Mashup idea 

"Peter Gunn" and "Beds are Burning."

10 minutes later: Oops, just hit me, not completely original. You ever do that? Think you thought of something but you really thought of something that somebody already thought of? I must have remembered how they used "Peter Gunn" and "I'll Be Watching You" on The Sopranos. Is there something specifically Australian about a song built around a distinctive bass line? My fave of those: "Owner of a Lonely Heart."

Tentative take on podcasting in education 

The Otter Group says it's dipping its baby toes into the pool of possibilities for podcasting in learning. Good! But isn't that a double analogy? Don't you either take baby steps or dip your toes? That must mean the authors are extra tentative about it.

I think consultants are loathe to claim too much expertise in podcasting, as well they should be, since so many podcasters are also bloggers and you know how bloggers are -- we tend to have opinions about things and don't think twice about saying somebody's full of shit. While that gives us some power, I'm conflicted between enjoying it and being a little ashamed of the tendency.

Variations on a theme 

Dave went on a little flurry of having fun calling people "wankas" a while back. My older son introduced me to his variation yesterday: "WankTron 5000." Proper usage would be, for example, "Because he's a WankTron 5000." I thought that was pretty funny. If I had to pick a favorite from among the denigrations on that theme, I think I'd have to go with the more explicit "tosser," also Brit slang.

Using RSS and not knowing it 

Here's the handout about a new Nielsen survey on Cyberjournalist. It's not surprising that users of RSS visit news sites more often than non-users.

More interesting to me are the 83 percent who were using RSS but were unaware of it. The researchers attribute it to sites like MyYahoo, where you can customize a personal news page but may not realize the feature uses RSS. That would also explain why these users end up visiting the originating news site, because I don't think MyYahoo provides anything like a full feed.

Knowing the paper boy's name
This must be the audience that Microsoft has in mind when deciding to drop the RSS label. I guess the average user doesn't have to know the name of the paper boy who brings the news to the doorstep. RSS is such a great advance, though; it will be kind of a shame if it ends up blending right into Outlook and other tools without so much as a nod to its existence as an entity in its own right. It would make me feel bad for Dave if that happened, but there still will be millions of geeks around the world who know how it works and what it is and appreciate the genius of it.

The aware/unaware divide was so wide that Nielsen did a bunch of crosstabs on it in describing the typical user. "Among RSS users who understood the technology, 78 percent were male, and 48 percent were longtime Internet users who have been going online since at least 1994."

Youngest users
And on age: "...it may come as a surprise that the youngest Internet users were not the most RSS savvy." I'm not surprised. Neither is Jean-Claude Bradley, who sponsors an RSS club at Drexel.

Attending the Upper Rooms 

Fran took in Bath, she posts from London. Yes, indeed, English lit is replete with Bath settings, especially in Jane Austen. Much of the action in Northanger Abbey takes place there, as well as lots of the important action in Persuasion. Austen didn't care for Bath herself. I have this half-baked theory that you can tell by some of her characters who think it's great -- Emma and Persuasion characters who like Bath are detestable. Catherine Morland doesn't count, she's too naive to know. I don't know how to explain away Henry Tilney, except that at the time Northanger Abbey was written, JA's distaste for the town may not have been fully developed. Anyway he isn't especially mad for it, kind of neutral.