Watched the Blazers-Warriors game last night, Steph Curry looked really good! I hope that Portland can rebound and make this a good series – or even win it!

My microblogging book is available on Amazon!

My book “Microblogging: History, Practices, and Tools” is now available on the Amazon Kindle Store! From the book page:

Many people are aware of microblogging, but how did microblogging get started? What are the practices of microblogging, and how is it different from regular blogging? Also, most people know about Twitter as a microblogging tool, but are there other tools available? This book describes the history of communication technology that led to microblogging, discusses common practices that apply to many tools, and an overview of five different microblogging tools you can use to start microblogging today!

Feedback is welcome!

How to avoid the corporate takeover of podcasting

In the past two weeks, there have been quite a lot of postings on the startup Luminary and its predatory practices toward podcast creators. Dave Winer, John Gruber, Marco Arment, and Smokey have voiced concerns, among others. The main benefit of Luminary is getting premium audio content for a fee, as well as regular (free) podcasts. The main concern, as I see it, is that Luminary is messing up the information from the free podcasts, and also hoping to capture listeners within their app/ecosystem, so that users would use Luminary as their podcast app of choice.

Content providers trying to lock in users is not a new concept. All of the major video streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) are producing original content that can only be viewed through their service. Apple and Google through iTunes and Google Play are gateways that people access podcasts, and Apple has been called out before for controlling podcast distribution through its extensive directory.

To me, these are the two ways of avoiding the takeover:

  1. Innovate on features and discoverability
  2. Find ways to help podcast producers know more about their listeners

Marco Arment took a nice step on point 1 with his clip feature that he added to the Overcast podcast app. Other innovations might be to support more distributed directories to assist in podcast discovery (OPML inclusion, anyone?).

Progress on point 2 might be difficult (requiring collaboration, between podcast app makers and other groups of people), but it might be better to band together to create new standards/processes/protocols than to be “picked off” one by one.

 

737-MAX software update still in progress, Collins Aerospace/UTC is involved

From recent reporting, the FAA is still several weeks away from approving the MCAS software changes relating to the Lionair and Ethopian Airlines crashes. In the industry media I read, I had not seen anything whether this was software created by Boeing or by one of its suppliers. This morning, I decided to do a search, and quickly found that it was my company (Collins Aerospace) involved in MCAS software development, and that Collins Aerospace supplies the computer that runs the software. Hoo boy!

  • Washington Post: Boeing’s 737 Max design contains fingerprints of hundreds of suppliers
  • The Gazette (Cedar Rapids IA, former headquarters location of Rockwell Collins/Collins Aerospace): United Technologies is parent company of sensor maker under scrutiny for Boeing 737 Max failure