So Leo Laporte, internet superstar and ruler of podcasting, contacted me a couple of weeks ago to appear on This Week In Tech (TWiT) as a guest host. After I picked up my jaw and changed my underwear (in that order), I happily accepted and we completed the show last night (listen here). At first I was a bit intimidated with the guest panel most of which have had huge exposure though the likes of TechTV and most recently Revision3, but I did my best to hold my own with such a large panel. Leo thinks the show went well and extended the invitation for future shows, so that’s a good thing

For those of you who don’t know much about TWiT, it recently won the Podcast Award for Best Podcast in the Technology and Science category. Leo Laporte produces a multitude of shows under the TWiT branding that deal with all kinds of interesting topics. For more information, go to http://twit.tv.

Leo has done an excellent job of taking the home grown podcast/video cast hobby and made it professional. If you view his live stream on live.twit.tv, it’s hard to tell that the setup isn’t in a television studio. Leo uses a tricaster to perform many professional effects using an insane setup that I can only hope to dream about for Bwana.TV.

I’m glad to have experienced this colossal event with the new media juggernauts and am already seeing the benefits of such high exposure. My web server has been taking a pounding since it was plugged on the show and also my Twitter follower count has increased by almost 200 in less than 24 hours. Insane!

Thanks Leo and everyone at TWiT for such a wonderful experience and I look forward to future shows.

I also want to thank Chris Pirillo for helping me through his wide, wide network of listeners. I occasionally produce videos for his podcast, the Chris Pirillo Show. I don’t know if Chris contacted Leo, but if he did, I’m even more grateful. Now, I need to get off my lazy posterior and produce more episodes of Bwana.TV and Bwana.org Radio. Look for new videos tonight on Bwana.TV and a new Bwana.org Radio tomorrow (11/11) at 8:30PM EST. Both will be streamed live as I produce them at live.bwana.tv.

Doing the TWiT, baby.

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First off, what is Gnomepal?

Gnomepal is an open sourced effort to take the Drupal platform and build an amazing install profile so that anyone can build and maintain a powerful online community. Yes, I just made that up.

Chris Pirillo is taking the lead on this project and has humbled himself to yield to the technical knowledge of the Drupal community to make it happen. I sat through a great deal of the initial conference call this past Saturday which Chris and many Drupal developers began their efforts. What I heard was an echo of my previous blog post concerning the situation. I spoke with Chris briefly on my concerns and he assured me that one of my concerns (about the project possibly dying) are null and void since the project is Open source. I think his words were “It will live forever”. While I have my reservations believing the “forever” part of that statement, I did understand his point.

While I am aware the feature set needed for this endeavor to take off will most likely happen, I’m still skeptical of the techosphere‘s mental willingness to accept it. In an effort to aid this situation, here are some reasons why I believe you should care about Gnomepal and possibly contribute to it:

• Communities are important – This is a no-brainer. The driving factor in any web success is community. Youtube’s feature set is behind that of blip.tv, viddler, and metacafe, but Youtube’s community is what makes them amongst the top 5 most visited websites on the internet. Gnomepal puts the power of community forming in your hands.
• Ease of use attracts users – A primary reason why bloggers use WordPress is due to its famous “5 minute installation”. With its cpanel one-click installation support, and dead simple import process from engines like Blogger, Moveabletype, and Livejournal, WordPress has built its user base by removing barriers to entry. Gnomepal aims to provide less barriers to entry for building your own community. It aims to make it dead simple. So simple, your local little league coach can build a web community for all the teams in the league. Play ball!
• Social relevance is the future – We’ve moved beyond the basic needs to join a social network such as Facebook, Myspace, or Ning network #223433. The next logical step is to filter the massive amounts of individual data to that of relevance. Translation: I don’t want to see drunken frat party pictures, I want to see pictures of Yorkshire Terriers and beach landscapes. How will existing social networks know this? Gnomepal looks to build relevance around the social web. You will only see what interests you.
• Users want to build and share, not write code – Ouch. As a geek, that hurt my inner being, but it’s true. The majority of the social web doesn’t want to learn a new templating engine, CSS, HTML, PHP, and mySQL in order “pimp” their presence. Gnomepal looks to provide superior ease of customization while maintaining power and flexibility
• Data ownership is critical – I learned something about this one. Allowing privately owned companies to harvest your content in exchange for free usage is not always a fair deal. Case in point, Facebook. Think about all the activity performed there daily: All the pictures, all the quizzes, the polls, the discussions, the conversations. Facebook owns that data, not the user. Disqus is a great commenting system which is so easy to use and will seduce you in seconds, but guess what? The data is out of your control. FriendFeed is a great mechanism for discussing the social web, and I use it daily. All of the comments, data relevance information (likes, dislikes), and the like are not completely under your control. While FriendFeed (and possibly Disqus) does have data portability options so that you CAN own it, it’s not trivial to do so. Gnomepal looks to build communities, with the same power as FriendFeed, Facebook, and Disqus, but give you data ownership and the option to do whatever you wish with that data. Easily.

Now all of these reasons may sound utopian in nature, but I’m convinced it is definitely possible to build on Drupal. The variable here is whether WordPress/Joomla/Moveabletype die-hards will put it down for a day to try this out. If any of this interests you, I urge you to follow the effort (and hopefully contribute) to Gnomepal. It’s not all about Chris Pirillo (it’s ok to hate him ), it’s not all about Drupal (ok to hate Drupal too), it’s not all about taking the other guys down, but it’s definitely about empowering you to build an online community.

Let’s make it happen.

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• Feedback Regarding Open Direction and Open Communities

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This is a response/feedback to Chris Pirillo’s blog post surrounding a huge idea surrounding web communities. Please read his blog post in its entirety prior to reading this one so you will understand the context. Enjoy.

Let me just say, I applaud this effort and believe you are on to something here. Here are my thoughts.

First off, I think it was a huge mistake to remove Disqus from your blog particularly for this discussion. You could have really spread the word using that mechanism. I think you’re going to need Disqus in the future for these ideas. Their developers are really open to ideas like this and could easily integrate Disqus directly into Drupal as an option. They could also include some of the features you outlined regarding comments as well.

As for Drupal itself, you’ve highlighted my #1 issue with it, it’s not “ready to go”. It may have power, but it requires too much love to get up and going like I want. I think this may also highlight your difficulty in finding a capable Drupal developer. It’s like asking a Linux kernel hacker to write a device driver for your specific hardware, not gonna happen. I’m hoping this situation improves.

While it may have potential, this non-unique idea presents a formidable challenge. What you’re describing sounds like what the OpenSocial foundation is “claming” to help enable. (I could be wrong here) Are you looking to build a competitor to that or to utilize it? There is stiff competition out there and this idea needs a compelling evangelist to convince people to abandon the Myspace, Facebook, and now FriendFeed platforms to support this one. While I understand you intend to include these frameworks in the grand scheme of things, it still will take man hours to make it happen.

Social relevance is huge and this may be why people went crazy over FriendFeed because some believed it enabled users to find others like themselves and discuss the social web. Toluu.com also has the same premise about social relevance. I suggest soliciting feedback from them.

Participation is the key to all of this. I’ve found that many of us on the web have social fatigue and are reluctant to try any new social services, whether they be networks, communities, or something like your ideas. We have to remove as many barriers to entry as we can. I think Drupal is a huge one at the moment. If it is to serve as the core of this idea (and it may not), you really need to make dead simple to get up and running AND to import archived content seamlessly. I can’t stress that enough.

Your idea about blog commenting and sharing ad revenue sort of frightens me. I can’t help but think about comment spammers. If this is going to be implemented (seriously), then spam protection HAS to be ironclad. I foresee a huge problem here. There are mechanisms to get around this of course (comment rankings, karma,etc) but spam protection has to be the #1 priority.

I’m glad you understand the massive undertaking with this. Not only with the technology, but the mindset of the community has to be considered. Something compelling has to be offered in order to dismiss claims of YASN (Yet another Social Network) If this is going to be open, we need to consider open standards: OAuth, Microformats, RSS, Atom, programming languages, etc. All of these are barriers to entry. It’s amazing how many people won’t touch this idea due to a few missing open standards. I’m pretty much in agreement with you here, I understand you have already considered this.

Again, It’s refreshing to see the enthusiasm presented with this idea, but I’m getting a sinking feeling it may be too much to take on considering the obstacles (mostly mental issues in the community, but some technological) ahead. Here are some more suggestions that I have that I didn’t see in your post. (I apologize if I missed it) You may have already considered these but not included them in your blog post:

1. Dead simple rich media support, which includes podcasting, videocasting, youtube api/plugins, blip, blogtalkradio, talkshoe, etc. Yet another barrier to entry.
2. UI has to be GREAT. I can’t tell you how important this is. You could have the great set of features, but if the UI sucks (you know this very well), people will NOT use it.
3. Cross platform support for clients. If we’re going to take an open approach to this, we have to support multiple flavors of Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista, and other OSs I haven’t mentioned that could be important.
4. Mobile support is crucial! We’re moving to a mobile world with the iPhone, Nokia tablets, and Windows mobile smartphones. This idea must consider and work with just about every mobile platform out there.
5. The gaming community needs to be considered. There are billions of gamers out there who use web features of game servers stats, xfire, steam stats, etc. You want to tap into an active community? Tap into the gamers. 360 Gamercard support, Wii and PS3 features. All are game. (no pun intended)
6. Security!! Oh man, you don’t need me to preach to you about this one. Security is so important and we need to make sure such a wide coverage of features has an easy update mechanism for security patches.
7. Assurance this project won’t die. A lot of people, including me, are reluctant to join an effort such as this if it won’t take off. Our time is crucial and potential evangelists and developers are going to need assurance they aren’t wasting their time.

Thanks Chris for your role in the community, and I wish you all the success with this effort!

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Chris Pirillo prefers Rhapsody over iTunes. Music subscriptions (Rhapsody) would be a waste of money for me and are not a viable solution at all. Here’s 10 reasons why:

1. I barely spend $15 every 6 months on music, let alone every month.
2. I listen to great podsafe music and I buy the music I _love_ (Gospel & Jazz). If it’s not something I will listen to 20 times in a row without getting a headache, it’s not worth having. I rarely take suggestions from IRC on what to listen to. Something like that never turns out well for me. Way different tastes.
3. I prefer DRM free music but I do have a few tracks I bought from iTunes store which work fine with our iPhones, iPod nano, Apple TV and Windows boxes via iTunes or other mp3 player. With Airtunes, I can play music in my office and have it play through my computer speakers, my surround sound system in the living room, and my laptop in the bedroom. I usually strip the DRM shortly after buying.
4. In the car, I don’t listen to XM anymore as it’s become as repetitive and crappy as over the air radio so I just burn my own playlists (of which I can easily manage in iTunes due to clean id tags) Smart playlists ftw.
5. 30 second clips are more than enough, and I don’t need to stream. If I don’t like a 30 second segment of a song, then I don’t believe I should buy it or listen to it. Songs that have a “good part” and a “bad part” are bad songs. Period.
6. I choose not to depend on one company for my music sources. While I depend mostly on Apple products to play my content, I have the choice of Amazon MP3, iTunes store, and music CDs to buy music that I can keep forever.
7. Music subscriptions is renting. I’d rather have a “lifetime lease”, if you will. While I really don’t own the music, I can play the copy I bought until the end of time, or oxygen.. take your pick. I don’t need to pay a landlord for my music and succumb to their will at their discretion. I want control.
8. Rhapsody (and other music subscription services) stinks like stale blue cheese on a dead duck. I prefer managing my own music stank you very much, with or without an internet connection.
9. Music subscription DRM is a slippery slope. What’s preventing companies such as Rhapsody/Real from embedding audio ads in streaming content? What if their servers go down? Go out of business? When I own the copy of the music I bought, it’s going to stay that way unless I choose otherwise.
10. I can listen to the same 10 songs for 3 months straight because I really love the music. Why would I give someone $180 a year for permission to listen to all the songs I want, when I can have all the songs I want for $50 a year? Easy decision.

Is Chris Pirillo wrong? Of course not. We both consume music in different ways. My situation dictates I do not even bother with subscriptions while he feels he would save money over a la’ carte. I use my iPhone/iPod, he doesn’t. He doesn’t burn music CDs, he listens to XM. He’s willing to give up control of the music he consumes to a third party, and I simply can’t do that. Different strokes for different folks. While you may argue MP3 (and its licenses/restrictions) is a form of control, OGG Vorbis isn’t. I have an exit strategy because…

I ultimately have control.

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Now that everyone’s had a chance to digest the new announcements from Apple at Macworld 2008, I’ll go ahead and express my thoughts on each announcement:

Time Capsule [link]

• From Apple’s perspective, this creates a great incentive for users to upgrade to Leopard. I believe users will see the benefit of Time Machine and also justify the purchase with a stable 802.11n router.
• At $399/$499, I believe they are fairly priced considering the two main components cost about the same separately.
• Will I get one? No. But I’ll definitely recommend it to new Leopard users who could use a 802.11n upgrade.

iPhone/iPod Touch Update [link]

• Well, we can’t say it was a total surprise since Gear Live reported a leaked firmware a few weeks ago. This turned out to be the exact same release as the official one from Apple.
• Customized home screen is a plus considering the SDK release is right around the corner. We’re going to need this functionality for other things.
• The Google maps “locate me” feature is easily the star of the show. It was genius of Apple to take a step further and include wi-fi location features. This makes it useful for the iPod Touch and increases accuracy.
• $20 for iPod Touch applications is madness. There is no rhyme or reason to such a dumb act. It really makes no sense to me and I feel sorry for all existing iPod Touch owners. They’re the exact same applications that are on the iPhone. Apple really didn’t have to change a thing. This is some kind of dumb tax for something else that iPod Touch users should not have to pay. Ridiculous.

iTunes Movie Rentals / Apple TV Take 2 [link]

• This wasn’t a surprise either as it was confirmed by a snafu on Apple’s support website. It’s good to see Apple is doing this.
• The real surprise was the support of every major movie studio. As far as I know, this is a first for digital downloads. Microsoft did well with their support but not nearly this much. Netflix as well. I think this will be a huge boost for digital downloads.
• AppleTV‘s software update and price drop were a pleasant surprise. Both were welcomed by tech enthusiasts because with the addition of purchase power on the unit and HD rentals, the AppleTV is now a true standalone TV appliance. Removing the virtual tether to a computer was a great idea and really should have been done from the start.
• The price point which was chosen is kind of a bitter sweet deal. We all hate DRM and putting a 24 hour viewing restriction on a movie should reduce the prices in my mind, but compared to on demand and Xbox 360 prices, it’s a fair deal. We need another revolution to reduce these prices and restrictions and I’m hoping Apple can lead the way. (Like iTunes really did help remove DRM. I don’t care what anyone says)

Macbook Air [link]

• Thin is in? I hope so for Apple’s sake. Apple made a bold move in attempting to redefine the ultraportable laptop market. Apple says ultraportables shouldn’t sacrifice keyboard size and screen size, but they should sacrifice an optical drive and hard drive speed. I’m not in this market, so I can’t really speak for which is better, but I do think Apple is taking a chance here.
• Again, the Macbook Air is not for everyone. With the limited battery replacement options, lack of optical drive, memory restrictions (2GB only), pricey SSD option (yes, I know it’s like that everywhere), this machine is clearly not marketed to your “typical” notebook user. The mistake a lot of bloggers and writers are making is that this machine was made for them, when it clearly wasn’t.
• I suggest the following questions before considering a Macbook Air: When was the last time you used an optical drive for other than installation? Do you care about carrying extra batteries? Do you need a fast hard drive for video encoding and the like? Are you planning to play video games on a Macbook Air? Do you require a lot of hard drive storage while on the road? Do you need a lot of USB expansion? Do you drop your equipment a lot? Ask yourself these questions before even considering the Macbook Air. In fact, ask yourself these questions before commenting negatively on the machine. Realize, everything Apple or anyone makes was not meant for your exact needs.

I recorded my reaction to each announcement during the keynote on Chris Pirillo’s live channel. The community responded along with me and you’ll probably notice that some of my opinions changed after thinking about them.

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