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November 18, 2004
GigaDial: Build Custom Feeds from Podcasts
Andrew Grumet and Martijn Venrooy have put together a very cool server-based application called GigaDial that let's you create your own custom Podcast feed from other feeds. Here's one I did that has a podcast from Adam Curry and one from the Gillmor Gang. As I find other things that are interesting to me, I can add them. I could create a custom feed for students to listen to or for my employees. I think there will be lots of applications for this.
06:46 PM | Recommend This | Print This
CTO Breakfast Reminder
We'll hold November's CTO breakfast tomorrow morning. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood.
02:55 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Starting a Business With No Money
Joel Spolsky points to several articles on starting a business without involving VCs.
- Peter Ireland on 10 reasons to shy away from venture capital
- Seth Godin's manifesto starting a business with no money.
- Joel's own VCs do not have goals that are aligned with the goals of the company founders
I would add on piece of unsolicited advice: never, ever use a reverse merger to raise money. Reverse mergers are the crack cocaine of the money raising arena and they set your company up for failure from the very start. The problem is that you're public long before your ready. What's more, many of your shareholders are not in it for the long haul or believers in your story. I've been meaning to write an essay on this. Maybe someday.
01:23 PM | Recommend This | Print This
KSL Radio has RSS
I've been trying to get news outlets in Utah to put up RSS feeds for a while. Russ Hill, News Director for KSL Radio wrote today to tell me that KSL Radio has an RSS feed. That's cool. They ought to put an "Add to MyYahoo!" button on the page as well for people who won't know what the XML button means. This is a good development.
Of course, having a radio station with an RSS feed immediately makes me think they ought to be using enclosures to send along the audio of the story. One feed with audio and one without. The audio of most of their stories are streamable from the Web page, so they already generate the content.
KSL Radio even has the opportunity to put ads in the enclosures. Place an ad at the beginning or end of the audio file and I'll likely listen to it. Do something like "this clip sponsored by Foobar Jeans..." In audio, you can attach the ad to the content more easily since its all sequential.
With this one discovery, KSL Radio has become my premiere news source for Utah news simply because I'll now see the latest stories from them several times a day without linking out to their site.
Think about seeing ten to twenty stories in your feedreader, clicking the ones you like and self-assembling a news program that you take on your iPod while you jog or drive into work. That is entirely possible using the technology we've already got.
11:19 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Google's Acadmic Search Tool
Google launched a search service aimed at academic literature. The services allows "you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web." The ranking is apparently by citation with is pretty cool since that's how most people would measure a paper's influence. Clicking on the "cited by" link gives you back the citing papers. Now, it they just had a link to the bibtex for the reference...