Dialup? 

I'm at my parents' house until tomorrow. It's their 55th wedding anniversary. Brunch in a minute; I'm doing the eggs. But first things first, let's see how this baby does on a dialup. Still really speedy. Still feels all mystical and close and stuff.

Tell me about the lighthouse I'm seeing, please 

Is the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) podcast tour the only listen-and-walk-around podcast tour out there?

If there aren't travel tours, there ought to be. Wouldn't be nice to have a knowledgable native of the area tell you all about the historical, industrial, and societal and recreational aspects of the areas on either side of a stretch of highway or railroad track. I'm not big on networks, but some kind of co-op would be great if you wanted to build a decent sized library of audio tours. Not everybody can know everything. Howard Rheingold's smart mobs thing, you know?

I was on Amtrak Thursday night, headed out of Chicago into Michigan, listening to podcasts. I looked at Lake Michigan on my left somewhere before the St. Joe/ Benton Harbor station, and I thought how cool it would be to have a voice in my ear telling about early explorers or shipping history, or lighthouses or oh, any number of subjects.

Next big thing? 

My brother drove me to Mt. Pleasant from the station in Grand Rapids. He works on a magazine for an association, like me -- isn't that funny? (Or not; we had the same influences after all.) He's a geek in a different way than I am. He's into using databases to track Michigan oil and gas wells, then they go in the association's magazine, which is published on paper only. He asked me what the next big internet thing was going to be. I told him "Maybe OPML." He doesn't know what RSS is. I think I agree with Dave that the 9% RSS awareness figure is way high. Almost nobody I know in real life knows what it is.