Podcasts
My commute means I’m in my car for a good 2 hours a day when I’m in the office, making it an ideal time to catch up on some podcasts. I find that they are ideal for the journey to work as they provide a good transition between home and the office. Sound quality on all of these is great, though with some of the shows where an interview is conducted via Skype or similar the interviewee’s volume could do with raising a touch.
I’ve now got a solid few feeds which throw up enough to keep me occupied.
Boagworld
Paul Boag from Headscape produces a pretty regular podcast aimed at the beginner developer and managers. Don’t let this put out off if you don’t count yourself as either of these as Paul covers a wide range of topics and there will generally be something to pique your interest.
dl.tv
The only one I don’t listen to on the move as it’s a video. Patrick Norton and Robert Heron cover all things gadetry from HD tvs to Vista to digital French rabbits. I’m constantly amazed by the knowledge displayed by these two.
Edgework
A great series of interviews from Brian Oberkirch with some of the web luminaries such as Ryan Carson, Jason Fried and Jeff Veen to note a few recent ones.
Live from the 101
Bryan Veloso of Avalonstar and Dan Rubin of Superfluous Banter team up to deliver a great podcast. This normally sounds a lot like a chat over a cup of coffee between two mates which makes it fantastic listening.
The Web 2.0 Show
Dont let the title of this one put you off, it was named way before the whole O’Reilly thing. Pretty irregular but a good listen as they have a good interview each episode.
Vitamin
The lovely people over at Carson post their interviews as audio files as well as a full transcript. Again great interviews with people like Dan Cederholm of Simplebits and Kevin Rose of Digg.
What’s New Now
From the same stable as dl.tv this is a general round-up of all recent technology news
What’s good about all these are that the personalities of the interviewers really comes across in the audio format, meaning that even if all of them talked to the same person it would result in quite different discussions.
Posted: Mon 4 Dec 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;
webcameron
Blogs made more in-roads into the political dictionary this week with the (Beta, of course) launch of webcameron, David Cameron’s new site. It’s only been up a couple of days so posts are still a little thin on the ground and I’m sure he’s still getting used to the idea. Design firm Head London have made a pretty good job of it all, and it fairly sings web 2.0. Everything is there - count them - Tag Cloud, Flickr feed, YouTube-style videos, guest blogs, widgets, PodCasts. Unfortunately there are a couple of non-Web2.0 code issues - a double doctype, inline styles and javascript in the hrefs, but it is light years ahead of what we would normally expect from a politician’s site.
The design is nice and clean, keeping away from the oh-so-obvious party-blue, and giving us a site it is actually pleasurable to be on. There is even a video clip of a conversation between (I assume) a guy from Head London and Mr Cameron regarding the sections of the site which haven’t launched and how they were going to deal with the high volume of comments. Now I would have thought that they would have given this a bit of thought beforehand, making sure that the early adopters weren’t left hanging waiting for replies. I’m sure there are several people employed full-time just moderating the comments, which all have to be approved before publication.
I hope that this site continues to be updated and isn’t left to be another fashion-following fad. Whether this is a good movement for politics itself I’m not sure - is it heading too far towards personality-led politics - but it does make the party more human, something which many large companies have already discovered.
Posted: Tue 3 Oct 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;Standards ;
Dell Starts Blogging
Dell has launched a company blog called one2one. Unfortunately for Dell, instead of talking about things the customers want to hear about through such a interactive medium, they have chosen to use it to wave the corporate flag. Product launches and back-patting seem the order of the day. That is not what a blog is about - you can have those as nice features on your company site. Blogs are about revealing the people behind the company and maybe the behind-the-scenes work they do, the reasons the company does what it does.
For a company a large as Dell a blog is a golden opportunity to connect with their customers, find out what they want or what is causing them concern - much more so than any number of feedback questionnaires would. In a blog you can go back and ask for clarification and also be seen to be acting. Dell should be addressing customer support issues which seem to be the main complaint about them. Also they need to ensure their customers can find them - I could see no links to the blog from the main Dell site, even after using their search tool.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a huge thing that Dell have decided to start blogging, but I hope they manage to keep it away from the in-your-face marketing people. This could do more for their reputation than their marketing dept could imagine if done right.
Posted: Wed 12 Jul 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;
BBC Blogging
The BBC has launched a new news blog called The Editors. After being initially disappointed that it wasn't an editorial viewpoint on the news (though that is dealt with elsewhere), I was pleasantly surprised. The Editors comes across as an in-depth Points of View, giving a personable face to a large corporation and covering the reasons behind some of the decisions the BBC makes which impact on their customers.
Informing customers is a great reason for a company publishing a blog, especially one as large and as public as the BBC. They've also ensured that they have gathered staff from the web, TV and radio, giving a wide base of topics, each with their own RSS feed.
Posted: Mon 26 Jun 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;