.
I mean, he interviewed Glenn Reynolds at Pone.
Any of you? Yeah.
And I really know.
I mean, the thing was, is that it wasn’t like a community, like what you’re doing is different because you have made it about technology.
And, you know, because, and that’s realistic because the barriers right now are technological, right? But the opportunity is not technological.
That’s where it gets tricky.
And then first we have to crack the nut technologically and then pass it off because, you know, it’s going to, I mean, ideally I want a device that is perfect at every aspect of what we’re doing right now.
It needs to have a microphone, it needs to be very portable so that I don’t have to plan in advance, but it’s very likely to be with me wherever I am when I want to say something , you know, in this mode, in this environment.
And it has to know it’s going to be very well and it has to do what we’re trying to do right now with, I mean, we’re hitting glitches again, right? I mean, this is this process of wiring together, of mixing together two microphones that are on two different continents, right? Yeah.
That means we need to convene some really serious engineers that know a technology that neither you or I know.
I mean, we’re not, I’m not a voice over IP guy would have to be here, you know.
Yeah.
But he really understands that.
Yeah, I think really the big problem is we’re just running into performance issues.
Well, here’s another one for you, okay? Why can’t you buy a mixer for your PC or for your Mac? Well, you know, a regular audio mixer that has an action.
No, I mean, Dave, Dave, the easy, there’s a couple of easy answers.
The mixer is, yeah, that’s part of the answer, but it’s really the fact that I’m recording to the same machine I’m doing all this stuff on.
And that’s just because it’s the blogger way.
I could go out and I could easily spend $20,000 on equipment and have it working perfectly.
But, you know, then I think we ’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity because I’ve already got the product manager of Audio Hijack Pro email, I mean, saying, hey, shit, you know, just tell us what do you need? What do you need for us to change? No, you’re right not to give into that temptation.
I mean, you know, then you have a compost, absolutely nothing if all that can happen here is you get to have a radio show and invite only your friends to produce.
That’s not much of a medium, right? Yeah, unless you have a show.
Yeah, unless everybody has $20, 000, you can’t do it.
You know, that doesn’t make any sense.
And there’s no need for it to cost $20,000.
That’s ridiculous.
I mean, basically an iPod, merge an iPod in the mixer, right? And I think you’re a long way towards it.
You know, in other words, instead of one microphone jack, give me, you know, 10 microphone jacks, 10 mini plugs, and each one of them has a switch which can be software if they want, that allows it to control the expected impedance, you know, so that I can plug in different kinds of audio sources.
And then, I mean, why can’t my laptop have five audio input and five… Of course it can.
Of course it can.
Right.
Yeah, just no one’s asked for it properly, I guess.
Well, you know, this has been a perennial problem when we wanted to work with Kobalt, which had a really great… I mean, it was their server, the Kobalt Cube.
Sure, yeah.
That was part of spiritual, you know, we were on the same wave, right? But the problem with most technology companies, and this is what we have to watch for, find one that isn’t like this, then let’s work with them, is that most technology companies have a very low opinion of users.
And so, you know, when we contacted them, they had to put us in a box.
Either we were competitors or we were users.
In either case, they didn’t want to work with us, you know.
If we’re users, well, you know, if you check out our latest product and we’re working on this and that, you know, you’ll love it when you see it, but frankly, we don ’t care what you want, right? And if you’re competitors, I would give you more to stand for you.
But we were neither.
We were developers, like very much like the iPod stuff that you’re doing right now, iPod or stuff.
And if somebody wants to, I mean, I offered to work with Sun on this basis, but what we need is we need to have somebody who joins our community, who doesn’t throw their weight around, who does a lot of listening, and then puzzles it out with us when at the time when, you know , it says, “Okay, I think we understand what the needs are now, and we ’ll just actually do it for you . " And it’s funny, I had an interesting conversation with Dave Luberts.
Basically, we seem to be getting a development organization together about Frontier.
And I hope that we’re going to at least try to solve some of these problems from a commercial development standpoint, because we’ve actually got a few commercial developers floating around.
And I was explaining to Dave what’s needed here, and Dave worked on the Word team at Microsoft going back to , I think, like Word 1 in the ' 80s, and stayed through like Word 5.
And you know, while Word gets a lot of people, you know, sort of snickering when you say Word , well, you know, it actually was productized a lot of times, and there was a lot of good work that went into it.
And, you know, it’s now the dominant word processor.
You don’t get to be the dominant word processor by being slouches.
They were good.
And so when we talked about this, there was a lot of nod ding and a lot of understanding, and just having somebody to work with to brainstorm at that level is good.
And, you know, and so the idea, which you keep harping on, you’re absolutely right to do so is that the installation experience has to be smooth.
It has to feel like you’re installing a real piece of software.
And of course, after that, you have to not even have to install it.
It has to be a device that you get that connects up to your laptop in some meaningful way that comes pre-configured because you didn’t have to install your iPod at them.
No, no, exactly.
Oh, yeah, just out of the box.
Yep.
And so, you know, it’s also going to be like a cell phone.
I think cell phone has a lot of the features that this device needs.
Don’t you think? Well, I mean, you might as well throw it in.
You know, now we’re into spe cking out a device which would, you know, be the geekazoid tool of all.
I like the idea of… But wait a minute.
Let’s time out.
If you put a hard drive on your cell phone, okay? Yeah.
Your cell phone.
And you called me, right? Yeah.
Wouldn’t we be doing… Yeah, you could record the conversation, absolutely.
We would be doing 90% of what we’re doing right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think the big advantage of what we’re doing right now, and this, you know, also makes this type of show possible, is this is not costing an arm and a leg to set up the conversation, even though we’re across nine time zones.
So the cell phone would be very expensive, is what you’re saying? Yeah, because then you’re going to want to put Wi-Fi in there, and, you know, if you want to do voice over IP and otherwise.
Yeah, I think it’s… Of course it’s a solution, but I don’t think any cell phone manufacturer is going to say, " Oh, yeah, let’s slap one of these together. " And, you know, while we work on what everyone really wants.
I like the idea that you said the iPod.
Just give me 10 ins and 10 outs and a little mixing interface, you know, switch or whatever.
I like that.
That’s a very simple one.
Well, somebody could do that.
I mean, probably somebody who’s listening to this recording right now would know how to do that.
I mean, it doesn’t have to be a beautiful form factor to start off with.
It doesn’t even have to be tiny to start off with.
It would be the size of a…it should have a very, very ample hard drive.
You know, a good 60 gigabyte hard drive, so that you don’t run out of space very frequently.
It should be a fractional horsepower HTT server, so that all you have to do is hook it up to Ethernet.
Let’s start right there.
Good idea, yeah, good idea.
Yeah, no, that’s a biggie, right? Optional Wi-Fi.
Well… Now, you want… I don’t know about things that we could give on.
I mean, I don’t mind if it has an Ethernet jack on it.
That’s optional Wi-Fi.
Okay.
I mean, yeah.
Okay, maybe only Wi-Fi.
That’s probably better.
Yeah.
That’s probably better.
I mean, these days… And you also want it to have a number of outs.
You know, you should be able to …here you go.
This thing should be able to record a number of sources simultaneously, or you should be able to…you know, when you dock it to your computer, then it becomes a router of audio.
So therefore, you don’t…you know, then it’s making sure that you can send audio to one application and record the other.
You know, so then it’s kind of like this breakout box that I have.
It becomes a…you know, it’s basically a hardware device that adds that capability to your computer.
So you can do a scaled-down version while you’re on the road, which could also include ho oking up, you know, guitars and microphones, etc.
Or, you know, just mics to just sit down and have a conversation.
Maybe you can mix in a tune from your playlist there.
But yeah, I mean, totally.
And I think that’s just a mod pod.
A mod pod.
What mod? What does mod mean? It’s modification.
Someone’s going to modify it.
I think… So is mixer the right idea? I mean, it’s that… You have to be able to turn the sources on or off.
Right.
And control the gain on each of them, too, right? Exactly.
And you have to be able to choose the kind of device you ’re going to plug in.
A microphone has a different profile than a cassette player has, than a CD player has.
Apple has all this technology.
I mean, they… I sit here and I’ve mainly worked with Final Cut Pro.
We did our reality TV show.
But I’ve been in enough audio studios and the guys at Apple, man, they know what they’re doing.
Every single time you think, you know, “Oh, if only I could do this, it’s there. " And it may be too early for it to work well yet, but they’re definitely smoking something.
But as you’ve pointed out so many times, as you pointed out so many times, they aren’t thinking about this application.
The one we’re doing right now … No, they’re not.
You know, where was it I read the thing you pointed to? My MP3.
I thought that was beautiful.
What was that? It was…you pointed to it.
There was this article.
Oh, I want my MP3.
Yeah, yeah.
I want my MP3, you know, like Dr. Straits’ song, right? I mean, you know, I want my MP3 .
And he was saying, you know, " Flash, you can do voice with MP3 . " Now, to us, that no longer seems like a big revelation, right? Right.
But to everyone else… Yeah, to Rio, to Microsoft, to Apple, they’re all thinking that’s great.
Yeah, they’re not thinking… the music business.
Now, and you’ve also wavered a little bit on whether or not you have to assist on MP3.
I want you to really…I mean, we have to have MP3 because… No, no, no, no, I recently…I thought I made it very clear.
It’s like, I’m sticking with MP 3.
Let me just say, here’s why, okay? Because MP3 imparts users.
We have choice.
With MP3, we can put it wherever we want to.
With any other format, you know , like the one whatever it is they’re using, we’re audible.
com.
I’m getting a call, but I’m going to let it ring.
Whatever we’re using, I think that’s Apple’s proprietary format or whatever.
Now, we’re using MP3.
We have no control over that.
So, there’s no give on that one .
Anybody comes to us and says, " Well, you can have what you want , but it’s not MP3. " There’s the door right over the door.
I hear by solemnly swear.
Everybody raise your right hand .
Put your hand on the iPod.
Put your left hand on the iPod.
And say, “We will protect MP3. " MP3, I want my MP3.
That’s great, isn’t it? It is good.
We’ve got to get Knopfler to sing that for us.
Oh, man. And you know he’d be totally into it.
I don’t know.
That was Sting’s thing.
No, no, no. That was Sting.
What? Sting. Sting’s thing.
Oh, you’re right.
Yeah.
He’s a dick.
We don’t want to ask him.
He doesn’t want us to have our MP3, right? Let me tell you about Sting’s story.
I’ve got two Sting stories for you.
I believe you totally, by the way.
Yeah, so… He’s a dick.
The first one is he was into all this rain forest shit and people with big plates in their lips.
Beautiful.
Beautiful world music Sting.
Love it.
And so my daughter, with her fourth grade class, they did this whole rain forest hoohow.
My daughter actually did a rain forest project on a weblog.
And so they had all these drawings and printouts and stuff.
And I knew his management really well.
And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what.
I’m going to have this sent to Sting and I’ll ask him to write you guys a note back. " And the manager said, “Yeah, no problem.
We’ll take care of that. " And he never did it.
He was talking stiff to some fourth graders.
It was horrible.
Really? And then I was visiting a house in Malibu next door to his.
And we kept throwing our ball in his yard.
You did? Hey, Mr. Sting! Mr. Sting, can we have a ball back, please? Yeah, what did he say? He was grumpy.
He has no humor.
He has no humor.
What’s his real name, by the way? Gordon Sumner.
Really? I don’t know.
Why does he call himself Sting? Because, and by the way, he was a teacher for Christ’s sakes.
Because he used to wear the yellow and black T-shirt.
Remember when he was in the police? Remember that? Yeah, I love the police, by the way.
I should say I love Sting’s music, too.
But if he’s a dick, he’s a dick .
What are you going to do? Yeah, hold on.
Let’s see.
Maybe we can play something by Sting.
By the way, they have a great … I’ve got to say this, Speaking of Dickheads, right? They have this wonderful, wonderful ad for George Bush.
For what? For George Bush.
I said I’m Speaking of Dick heads.
Gotcha.
And it’s John Kerry on a wind sale, you know, flip-flop.
It is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.
So, you know, what I would love to say to George W. Bush right now is, thanks a lot.
I love a good laugh.
I’m still voting for Kerry and fuck you.
I mean, it’s like, you know, I mean, and by the way, they’re doing this in a big favor because when Kerry is president , we’re going to know how to give him shit.
Oh, yeah.
Because they’re teaching us how to do it, right? Oh, yeah.
And don’t ever think that that ’s going to be a love affair because it’s not.
But we’ll be very happy to give him shit.
For sure.
And I’ll be able to say, George Bush, you are the best fucking ex-president I have ever seen.
I’m going to play a song of the day.
I just decided it’s going to be one by Sting.
Hold on a second.
I’m going to turn it on so that you can hear it, but you need to mute.
Can you mute your microphone or something? I can just pull it out.
Oh, that’s going to sound really professional.
No, I won’t pull it out.
Hold on.
Okay.
I’m going to give you a return line now.
So you’re probably going to hear a bit of an echo.
All right.
Here we go.
This is a remix, is a JPL remix of Sting’s Russians.
And Dave and I will be right back.
[MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Whatcha know as nobody wicked is this a red and rap pages, they refer to me as salt, yeah, more like micro salt.
. He shared the same biology regardless the ideology. One might say, “Bus me and you. " As if the Russians love their children of truth.
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Thank you.
Now there’s a track I promise you will never ever ever hear on a commercial radio station.
Really? No, because it’s pretty outrageous.
You like that? I like it. It’s funny. I know the Sting song is great.
Yeah, you know the Will Smith rap that was mixed in there? Didn’t tune in that was Will Smith.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that’s a remix done by a guy who goes by the name of JPL .
And you can download that and lots of other excellent mixes at mixfreaks. org.
Cool.
Yeah, no, they have, and you know there’s a new trend called mashups.
There’s another thing that will never make it to the public commercial space because there ’s too much rights hassle and issues involved.
So a mashup is where you take an old song and a new song and you mix them together.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And you know you might hear them, some radio stations may do them live or you know, but it’s just so complicated.
You can’t commercially exploit that because you have to get permission from everybody and you have to agree on the split and that all depends on how many seconds you’ve changed .
It’s a wormhole.
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.
So I have another thing I want to mention and maybe this can be the last thing or I don’t know, how long has this been going? Let me see. We have been at it for a little over an hour.
Really? Yeah.
Well, here’s something that I ’ve been sort of thinking about in the back of my head and I’m wondering when or how we can do something about this.
Netflix, which I don’t think you get in Europe.
No, no, we do not have Netflix.
And you’ve explained it to me and I still don’t really understand what the big deal is .
Let me try again. It’s not a big deal. I mean, it’s nice and it has its place.
I get movies from four different sources. One is the first run stuff in the movie theater.
Another one is Turner Classic Movies, which is great, except I don’t get it here, so I’m not going to be watching Turner Classic Movies.
The third is like HBO, the normal cable stuff.
And the fourth is Netflix.
And they all do different kinds of movies.
The first one movies, obviously , those are current with current stars and whatever.
And same thing, more or less, with HBO.
And Turner Classic Movies goes way back in time. It’s mostly the MGM vault.
So it goes back to the 1920s and even some movies from the teens.
And Silent Pictures, the best part of Turner Classic Movies, I think, is the ’30s, where it was kind of a renaissance of movies.
And they have a lot of stuff from the ’30s.
And it’s really, I think, you know, it’s been an eye-opener to me.
I didn’t used to like that kind of movies, but now I do.
And Netflix sort of allows you to get unstuck in time.
And you can get really any movie that is available on DVD.
But you don’t have to own it.
And I guess another source of movies would be, you know, go down to Blockbuster or Hollywood or whatever, Barnes & Noble or bookstores and stuff like that.
And buy the DVD.
But I don’t know. I don’t do that.
I bought a couple, but it seems wasteful to own one of those.
So how does Netflix work then? Okay, so what you do is you give them $20 a month.
That happens. They deduct $20 a month from your credit card account.
Re-interest, it doesn’t matter how many movies you’ve watched.
It’s a flat fee of $20.
And you get three movies out at any one time.
It’s like having a library card .
And they send them to you. You don’t have to go anywhere. You can just order them online.
It’s all done via mail.
You order them online.
So there’s netflix. com.
And you maintain a queue.
And that queue says, “Okay, these are the movies that I want to watch. " And pretty much, you rank them.
There’s one, two, three, four, five and so forth.
Right now I think I’ve got like 17 movies in my queue.
And you pretty much get the number one, number two, number three at any given time, except if you want something that’s in high demand that they don’t have a lot of copies of, then you’ll wait for that to show up.
Like for example, when the new Manchurian candidate came out, the old Manchurian candidate went way up in demand.
Now that it’s no longer a first release, you could have it whenever you want it.
They maybe even ordered a few extra copies because of that or whatever.
And for them, it seems to be a remarkably profitable business.
And for me, it allows me to sort of browse the world of movies.
I get things they wouldn’t have in Blockbuster in a million years, they wouldn’t have them.
And it allows me to browse the history of movies in a sort of way that there was no other way to do it before they came along .
So they very recently supported RSS.
As soon as I sort of got in the loop with them as a user, I started writing about it.
Wouldn’t it be great if they had RSS? Wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t it be great? I said it over and over again.
At HackingNet Netflix, this is how you do evangelism. You just become a broken record until they finally give you what you want.
That’s how you become president , Dave.
Yeah, that’s true too.
Maybe my future has me as president or whatever.
So, okay, so now they gave us what we want, right? So now we need to use it, right ? And so what I want to do is have a site that aggregates the queue of all the scripted news readers who have Netflix accounts.
That would be ideal. I’ve got a community and what I want to do is I want to look at the aggreg ator and see what you guys are watching.
Yeah, and you want to be able to cross-reference stuff and you can extrapolate all kinds of interesting things.
And we can all watch movies.
In other words, we can sort of like, “Oh, well, 50 people have watched this movie. Why don’t I watch it?” And when I write something about it, I’ll bet they have something to say about it, right? I mean, we can be like a book club, except with movies, right ? So if Audible did the same thing, for example, I wouldn’t have to wait for you to talk about what – there you go.
I mean, that’s something you’ll totally understand, right? Because now that you’ve talked about that Audible with the guy around the TV set, right? I forget what it’s called, but you know I’m going to buy that one, right? And maybe part of the reason I ’ll buy it is because I think I ’ll like it.
But another part of the reason why I’m going to buy it, maybe even the bigger part, is because you’ve already experienced it, and it’s going to give us something to talk about.
The spoken word revolution.
Yeah, spoken word revolution.
Okay, I’m writing that down.
So they don’t – Well, that makes sense.
And so it’s like an Oprah’s book club only for Netflix.
So let me just put the request out, okay? So if you have a Netflix account, right – I’m talking to everybody who’s within your side of me, right? If you have a Netflix account and you don’t mind sharing with me the contents of your queue, send me the URL of your queue, okay? I won’t share it with anybody other than in an aggregate view .
I won’t say, okay, this is what so and so is subscribed to.
So what does Netflix provide? Do they provide your queue in R SS? That’s what they provide? Yeah, yeah.
Not only do they provide your queue in RSS, but they also provide your history in RSS.
Okay.
So the question is, which would be more interesting, the queue or the history? And I don’t know.
So why don’t you go ahead and send me both? And then, because the hard part of the application is the user interface.
So this means I can bootstrap the thing without putting up any user interface at all.
People just send me the URLs.
Then I can just program that into the app and do the aggreg ated.
I’ll do a run every day basically up on it, which won’t be great.
Yeah, and I think that we’ll see something from that.
I mean, I think Audible, I don ’t know if I point to an Audible link from my blog.
I don’t know if other people can see that.
I suspect that you can’t.
That they don’t have their URLs down.
And this is something they really ought to do.
They ought to make it easy for a blogger to point to a book.
Why not? But they seem to be very member , right? It’s like, don’t make it hard for us to sell your product.
Exactly.
But Netflix, I know, does make it easy and it works.
So even if you’re not a Netflix member, you can sort of get a sense of what scripting people or actually it will be trade secrets people are, what kind of movies are they watching? And I think that gets kind of interesting.
And then you can sort of watch the effect you’re talking about a movie or a book in one of your sticks and see how to do more people watch it because you did that.
Then you can go send them a bill.
Yeah, you’re looking at it.
Basically, I need you all to send me just kidding.
Along that, I had an email exchange with a nice guy from, I’m afraid to touch any other applications while I’m doing this.
Please don’t touch any other applications.
Lulop. it.
I’ve pointed to them in the past.
They provide paparazzi video feeds.
Have you seen that? No.
He’s got RSS tricked out where they encode copyright information into the RSS.
I don’t really fully understand it yet, but they’re helping me out.
And they have a transaction back end where if traditional broadcast media want to take an excerpt, that’s why there’s all this pap arazzi footage on it, then they have right built in.
Okay, also you want 30 seconds.
Great, that’s going to cost you so much.
And then they take the video footage and the transaction is made and someone’s paid someone down the line.
Just interesting shit that’s popping out.
That’s pretty funny.
Yeah, at Lulop. it.
Very commercial sounding name.
Lulop, what the hell is that? I don’t know.
Oh, you were being sarcastic there.
Yeah, yeah.
I was like, “Hey, what’s up, L ulop? What’s a Google?” There you go.
I hate it.
I’m so gullible.
I go for, like, “Tell me the sky’s on fire and I’ll go wheel ie. " All right, so what’s up for the rest of the week for you? Lots of meetings.
I’ve got lots of meetings.
I’ve got to somehow get a conference set up and ready to go.
You know, you start with things .
The conference is six weeks away.
Why is he, you know, what, it takes so much time to do these things.
Yeah, but to do it right, it sure does.
Well, yeah, I want to do it right.
To me, it’s very important that it not just be another conference.
And that means I have to talk with each of the discussion leaders.
And then the other thing is the two technological aspects of the conference and then the financial.
The two technological aspects are Wi-Fi and webcast.
And those never ever work.
They just never seem to work.
If I could give up on them, then the difficulty of the conference would be like one quarter is difficult.
But I have to somehow worry a lot and then have it not work.
Yeah, in that regard, it’s still like a regular conference .
Yeah, well, the thing is that I was thinking of saying to Doug Kay, who wants to, Doug wants to do the… Webcast.
The audio.
Yeah.
Well, I don’t think it should be webcast.
That’s my feeling.
Because we can make it a lot simpler if we’re not trying to webcast.
I agree.
We just set it up as RSS feeds and go.
And record it.
Yeah, record it.
Definitely.
Yeah, and by the way, that’s the technology that I think Doug really understands.
I don’t think he’s a streaming guy.
I think he totally understands how to record a conference well and how to encode that and get it up somewhere.
People can listen to it.
ITconferinations. com is full of conferences.
It’s good.
Right, but not streaming.
But you said he’s not a streaming expert? No, I don’t think so.
I mean, I don’t know.
He doesn’t seem like that’s his expertise.
I do know that he understands conferences.
I think that without the facility already prepared for streaming and having tested it 15 times before he ended it.
It’s always disappointing.
It’s always fucking disappointing.
It’s effective to work.
Right.
And so, I mean, I’d like to do that.
Yeah, so maybe we’ll do it.
Or maybe we could just sort of like allocate, ask people to cover sessions and bring their microphone and then at the end of it, I mean, actually, that would be a really good thing to sort of look to you to help with because, hey, this is what we’re talking about.
Yeah.
You want to, you know, maybe you could ask that somewhere.
The only problem is, in order to do it right, and I don’t know what the setup’s like and what the rooms are like, is if this is an existing audio system, you want to tap into that.
And you can only really have one person who knows what they ’re doing do that.
Yeah.
All right, I have to go down there and find out what’s the deal with the audio system.
Yeah, I’ll help you with that.
Let me know what their setup is .
Yeah.
They must have a spec sheet or something.
They usually do.
I could get down there.
That’s basically it.
I have to go and sort of like that.
That’ll be my job after I’ve got the discussion with your bootstrap.
So you could really help by taking the lead on your discussion and writing up your own personal experience.
What you think, what’s your vision? It doesn’t have to be long.
I have another question for you .
Yeah.
What’s the best hotel to stay at? Hmm.
Well, let me write that one down.
I don’t know if there’s info on bloggercon. com? We haven’t done it yet.
Probably the– Is . com or . org? . org.
. org, sorry.
I haven’t done the hotel stuff yet.
There’s something Garden Court or something.
Why does that come to mind? Hold on, let me look this up.
I’m going to give you a little bit of look up music, Dave.
Oh, really? Yeah.
It should be like the Jeopardy theme song.
Oh, hold on.
Okay, hold on.
Let’s see what it is.
Here we go.
It’s the Garden Court Hotel.
It’s in Palo Alto.
It’s probably– there’s that.
It’s the Stanford Court Hotel, I think is what it’s called.
I mean, you know, it’s like– Do you hear that? Dave? No.
I can’t hear it.
It’s the Garden Court is where you want to stay.
It’s 520 Calpers Street in Palo Alto.
You can hear it now.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, I’m sorry.
So what’s the name of it? Yeah, you want to stay at the Garden Court because it’s right next to Il Frenaya, which is a really nice restaurant.
Garden Court.
Okay.
Yeah, it’s 520 Calpers Street, Palo Alto.
And, you know, I know you like to stay in Nice Hotel.
This is a nice hotel.
And there’s also, I think– I’m downgrading my expectations .
Are you? Yeah, I’m not at work.
I have no work, you know.
I’ve got a big move coming up.
I like being unemployed, so I don’t want to go to the– All right, let me give you that .
Let me give you a little one, then.
Okay, there’s Sheraton Palo Alto.
That’s probably the closest hotel.
And even that’s not very close.
You do need to rent a car.
Okay.
And that’s going to be sort of your mid-price range hotel.
And then Ricky’s Hyatt House is nice.
Are you going to post this on the site? Well, sure.
Oh, you’re not taking this.
Okay, Ricky’s Hyatt House is probably pretty good.
I’m trying to keep the show on the air, Dave.
What are you talking about? I’m calling Chicken Wire and chewing gum here.
Oh, really? So we’re about at– It’s already 11. 04 here.
And, God, what does that mean? It’s like 2004, which is– Yeah.
It’s 8 p. m. where you are, right? Yeah.
Okay.
That’s not too bad.
Well, why don’t you just say the– the– the– the theme song.
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
All right.
Hey, listen, dude, we’ll talk sometime after the weekend.
Should be our signature sign- off, by the way, if we’re looking for one.
Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of here.
That’s our sign-off.
Hey, I’ll talk to you after the weekend, buddy.
Right on.
Right on.
Take care, everybody, and we’ll check you out soon on Trade Sec rets.
We are at Secrets– Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I was going to talk to you.
It’s Secrets– Secrets. scr atching. com.
Is that what you’re going to do ? Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.
Oh, sorry.
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
Yeah.
All right.
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