Nine hours of music and talk to celebrate New Year's Eve on KSSX. The portion of the show that counted down to 2005 on the west coast was recorded for podcasting.

Thanks to all those that called in, wrote, IM'd, and IRC'd. I'd like to think we had a bit more fun that TV.

Here were the last songs played:

06:19:33 Bob Doruogh - Up Jumped A Bird Current Song
06:18:36 Thom Rotella - What's The Story
06:11:57 Thelonious Monk - Nutty
06:11:52 Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Freddie Freeloader
06:11:38 Patti Austin - This Christmas
06:06:08 Oscar Peterson - Wheatland
05:56:37 Ornette Coleman - Doughnut
05:52:39 Olu Dara - Your Lips
05:48:53 New-York Voices - Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard
05:45:31 Miles Davis

Happy 2005!

Of course, in reading the responses, all I can think of is Google AdWords being the ultimate SEO. Just buy your way in! ;-)

Marqui's world: SEO Whitepaper Controversy

From Marc's Voice: Last night at the Geek dinner - people scoffed at me - when I mentioned VloggerCon 2005. Fucking cynics.

I can't believe that from the crowd that was attending, that people would scoff at a videoblogger conference. Hello? Did people suddenly get jobs at AOL Time Warner?

Thanks to all my readers, listeners, supporters, and peers who helped pushed my site to nearly a quarter million page views for the month of December alone. Hence, my goal for a half mil plus in '05.

As I was leaving a party of old Otaku and Slackstreet folks, I found myself participating in a discussion with Real Life News People and media junkies about new media meeting old media (or videobloggers/citizen journalists meeting the newsroom manager or newspaper editors meeting bloggers). What was especially nice is that there is an outside view of blogs, podcasting, citizen journalism at work here, and made my skills get honed in explaining, life, the universe and podcasting.

I wish I recorded it. Intellectual Property, International Media, How the News Biz Works, and a whole lotta other good stuff including screenings of really old video remixes, mashups, and hysterical public access shows.

This path needs to be explored in depth. I'll report more later since it's 4 am and I'm beat.

The good thing to sleep on is how this path exploration is so key and integral to my Blogcast 1.0 plans.

I've recently had the please of meeting Stuart, of course, through his blog. He writes that he is giving up traditional blogging.

I'm not sure on my thoughts on that, especially since I'm coming out of a content identity crisis myself. I'm finding that I'm blogging in other places, as a contributor to some things greater than me. I think that's called 'Gestalt'.

Also, I've found that the more I "blog", the more it seems to become "writing"... What's the difference? One's well thought out and the other is casual, first-person writing? I'm being called a writer. I'd never call myself a writer. Am I?

EricRice.com is becoming a bit more than just my personal site, as well. I've toyed with the idea of contributors, which of course, isn't that bloggy come to think of it. I mean, my podcast (while mine in namesake) is a gathering of three others. There is no "I" in team, only in marketing materials. ;-)

At any rate, it's also odd to note that my whiteboard has a massive roadmap scrawled on it for my content strategy, not just in the confines of ericrice.com, but also KSSX, Slackstreet Entertainment, my other properties and consulting projects, and naturally, Audioblog.com. Blogging for me, is an industry. I'm now paid to blog, paid for advertisement, paid to podcast, and still generally keep it real. At least I think so.

Tangent: Why the HELL is all the traffic spikes generated by stuff that is not blogosphere-related? I know full well that my audience is two-fold. Those that know (and care) what RSS is, and those that know very little about technology, but are nerdy and hip in their own special ways. And some of them like listening to FM radio.

That might be what frustrates me about the blogosphere. It's a perpetual, arrogant high-horse and a lovemark at the same time. It's the epitome of Power Law and it tries to change the world (and I believe in some of that change and am guilty of the arrogrance). But really, people. We need to go outside, go to the mall and explain something like The Big Evil of Corporate Radio to a teenager with a disposable income, and see if they care. Some might. Some might not.

Besides, wouldn't the ultimate slap in the face to idealists be when Clear Channel puts some morning show segments and top 40 musics in podcasts and that's what the kids download to their iPods? I think that's called Schadenfreude.

Best of luck, Stuart, I know I'll see you around. And the compulsion to blog might somehow overpower the desire not to, as I've found when a reader reminds me that some bloggers provide valuable services of information that betters certain parts of our techno world.

PayPal donation page and eBay Tsunami Disaster Relief

Some of you know that my other half runs a elegant and simple service that provides auction templates and image hosting for eBay sellers. The auction economy is our little secret. ;-)

Anyway, stop on by the Seller Sourcebook (also known as AuctionTemplates.com): SellerSourcebook.com

You've got to be VERY CAREFUL when you start mixing the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Bloggers talking about CMS (communication Management Systems is the Marqui vernacular) products. Especially when it could be argued that blogs can be implemented as adequate, non-overkill'd alternatives to purchasing/licensing complete CMS solutions.

Part of what I've got in my inbox regarding this week's paid assignment on Marqui has to do with SEO, a touchy subject I don't normally talk about. After all, the old joke is that BLOG is short for Better Listing On Google. I don't need search engine optimization thankyouverymuch. I do quite fine on my own.

Robin Good has a brutal, I mean, brutal deconstruction of an SEO whitepaper. I wish I could be as detailed as he is on a daily basis: Bad SEO: Marqui Has The Reference - Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings

I have a previous engagement with the Otaku / Slackstreet studio crew in the Valley.

Two announcements from the eBig Blogging & RSS forum:

First, on Tuesday, January 4, 2005 in Concord, CA is "The Value of the Corporate Blogger" with speaker Elisa Camahort. The event runs from 6:30-9:30 at the University of Phoenix 11401 Willow Pass Road (the new tower). Hope to see everyone there. The last session on Blogging & the Law was quite helpful and lively, of course. ;-)

Second, I am going to be the co-chariman of the eBig Blogging & RSS forum. Should be fun!

From personal publishing to corporate communications tools, weblog and Real Site Summary (RSS) technology is skyrocketing in popularity and attracting serious interest from megaplayers. Weblogs are quickly becoming the new standard in publishing online and collaborating with employees while RSS is replacing email as a way of sharing information in the face of overloaded inboxes. The Weblog and RSS SIG will explore the emerging field of blogging and RSS, and how it can be utilized efficiently in your business. We'll define and discuss business blogs, how to get started, best practices, legal issues, technology requirements, weblogs as marketing and content management tools, and much more.

Blogging & RSS sig

Heh. The irony.

Making resolutions for the New Year is easy. Making them happen is an entirely different matter.

That's why, 2005, I pledge to you to make my resolutions come true or die trying.

Here's my short list of five.

1. Move the family to Seattle, WA
2. Have a successful Blogcast 1.0 conference
3. Do some rocking and highly confidential $tuff with Audioblog.com
4. Finish the Podcast Notebook and get another book in the can
5. Bring blogging/podcasting to the everyday consumer
6. Visit Japan

updated:
7. Pass 1/2 million page views per month
8. Read more books, not blogs

It's like Flickr, location-based moblogging with audio annotation, and a mobile-phone based operating system shell that reminds me of those guys that tried to make an OS that was history-based and stacked:

Keyword(s): digital media; photo sharing; multimodal; camera phones; storytelling

Abstract: The convergence of communication and imaging capabilities in a single device, the camera phone, is changing the way people take, share and communicate around pictures. In this paper, we describe and discuss three complementary research prototypes - MemoryNet Viewer, Plog and StoryMail - that we built to explore how media can be used as part of everyday storytelling activities. Each system focuses on informal, casual and lightweight solutions for multimedia storytelling and conversation. We conducted small preliminary pilot studies that revealed interesting patterns of use of the media within social networks, which we plan on investigating further.

Tech Report: HPL-2004-180: Enabling Informal Communication of DIgital Stories

Overheard in IRC:
[ptorrone] "you're only a real artist if you're willing to burn your face off with a high powered green laser"

eBay to Retire Passport and .NET Alerts

Over in my podcast channel:

"Greg Hughes of GregHughes.net chatted with me about using AdSense revenues to benefit aid organizations for the Tsunami victims, as well as encouraging Google to open up AdSense to enable people to donate. Download the interview where we talk about Adsense; Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon fame, Robert Scoble and citizen journalism, and other peripheral topics surround the tech and social aspects surrounding the events of the past week in the blogosphere."

Eric Rice Podcast: Interview: Greg Hughes on Tsunami Donations

This document will continue ideas and discussions on audio and video naming conventions.

First off, I'm not as much of a pain in the ass about naming conventions as it might seem. In fact, I was trained (and although not an active practictioner) on strict naming conventions for HTML and SQL.

Examples:

Within the FORM tag, each item should have the prefix abbreviated and initial-capped based on the element's usage, and this carries over to fields and tables in a SQL database.

cboState relates to fldState (cbo = combo box, the real name of a drop down)
txtFirstName to fldState (txt is text field)
chkSendEmail fldSendEmail (chk is checkbox)

In a database tblName is the name of a SQL table, and so on. This is what my mentor most likely derived from the Reddick Visual Basic for Applications (RVBA).

Now that's a bit heavy on the programming/coding.

Some of the ideas presented in the podcasters group on Yahoo! include:

YYYYMMDD_ShortSubject.xxx
ABC_YYYYMMDD_ShortSubject.xxx

One of the challenges that may arise (and also be a point of contention) is the way certain programs generate filenames.

Take iTunes for example, the cross-platform program that rips music from CDs and stores them as a digital file on your hard drive. Most file systems are capable of having file names such as, "01 X Gon' Give It To Ya.mp3" even though the ID3 tags give me the title, artist, album and genre.

The question remains if ID3 information is good enough for the consumer, whereas good file name habits are good for just the publisher or good for the publisher and consumer.

It's also easy to fall out of good habits. I'm guilt of this, most likely because it's not mission critical for me to fix.

Other naming conventions for audio have existed, more in the traditional file-management sense for practical system indexing, not human intuition.

Ultimately, it's my belief that under normal circumstances, incorporating best practices in file naming benefits the publisher and publisher's descendents first, and second (and in rare cases) in the average end usesr's case.

It certainly never hindered file sharing on P2P networks. ;-)

(This is a work in progress)

I love the Red Meat Generator. Today's installment: I don't 'like you' like you.

Just got an i860 from Motorola, one of the sleekest, feature-rich phones that's pushing me into Nextel full time. I'm not going to use sprint anymore, and if you use the 457 number, be advised it will be disco'd in the middle of January.

This phone should tie me over until the 930 smartphone arrives.

What's fascinating is that a sexier gadget comes with better features and interface, so it just begs me to upgrade. And that's not too different from iPods.

Which, btw, I saw firsthand someone who wanted an iPod so bad, they got a U2 ipod just to have one.

That's passion!