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Archives for June 2005

Well that was quick.

June 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Well that was quick.

I got my invite to Odeo earlier this evening, and from my cursory look-see, the service looks pretty good. The site is easy to navigate and use, and is presented in a very straightforward manner. I downloaded the Odeo Syncr app and gave it a try, but I also was very happy to note later that you don’t have to use it – you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your subscriptions and use your normal feedreader to download the podcasts, which is probably what I’ll do.

There is an important feature that will likely be the next tempest in the blog-teapot – but that I think is totally cool and web-like. The site is to a great extent simply organizing links to podcasts that already exist elsewhere, so the original show stays only on the site it came from. At least that is the case for content that has not been expressly put into Odeo by its creator. You can be sure that there’s going to be some sort of outcry over this, but that will be misplaced to say the least.

Beyond that, the little inline Flash player is pretty good, and for some reason your subscription list is hidden and only accessible via the Sync section. It really should be a site-wide sidebar item or something.

Anyhow… I can’t wait to see the content creation tools, and maybe soon I’m going to have to motivate myself to do something in this medium. Or maybe I’ll just convince Nadia to give it a try – after all, she’s the all-pro radio host in the family. I’m sure her skills would translate very well to podcasting!

Tags: Feeds, Podcasting, Startup

Evidently,

June 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Evidently,

Odeo has launched. Haven’t gotten an email here yet, and I don’t know if I will, but I hope to check it out soon.

Tags: Podcasting, Web 2.0

As a general principle,

June 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

As a general principle,

I love the internet. After all, I’ve made a very comfortable living by working on internet projects over the last 11 years, and I’ve met some wonderful friends and all the rest of it – all through the net.

Sometimes, though, I’m brought face to face with an undeniable and amazing fact: the web in Canada sucks. Badly. The infrastructure is there, the rate of high-speed adoption is second to none in the world, some of the great internet companies and services have come from Canada… but in terms of local, regional, or even national services, the situation is really lame.

What brings this on is a simple but telling tale. For curiosity’s sake, I was taking a look at take-out sushi restaurants in Montreal. I noted (and have noticed on the street) that there are the Sushi Shops and Soto/Soto Express. The Sushi Shop has a pretty good little site – no problem there. So I tried soto.ca andsotoexpress.ca. Nothing. No response, not even a squatter. OK, let’s check Google. The first result is from some Washington DC magazine, and it confirms that soto.ca is the right address… or seems to confirm it. Of course there’s still nothing there, though.

Hmmm, I thought, maybe Soto has gone out of business or something. So I cruise over to the Canada.com Montreal Gazette site to check. Surely there will be even an excerpt of a story in there if they’ve closed up in the last little while. Uh, no.

First of all, you can’t even search just the Montreal site, at all. Then, the only results (most of which are already guaranteed to be useless, as they come from across Canada) are from the last 7 days. Only. CyberPresse, the online arm of the La Presse group of papers, is worse: there is no search at all.

Then, I went back to the Canada.com site, this time to their Yellow Pages, and tried a search for sushi. I managed eventually (through the worst-designed search I’ve seen in years) to get a list of sushi places… but there was not a single link. They had links to maps, to directions… but no links to websites that I know for a fact exist. What’s the point!?! To add insult to injury, of course none of this stuff is touched by Google, so it’s completely hidden from view to locals or to the world.

Basically, according to the Web, a supposedly thriving restaurant chain in one of Canada’s major cities does not exist. And there are no local online news media through which you can confirm or deny this possibility in any way. What, is it 1992?

Tags: Canada, Internet, Marketing

Graphic:

June 21, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Graphic:

Technologies of Cooperation. By Howard Rheingold, via Seb Paquet and Ed Bilodeau.

Tags: Rheingold

At MIT they’re currently conducting

June 21, 2005 by Michael Boyle

At MIT they’re currently conducting

a survey of weblog authors: the MIT Weblog Survey. I’ve completed it and it’s painless and the survey itself is very well built (it works in the browser and the questions are well presented). The payoff for having completed it is that you can compare your results to the survey population. Check it out.

Tags: Blogging

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