Evan Williams’ podcasting round-up ignores TPN

by | Aug 24, 2006 | Melbourne, Podcast, Uncategorized

b5 Media’s Duncan Riley (no relation) just pointed me to Evan Williams’ recently post on a list of podcast sites, ranked by Alexa ranking. Evan somehow managed to completely ignore TPN. Perhaps he’s never heard of us. I’ll have to get my marketing team to send him a parcel of flowers or something.

For the record, here’s our Alexa ranking (32,450) and it would put us just above John Furrier (and Robert Scoble’s) PodTech on Evan’s list. Evan says of PodTech:

They snagged $5.5 million in March of this year. From what I understand, PodTech is mostly a content company, and there are a lot of other content podcasting companies I didn’t include on this list. But PodTech is probably the most significant one and has had a lot of press with things like the hiring of Robert Scoble.

I guess we were one of the companies he decided to ignore. Gee, thanks Evan. PodTech may have more money (about $5.5 million more) and a much higher profile employee than TPN but we have a higher Alexa ranking (for what that’s worth… it doesn’t pay the bills and I can’t eat it). But they are great guys. I met John in NY late last year at Steve Gillmor’s after party for the Guidewire Groups’ BlogOn 2005 conference and he seemed like a very nice bloke. And Scoble and I go way back to my Microsoft days. He did his first podcast on TPN and we were very grateful for the promotion he did of us in the process.

Speaking of the Guidewire Group, I had the pleasure of having a couple of drinks with Chris Shipley in Melbourne earlier this week. Chris is one of the co-founders of Guidewire and the Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences. Chris was introducing me to Viki Forrest, the CEO of ANZAtech. We had a great chat about podcasting and why Australian technology start-ups need to move to the USA. If I had my time over again, I would have packed up and moved to the USA a year ago rather than try to build TPN out of Australia. The climate in the USA for investment in a business like this is much stronger than the climate in a technology backwater like Australia. It’s a sad indictment on the Australian investment climate but there it is. Right now I’m of a pretty firm mindset to pack up my mic and headphones and make the move later this year. Anyone got a couch I can bunk down on for a few months?

What have we done…?

by | Aug 13, 2006 | Uncategorized

Is Andrew Bolt, News Ltd’s #1 right-wing apologist in Australia, finally starting to wise up?

In his blog yesterday, talking about the arrests in Britian, he wrote:

We must meanwhile wonder what we’ve done to breed alienated – and, I’m tipping, increasingly well-educated – non-Muslims who see salvation in a violent fascist ideology all over again. 

Andrew, at least you’re starting to ask the right questions. "What have we done…?". I’d personally like to see the people in the media with your level of readership spending more time helping us focus on what we have done to create this situation and less time using emotional trigger words like "fascist", "terrorist" and "insurgents" to justify further Western military and economic warfare. Until we discover and understand the root cause of this situation, we will stay in denial and have to live with escalating payback-counterpayback scenarios from the hawks on both sides.

Until folks like Ron O (one of Andrew’s commenters) realize that this is a two-way street and that they are also protecting themselves from us… this isn’t going to stop. Unless, of course, we seriously think we can bomb the enemies of Western Imperialism off the face of the earth without being compensated.

I agree with Ibrahim, a Lebanese blogger who I recently interviewed on G’Day World, when he said "it doesn’t matter who is wrong or who is right. What matters now is peace and an end to the violence and deaths." To even HOPE to achieve an end to the violence we need to understand and accept the position of our enemies. And this isn’t "lefty" talk. Even Sun Tzu, the master of military strategy, will tell you that if you don’t understand your enemy, you will lose more battles than you will win.

StJohn – I’m onto you!

by | Aug 11, 2006 | Uncategorized

Last night, while Netspace (my ISP) was down for the second night in a row, I happened to be checking my router and noticed a PC called "StJohn" attached to my network. I didn’t worry too much about it because my next door neighbour (and regular tech support guy) David has the WEP key for my network and sometimes jumps on to copy media files or just when his network is having issues. I know StJohn isn’t a PC name I normally associate with him, but he’s always getting new machines.

HOWEVER… I happened to be up tonight (it’s about 3am), turned on my desktop PC in the study and got an "IP conflict" message from Windows. So I went to check the router again and discovered "StJohn" control of the router and I couldn’t log on!!

So I walked downstairs, manually re-booted the device, then scurried upstairs, logged onto the router, and set it to "trusted PCs only".

So… StJohn… As DeNiro said… "I’m. watching. you."

“The Long Tail” hits NYT top ten

by | Aug 7, 2006 | Uncategorized

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Mag, wrote a great book called “The Long Tail” about the way the internet is changing how we consume products and media. It was released two weeks ago and it’s already hit the New York Times Top Ten seller list for non-fiction books.

But the best piece of this news (apart from the fact that this means a bunch of people are going to start to get their head around the long tail meme) is that Chris blogged the book while he was writing it, so it should be clear evidence for publishers around the world that blogging a book will not necessarily hurt it’s sales.

Chris sums it up on his blog:

Part of the reason the book is successful, I believe, is because as I was writing it the smart readers of this blog helped improve the ideas, catch my errors and suggest dozens of applications and dimensions of the Long Tail I never would have thought of myself. So today’s recognition is also a recognition of the power of tapping collective intelligence. I couldn’t have done it without you!

I’ve been talking about the book a lot recently and I like using this quote from it:

“There’s still demand for big cultural buckets, but they’re no longer the only market. The hits now compete with an infinite number of niche markets, of any size. And consumers are increasingly favoring the one with the most choice. The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes.“