Blogarithms

It’s time to take The Conversations Network mobile. That means two things: (1) a lightweight version of the website design suitable for all mobile browsers, and (2) an iPhone 2.0 dedicated application. The former has been on the to-do list for some time, and the number of requests has been growing steadily. The latter is (for now) just for fun, but I’d love to see what could be done. We need help for both projects.

Question: What’s the latest/best standard for mobile apps? What flavor of XML/HTML, etc? I’m so out of touch on this. The last thing I remember dabbling with was WAP when developing for mobile devices was brand new. Where should I look to ramp-up on developing for mobile browsers?

Opportunity: I don’t have the personal bandwidth to get up-to-speed on iPhone development, but if anyone wants to volunteer to create an iPhone app for The Conversations Network, I’ll gladly handle the back-end development.

AIR: And I’d also love to see an application for The Conversations Network based on Adobe AIR. From the few AIR apps I’ve used to date, I’ve been impressed with the UI as well as the cross-platform installation and update processes.

With all of my problems and grousing about the iPhone 2.0 upgrade, MobileMe, etc., I do have something positive to say. One 2.0 application I find surprisingly good is the New York Times viewer. Not only is it a clean, simple program (which is mandatory for a small mobile screen), but it turns out to be a great way to read the newspaper. Who knew? Good timing, too, since I just canceled my home-delivery subscription. It appears to be the full stories and there’s just enough of the photos and graphics. None of the other apps I’ve tried are as interesting, and quite a few of them crash rather easily (Movies). One of them even rebooted my iPod Touch (Where). BofA is another handy vendor-specific app. Twitterific also looks pretty good. I may start using that as y primary client. I sort of like having Twitter in a handheld device even while working on a desktop or laptop machine. Something about the immediacy and separateness from my mainstream work.

I predict that we’re only seeing the beginning of Apple’s horribly botched migration from .Mac to MobileMe. I’ve been following the discussions on the Apple’s forums, and I’m not the only one with some rather serious problems. My personal issues (shared by others) include:

• Usernames aren’t necessarily carried over to Mobile Me. My .Mac ID is dougkaye@mac.com. But apple has allowed someone else to register the ID dougkaye@me.com.
• iDisk is down, and there’s no word from Apple when it will be fixed. I rely in iDisk to keep multiple computers in sync. I store all sorts of things there such as a page of bookmarks and a password database (using 1Password). This a fee-based service, and the multi-day outage is a significant blunder.
• My fear is that when you combine the above two issues, the recovery is going to be ugly. The WebDAV configuration used to access the iDisk appears to also be hosed or at least confused.

I don’t normally think in these terms, but if I were running Apple, there are a number of people who would lose their jobs over the way the iPhone/iPod 2.0 and MobileMe migration has been deployed. I’ll cut Twitter some slack for their infrastructure problems — they’re still a startup — but Apple has no excuse. This will cost them bigtime in their efforts to penetrate the enterprise market. And I’m going to pass on buying that iPhone after all. I think I’ll just stick with my Blackberry and iPod Touch for now. I’ve lost a lot of faith in Apple over this.

Update 7/12/08 1:30pmPDT: Tried a Software Update and got MobileMe 1.1. I can know access my iDisk, but for some reason they moved it from file:///Volumes/iDisk/ to file:///Volumes/dougkaye/, so code I’ve written to use the iDisk has to be reconfigured. Still can’t login to MobileMe via System Preferences, however. Doesn’t like my auth.

PayPal is a valuable service, but there are parts of it that just suck. Here at The Conversations Network, we use PayPal (a) to receive membership dues and donations, and (b) to distribute payments to TeamITC. It’s been very difficult to balance the account because of the way PayPal holds onto funds (to their advantage) and only deposits the difference between receipts and disbursements back to our BofA account. So a week ago I decided to open a second PayPal account, tied to a new BofA account. It was easy enough to setup, link the BofA account and make a round of payments to our team.

A few days later, we got an email message that they needed more documentation: copy of a voided check, IRS non-profit determination letter, etc. No problem. We uploaded it to them the same day.

But yesterday I discovered we’ve fallen into a Catch 22. First, Paypal canceled all the payments we made to TeamITC earlier this month. (They’d never gone through, it turns out.) Second, they’ve essentially frozen the account. Third, the funds that should have gone to our team are stuck in the PayPal account. They refuse to return it to the BofA account. So we can’t make payments and we can’t get back a few thousand dollars that PayPal so happily withdrew from our bank. The reason? They say they can’t accept a “starter” check as verification of the account. (Silly, given that they don’t seem to have any trouble withdrawing funds from that account.) Since we don’t plan to use this account for anything other than PayPal, there’s no reason to print checks. As an alternative, they’ll accept a bank statement, but we won’t get our first one for more than two weeks. PayPal refuses to accept anything else such as a letter from BofA.

I’ve spent about 1.5 hours on the phone with PayPal people, none of whom had the authority to solve our problem. The last person said I’d have to email the Compliance department. We’ll see how that works and how long it takes to hear from them.

What we need is a reasonable competitor to PayPal. Neither Amazon nor Google are there yet. Amazon won’t allow us to pay people outside of the U.S. and Google doesn’t (AFAIK) support outbound payments at all.

Update: With a little help from the PayPal executive offices — it helps to have influential readers of your blog — we seemed to have resolved this quickly. It appears we fell under the compliance obligations imposed by the (U.S.) Patriot Act and financial regulators for KYC (”Know Your Customer”) and AML (”Anti-Money Laundering”). It looks as though all non-profits are now, by default, considered terrorist organizations until proven otherwise, and opening a bank account without printing checks is a red-flag warning of intentions to launder money. It’s going to take a while to sort out which payments went through and which didn’t. Some are clearly marked as “Canceled” while others are simply “Uncleared,” but we should be able to get payments to our international team of “terrorist” writers and audio editors in the next few days. (I can only imagine what a field day the NSA’s text scanners will have with this paragraph.) Not that I wouldn’t still like to see some good honest competition for the PayPal near-monopoly.

Guess I should have read the fine print. I downloaded a movie rental from iTunes. 30 days to watch it — okay. My wife and I started watching it yesterday, but she fell asleep. We went to watch the rest of it tonight — afte rthe house cooled off a bit from all the heat here — but no luck. iTunes only allows you 24 hours from the time you start watching the movie, then it just disappears. Seems like a ridiculous restriction to me. I think I’ll just stick with Netflix for now.

Update: I complained to Apple via a web form, and to their credit they gave me another download/viewing without question. And they replied very quickly, particularly considering how busy they must be today (iPhone 2.0). I still don’t like the policy, but at least Apple’s iTunes support works.

In my research planning our new site for finding and sharing recordings of spoken-word events, I came across Soundflavor, a site doing something similar for music. I’m still learning my way around Soundflavor, but it seems to me that it has nearly all the features we want in a spoken-word site, and it seems to be very well implemented. Looking at Soundflavor, what would you do differently for a spoken-word finding/sharing service?

Now that we’ve got OpenID running as a login/registration option on The Conversations Network, I’m concerned about a particular weakness. Maybe the Identity Gurus can help me out.

I’ve taken the advice of others and allowed registered members to attach multiple OpenIDs to their CN logins. It’s very convenient. For example, I can login with http://dkaye.myopenid.com, http://rds.com (a delegated OpenID) or a variety of others. But this isn’t solving an important problem that I think it should. What happens when I, as an OpenID owner, change my email address? I’d like to just change it in one place (my OpenID provider’s site) and have that change automatically propagate to the sites where I use my OpenID the next time I log into them (if not before). The service providers allow me to change my email address and that address is transmitted to the sites when I use my OpenID.

The problem is that because we receive those email addresses from potentially multiple providers, they can be different. And when we receive an email address as part of an OpenID authentication transaction, we have no idea whether we’re supposed to change our database to reflect that new email address or not. Bottom line: We have no choice but to ignore the email address we receive except the very first time when we can use it as the default for a registration-form field.

I thought OpenId credentials were like the old wallet concept, but how is a web site supposed to deal with an individual who supplies multiple wallets? Am I missing something here?

I can’t tell you why, but Tony Hirst has use the clip/excerpt feature from The Conversations Network as part of a pad-triggered JavaScript audio demo. All sorts of things are possible.

I’ve spent the last three days trying to implement OpenID for The Conversations Network’s web sites. I’m familiar with the concepts and protocols, so I figured it wouldn’t take much effort. I guess that’s what I get for being so self-confident. I still don’t have a solution to the current snag. Maybe someone else knows a workaround or at least some search engine will find this so others can avoid the traps I’ve fallen into.

All our sites are built on PHP5. I develop on OS X, check my code into Subversion, then checkout onto our live servers running RHEL. I chose the OpenID Enabled library. It’s really the only choice as far as I know.

I don’t know whether it’s a bug, poor documentation, or just our peculiar architecture, but there was an incompatibility between OpenID Enabled and my code that took about 12 hours to find. (If the URL of your response receiver includes a query string, you’ll have some extra work to do.) I finally got past that, coded new pages for login, registration and managing multiple OpenIDs for a user, and checked it into svn. I installed the library on the RHEL server and updated the code there. Didn’t work.

It turns out that the OpenID Enabled library needs an XML parser, either domxml (which is no longer available) or the newer/better DOM, which comes with the PHP 5 core code. But we use yum, and the yummy version of PHP5 was built with the –disable-dom option. So no XML parser and hence no OpenID. Aargh!

Sysadmin Tim doesn’t want to mess with another PHP5 build, and after years of working with him — and sometimes ignoring his advice — I’ve learned he’s always right. Surely, replacing our PHP5 (or even rebuilding it) would likely break something else. So I’m stuck until I can either find another OpenID library that doesn’t require the DOM XML parser, or some replacement for that parser. Too bad. OpenID is sort of cool.

Update: Problem solved. Just ran “%yum install php-xml” and restarted Apache. We now have OpenId across all The Conversations Network’s web sites.

Windows and OS X users can now download a new version (1.4.0) of The Levelator. A few small fixes and minor new features. If you’ve been stuck on a bug, it may be fixed in this version.

Podcasting pioneer and friend, Dave Slusher, is reviving his Reality Break radio series as a podcast. Dave honed his interviewing skills well before the advent of podcasting, and I’ve always appreciated his research and preparedness, which help make his programs a cut above the rest. For a while, Dave hosted the Voices in Your Head series on IT Conversations. The majority of Dave’s interviews are with authors, most notably those of science fiction.

The Conversations Network and IT Conversations have running on servers at The Planet for many years, and we’ve been very happy with the performance and support. Apparently — I know nothing about it — there was a fire in one of their data centers or something. In any case, it certainly hasn’t affected us. But the folks at competitor Verio smell blood. I’ve received three phone calls within the past hour, each one for a different person who doesn’t really work at this location such as Paul and Leah. The callers are trying to scare us into switching. However, the number they’re calling is on the national do-not-call list, and since I have no relationship with Verio, they shouldn’t be calling us. And the substance of teh calls is quite sleazy. Shame on you, Verio.

I was surprised to see a 300×250 animated/video Flash ad for John McCain appear on our ‘08 Conversations channel on this page that isn’t particularly flattering to McCain. I was even more surprised, however, when I noticed that there’s no typical “Ads by Google” tag. Without it, one might assume that The Conversations Network accepted advertising directly from the McCain campaign, which is not the case. Not sure I like this. I wonder if there’s a way to disable political ads on our AdSense account. I don’t mind running such ads when we’re not a party to their selection, but this could send the wrong message. Might also be a problem with our 501(c)(3) status.

Just heard from a recently relocated fan of IT Conversations and Social Innovation Conversations that he can’t download our audio files from Shanghai. Anyone else have that experience or know why?

Phil Windley, our Executive Producer Extraordinaire for IT Conversations turned the tables on me and interviewed me on the latest episode from his Technometria series. We discuss the past, present, and future of both IT Conversations and the Conversations Network. I talk about the technical aspects of how shows are assembled and also assesses the challenges with trying to produce quality programming in a non-profit environment. We also discuss how the Conversations Network will continue to evolve in the future.

As we continue to grow The Conversations Network and begin our Phase 2 development, we need to expand our staff management team. We’re looking for volunteers to help with the following:

• AdWords Manager. Thanks to Google we’ve got a large monthly AdWords budget. But if you’ve ever used AdWords, you know how much time and experience it takes to use it properly. We need one or two people with AdWords experience to help us create and manage campaigns for IT Conversations and Social Innovation Conversations.
• PodCorps.org Manager. PodCorps.Org is a critical element of our Phase 2 plan, and it needs a manager all its own. If you share the PodCorps.org vision and want to help accelerate its growth, here’s your chance.
• Pay-to-Play Manager. We’re building a whole-new post-production service based on the success of TeamITC, and we need that special entreprenurial person to take the ball and run with it. This position could evolve to a full-time role with appropriate compensation.
• Wiki/Forum Webmaster. We’re expanding our wiki (MediaWiki) and forum (punBB), and need experienced admins to help them grow.

If you’re interested in any of these projects, please email me directly. All of these are (at least for now) volunteer positions without compensation. The Conversations Network is a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation.

We just got the word that The Conversations Network is the recipient of a Google Grants award. This will be a big help in reaching new listeners, particularly for our fastest-growing channel, Social Innovation Conversations.

From Google:

The Google Grants program supports organizations sharing Google’s philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts.

Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program harnessing the power of Google AdWords advertising product. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education.

The mission of The Conversations Network is to publish online, free to all, the most educational, inspirational and entertaining spoken-word events that would otherwise simply evaporate – be lost forever. We’ve succeeded in that mission, but only with a few niche channels such as IT Conversations and Social Innovation Conversations. As we look to apply what we’ve learned to address a far wider scope – encompassing spoken-word events of all types, on any topic and in many languages – we can’t simply expand the current model. While our processes, tools and team could scale by a factor of perhaps 10x, that’s still just a drop in the bucket of the programs we’d like to help make available. We need an entirely different approach.

Our next challenge isn’t merely to scale what we’ve done by one or even two orders of magnitude, but rather to scale it infinitely and thereby enable virtually every event, no matter where or how small, to find its way to the Internet and from there to anyone who might want to see, hear or read it. To achieve this goal The Conversations Network will evolve from being strictly a producer/publisher to an enabler of others, offering a wide range of assistance to any legitimate organization or individual who needs our help.

We will enable the publication of spoken-word events in three ways:

1. operate a free and open online service for people to find and share recordings and transcripts of any and all spoken-word events, no matter the source;
2. provide assistance in the forms of tools and services to others trying to publish spoken-word events online; and
3. continue to expand our curated channels as examples of the best practices in spoken-word event publishing and as test beds for new concepts and technologies.

Evolution

Phase 1 of The Conversations Network has emphasized a top-down model in which all programs are curated, post-produced, published and distributed by our own staff and on our own web sites. The quality has been high and we’ve built loyal audiences, but we’ve also become a scarce resource – a gatekeeper. Although our post-production costs are very low, we still require an audience of at least 10,000 listeners to each program in order to pay for the publication of that program through a mix of membership dues and underwriting sponsorships.

When our IT Conversations channel pioneered publishing conferences on the Internet in early 2004, many of the required technologies were in their infancies. We had to invent some of them ourselves. Important tools such as our Levelator software, which we distribute for free, are now used by tens of thousands of amateurs and professionals alike in the daily production of spoken-word programs. There are still some missing pieces in the start-to-finish process of recording, producing and publish events, but the tools and know-how are far more widespread than even just a few years ago. As we’ve researched the expansion of our curated-content production model into additional verticals, we’ve increasingly found that others have begun to make substantial progress. If you look hard enough, you can now find a podcast or videoblog covering almost any topic.

But while online-media publishing is simpler than it was four years ago, there are still areas in which people need help. Relatively few lectures, meetings, conferences, speeches and debates are readily available to all. Our plan for Phase 2 is therefore to leverage our expertise by helping others in the production, publication and distribution processes rather than provide a single-source solution as we have done until now. In this way, we will serve far more events and reach a much larger audience than we have under our current (Phase 1) model.

Publishing Challenges

The following are the areas in which we will help others produce and publish spoke-word events:

• recording live events (production)
• editing, mixing and encoding (post-production)
• publication, distribution and syndication

And for listeners, viewers and readers:

• finding recorded and transcribed events
• sharing them with others

During Phase 1 we solved these problems for our own channels and under our own brand. In Phase 2, The Conversations Network will continue to address the full life-cycle of publishing spoken-word events on line, but through an á la carte menu of wholesale services (most of which will be free) from which others can pick and choose according to their needs.

The Phase 2 á la Carte Menu

Here are examples of the services we plan to make available under The Conversations Network Phase 2:

• Recording Events. PodCorps.org is our free matchmaking service connecting event producers with stringers: independent audio/video professionals and semi-pros who can record spoken-word events. As of the end of May 2008, 640 stringers worldwide were registered members of PodCorps.org. We will expand this online community and the forum and wiki that allow stringers and event producers to learn from one another.
• Post-Production. In some cases, PodCorps.org stringers will also provide post-production assistance. But some event producers want a one-stop solution comparable to how we produce event recordings for IT Conversations. We will therefore offer a fee-based post-production service that will take event recordings and generate completed audio, video and slideshow files as well as associated web pages for event producers who cannot do this themselves or who cannot for whatever reason use the services of PodCorps.org stringers. Overall, this fee-based service will produce only a small portion of the events we’ll promote through our finding/sharing web site, but it will fill a need and also generate revenues for our other activities.
• Publication. Through our online forums and wiki we will advise event producers on how and where to host their media files and we sites. We will not provide hosting ourselves. We’ll leave that to the many media-hosting sites and services that are now available, many for free.
• Finding and Sharing. Our most ambitious Phase 2 project will be helping people find what they’re looking for in what will soon become a massive distributed collection of audio and video recordings. We will do this using a social-networking model, which allows anyone to post links to recordings he or she finds, to build collections or playlists of their favorite recordings, to share those playlists with others, and to rate and comment on playlists or individual recordings posted by others. These will not be limited to recordings produced by The Conversations Network, but rather from any and all online sources.

On June 5, 2003, I announced IT Conversations on my blog with two interviews. One of them was with Phil Windley, who is now (among other things) the Executive Producer and voice of IT Conversations. Amazing how Phil and I have gone full circle.

During these five years we created The Conversations Network and achieved these milestones:

• published 1,743 audio programs (89 currently in production)
• trained 152 members of TeamITC who produce our programs
• created four channels based on the IT Conversations model
• created PodCorps.org (now 640+ stringers)
• released The Levelator (more than 83,500 downloads)

I’m thrilled to announce that StackOverflow, a weekly podcast with software-development gurus Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, has joined IT Conversations. Episode #8 (the first on our network) was published yesterday.

StackOverflow is an informal two-person chat. But don’t confuse this series with rambling podcasts you may find on the ‘Net. Phil Windley and I invited Jeff and Joel to bring their show to IT Conversations because of them. They’re two of the most highly regarded members of the software-development community.