Monthly Archives: February 2007

Emerging, New Media, New Paradigms, podcasting

R U Sirius, XM?

It’s not often that The Portable Consultant scoops The Economist… well, not exactly but sort of…

Back in July of 2005 I suggested here that Internet options (like podcasting) would compete with satellite radio. I followed this up with a couple of posts… here… and here.

Today The Economist commented on the pending merger of XM and Sirius while noting “…the satellite-radio networks have been struggling to respond to competition from recent advances in broadcasting, such as through the Internet.”

You read it here first! …um… sort of. 🙂

Hi Ho!
-pmh

UPDATE:
Shortly after posting this I was on the road and heard Todd Maffin‘s podcast on this very topic.

ECM, Emerging

RSS as a Radically Simple Suggestion

As some of you may recall, The Portable Consultant is presently assisting with the implementation of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System for a Canadian financial company. The vendor has now been selected and the project PM is scheduling the vendor’s training courses. One of the course descriptions mentions management of “content subscription” and the PM asked me what this was.

IluvRSSÂ

As it turns out, the course description may be referring to the system of email alerts sent out when there are changes to content in the repository to which a user has “subscribed”. Being immersed in Web 2.0 and related technologies, however, I immediately launched into a presentation of RSS subscriptions complete with a demo of FeedReader and descriptions of the benefits of RSS for updating staff and partners via intranet and extranet RSS feeds.

Of course, the ECM vendor does have full support for RSS too. So my explanation wasn’t wasted, but I have been struck by how little people in the general IT world do know about RSS. Our project is sponsored by the company’s Sales & Marketing group and they also know nothing of RSS. For my client the benefits of RSS are simple to explain… a radically simple suggestion, actually.

Since my professional life is in perfect synch with the podcasts I listen to on my daily commutes, I recalled that the February 13th. episode of Todd Cochrane’s Geek News Central Podcast contained a pointer to Why Do You Care About RSSÂ by Sue Polinsky. Check out the comments below the article for more useful links.

Cheers,
-pmh

Emerging, netcasting, Open Source

net@nite interviews Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales

My morning commute today featured the net@nite podcast netcast interview with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. He had some interesting points about software design supporting communities such as Wikipedia. He draws the obvious connections between the Wikipedia community and those that produce open source software. His commercial initiatives are building on the expertise on community management gained with Wikipedia and it seemed to me that this is the direction that the Internet seems to be taking.

It continues to blow me away how a small group (a half-dozen, in Wikipedia’s case) can create and manage a resource the size and popularity of Wikipedia.

The interview was interesting for its social rather than its technical content. (My question to Jimmy would have been about Wikipedia infrastructure… see how shallow I can be?) 🙂

Cheers,
-pmh