RichardRadio

I’ve spent the last couple of days looking into, or more like listening into, Podcasting; more on that later. However here is a really nice article on the iPod from Steve Gillmoor which has a few gems on design philosophy

“The dominant bottleneck in this digital communications fabric is battery life. By scoping the iPod to handle audio but not video, to docking instead of transmitting, to caching but not computing, the device’s designers match its use cases to maximum utility. In each case, the device turns a liability (battery life) into an asset (shifting information to a time and place where it can be consumed most efficiently.)

Audio blogs have been around for a while but PodCasting automates the tedious process of downloading to you machine and uploading it to your MP3 player (iPod or not).

An ode to iPod

You could take this as a plea, but also a prediction. Gmail want us to read email on their site because we might click on one of their text ads and give them revenue. So why don’t they let me host my mail from all the pop accounts that I have? Then I don’t have to check mail in outlook AND Gmail. I don’t just mean pulling my pop3 mail into gmail, I need to be able to send from through that account as well.

In fact email is in need of a big shake up. Users need to consolidate mail onto a single “Point” for want of a better word and be able to access it through which ever device/client they want. You could say point of presence but I don’t want to confuse that with the POP3 protocol. IMAP perhaps fits the bill. I heard about IMAP years ago but no one has yet convinced me to use it – I am about to try IMAP and have been researching it but I think most of the things I want IMAP for would be served by using GMail as my exclusive client, cos I get extra searchable repository benefits.

I’ve noticed that I send stuff from my POP3 accounts to my GMail account so that it will be safe and searchable. Searching through Outlook I do as a last resort – its painful: slow and inaccurate and I also have the responsibility of backing it up – and I have lost things when loosing/changing machines and email clients.

Another thing I’ve started doing is to sending things to my GMail to see what ads or related pages it brings up. For example today I was researching IMAP providers, so I sent a mail with fusemail.com and fastmail.fm and GMail bought me up a whole load of competitors. I could have copied the list into the normal google seach box, but at the same time I am archiving and saving my search…

After I do get to point my mx record at GMail, I would then probably want IMAP access too. I might need asynchronous access on a laptop, or from a light client on a phone – but this is hypothetical as my laptop went walkabout, then my smart phone went into a glass of wine and I’m really enjoying the small, bouncable, non crashing and above all SIMPLE replacement. I normally can get to a web browser.

Garbage Company sue hiphop artist for for trademark violation This story is a classic example of the friction that takes place when history experiences a paradigm shift. The shift is from a world where you have intellectual property rights to a world where you don’t.

I believe that in 50 years time we will look back and wonder how anyone ever tried to protect intellectual property, seeing that it is technically practically impossible to stop others copying your stuff. So get used to it and work out how to change your business model. Normally this will mean a move away from sale of products towards provision of service. It might also involve the creation of a community to develop a product rather than simply creating the product itself.