A few days ago I wrote Building an Open Source Home over at Linux Journal. Lots of great responses there. Meanwhile, a new question has come up: If we want to future-proof the house as much as possible, we'll want fiber, right? The question is, what kind? My electrician — the guy who's doing the installation — says there are many kinds to choose from. Me, I have no idea. I'm hoping one or more of you folks do.

Tired of the blue screen, tired of the monotony using the same OS with the same design and especially knowing that the founders is just one of the person who by his shadows he puts down the Amiga Era.
For the first time in 20 years using computers, from the ZX spectrum passing to the Commodores 64-128 to the actual x86-64, I’ve tried first the Suse 9.3 pro find it really friendly and appart from MS system, after installed the SuSE 10.0 OSS, Mandriva 2005 and RedHat fedora. I’ve fall in love on the Linux world more then my first love.
Well I’ve decide to give my own support by creating www.arameya.com, which is just a push dedicated to the Tux and I hope it will manage to give something to the Linux. Do not hesitate to contact me via my website or via the forum in case you got any suggestion to add well all your idea can help, please do not hesitate making any critics.

RSS DJ is a new style of RSS aggregator. In fact, we call it an RSS Mixer, and you are the DJ (well, maybe a PJ for Podcast Jockey). Here are some of the coolest things that RSS DJ does and lets you do...

* Take any text based RSS feed (blogs, news feeds, anything), and automatically convert them to spoken word MP3 podcasts!
* Filter out advertisements from RSS Feeds - Yay!
* Scrape web pages for those RSS feeds that don't provide their entire stories but only a summary or a link (you know who you are!)
* Create your own RSS DJ "Mixes" combining feeds based on tags, freshness, and peer ratings

Identity became a STAGS — a Subject That Actually Goes Somewhere — not much more than one year ago, at the Fall 2004 Digital Identity World in Denver.

That was the first time Identity moved out of the corporate monolith-to-monolith realm and into the personal peer-to-peer realm we also call the Net. Up to that point, most of the talk at DIDW, for years, had been about "federation".

That topic had positive meanings, sure; but to individuals it all looked like what I unkindly characterized as "large companies having safe sex with each other using customer data". If you can't parse that, don't bother. The perspective is what matters. And that's what changed at that show. For the first time, Identity began to get personal. The grass roots began to grow together and cohere into something truly new and interesting.

A bunch of people — Drummond Reed, Jamie Lewis, Kaliya Hamlin, Fen Labalme, Craig Burton, Owen Davis, Kim Cameron, Johannes Ernst, Andre Durand, Eric Norlin, Phil Windley, Bill Washburn, Marc Canter and others — began to connect at that show and in the weeks that followed. Kim Cameron started Identityblog and began to write his laws. Phil Windley and I gave a progress report on the 14 December Gillmor Gang.

Then followed this post by Dave Winer and this one by yours truly, in which I said "identity needs a Dave Winer", among other things. Then, on New Years Eve we

chat,server,web,index,ftp,vb,

slipstream n. ... The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water. intr. v. To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

The sucking sound you hear in Mitch Ratcliffe's post "More on the Future of Podcasting" is his effort, on Audible's behalf, to slide the company into podcasting's slipstream. Nothing wrong with that. Audible has every reason to climb onto the podcasting bandwagon, even if it's over the tailgate. Audible is a pioneer in downloadable audio, playback devices and much more. It has a lot to contribute, just as Apple did before the podcasting market leveraged the iPod — and after Apple joined that market by adding podcast subscriptions to iTunes.

While Mitch makes a case for enlarging the concept of podcasting to include Audible's, he also has nasty remarks about Dave Winer (or Dave's "perspective" — it isn't clear) and incorrect (though respectful) remarks about my positions as well. The first responses from Dave and myself are here and here.

Now I see (at 1pm Pacific) that Mitch has replied to both Dave and I (though mostly Dave) at even greater length here.

As I said in my post, podcasting is a market that began with the demand side supplying itself. That's what IT Garage is about, and why I've been writing about podcasting here (more than elsewhere) since the post on September 28, 2004 when I noted that there were just 24 results for "podcasts" on Google.

Today that number is 102,000,000. It is into this slipstream that Audible made an announcement memorably titled Audible Unveils Audible(R)Wordcast at Podcasting & Portable Media Expo; For the First Time, Content Creators Large and Small Will Be Able to Build Audit-Ready Advertising-Based and Subscription-Based Podcasting Business. In Audible's silo, that is.

Because that's what Audible is proposing here: a silo. And what Mitch is proposing as well. It's also what Real and Microsoft and Apple and the whole 'content' industry wants to do

Web 2.0 is interesting, the idea of having services available across the net... cute, but what I really want is App 2.0. In App 2.0, we still do things in a document centric manner, or perhaps a task-centric manner. The main improvements are more along the lines of user interaction.
A good "app 2.0" application does a few things differently:

I wrote yet another rant on the train in this morning. Then a thought occured to me after publishing it on blogger... why can't we undo "close"?

Who does one contact for a Web 2.0 app gone bad?