Community Guy – Jake McKee

Apple joins podcast fray

One of the least community friendly companies around, Apple (yes Apple) screws up what could have been an amazing opportunity.



Yesterday they launched iTunes 4.9. In this latest version, podcasting is supported.



Apple is allowing podcasters to add their podcasts into iTunes Music Store (for free, of course). It’s all a great idea, but they’ve dropped the ball in a big big way in a couple of ways:

• Their initial specifications document is a HORRID pdf document, set with tiny text, unclear detail, and apparently some mistakes.
  
• Along the lines of the first point, there’s apparently a mistake in the horrid spec document. Apple has been 100% silent on clarifying whether <itunes:link> is correct or if it’s <itunes:image>. How hard would it be to simply say "We saw there is some question – here’s the answer"?
• The specifications document, as well as any details about how the specifications are used has been cobbled together by the community, rather than being shared at all by Apple
• The extensions they’ve had to add to RSS 2.0 had basically no input from the tech community, the podcast community, and with zero discussion… consequences of their (poor) decisions is yet to be fully understood, but it’s very likely to be negative for RSS overall, and is likely to lead to another "browser war" among competing specs.
• A total lack of clarity about what the review/approval process is with the submission of podcasts to iTMS. How are podcasters supposed to promote their shows, if they don’t know when they’ll actually show up in iTunes. And how are podcasters supposed to understand what will be accepted and what won’t in order to improve our feeds?

Everyone raves about how Apple is this great community minded company. In reality, Apple has created a certain formula that they don’t often sway from – create such cool goods that people will deal with your bullshit.



I can certainly understand that it’s as much up to a company to understand what not to do as much as what to do. Fans want more and more and more, that’s what they do. They’re never happy, and that’s just what you have to accept.



The Apple community has reached that critical mass point where the community will live on no matter how much of an asshole Apple is. But that doesn’t make it kosher to be an asshole.



The sad part of all of this is that with less than one day of one person’s time, they could have had a huge victory, rather than a pathetic launch.

Queer Eye Podcasts

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is now podcasting their weekly Hip Tips.

Great idea!

X-Men and their fans

When I heard that the X-Men fans were up in arms because the director for the third X-Men movie was a new guy, I was very curious to see if the studio would responded to that reaction. While I haven’t seen much reaction from the studio, the new director, Brett Ratner responded directly and clearly, showing that he was aware of the negative buzz.

Hopefully this concern, and Ratner’s awareness will actually help him think more about the audience.

ScreenRant.com also has an interesting look at the key points of Ratner’s interview.

Another good manifesto

I came across this intersting Craft Manifesto. I think it’s quite applicable to the current “participation economy” that we’re entering into. Using the word “craft” here can be replaced by any number of specific terms.

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.

2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can?t see.

3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.

4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.

5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.

6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.

7. Essential for crafting are tools, which are accessible, portable, and easy to learn.

8. Materials become important. Knowledge of what they are made of and where to get them becomes essential.

9. Recipes become important. The ability to create and distribute interesting recipes becomes valuable.

10. Learning techniques brings people together. This creates online and offline communities of practice.

11. Craft-oriented people seek opportunities to discover interesting things and meet their makers. This creates marketplaces.

12. At the bottom, crafting is a form of play.

Site down this weekend

Just a heads up – this site will be down over the weekend.

The “little server that could” that’s been running this site and others has been the “little server that couldn’t”. So this weekend it’s undergoing a full rebuild. Hopefully that should help eliminate all weirdness you may have seen lately.

We should be back online Monday morning. Thanks for your understanding.

Apple + Intel = MS Demise?

 Last night I read quite a bit about the Apple news that they’re replacing their PowerPC processors with Intel processors.

None of it seemed to address some of the obvious questions – namely, if the PPC chips (aka G3/G4/G5/etc.) were so smokin fast, why would a move to Intel be a good thing?

Once again, brain child Robert Cringley addresses these questions in his latest article. He also has an interesting theory on what’s really going on:

Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn’t always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel’s standpoint Microsoft doesn’t work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft’s bloatware strategy just isn’t making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.

Enter Apple. This isn’t a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I’m just guessing on this one).