Taking a break 

I'm going to put my literature game podcast on hiatus for a few weeks, unless somebody is interested in subbing. Let me know, I might be up for doing part of the work. amy AT whosaid.org

Laid-back disputation 

"Left, Right & Center" is an easy-to-listen-to weekly political commentary show on KCRW, an NPR radio station in Santa Monica. (Commercial broadcasting debates exhaust me; yelling builds audience, they must believe.) It's available as a podcast. The voices.

'In countries with mild climates... they have science and culture, their philosophies aren't so gloomy' 

Listen to passage #81 in my literature game podcast. It's another character speech from a play.

Audio.weblogs.com sure has a lot fewer podcasts on the changes page. I wonder what they did, besides making sure the blog page for the podcast has changed. It's the first time I've pinged it since the cutover, and my podcast isn't showing up after an hour. I used to enter the feed URL into the ping form, but I think the new form says I should enter the URL for this page. Maybe not. Oh, no, wait, the form at the old audio ping form URL is not for audio, now that I read it again. Later: Now I'm really confused. Way too much trouble for an ordinary podcaster to take. I hope they are not trying to put this in a black box so that a simpler way can cost me something.

I guess I should check out the podcasters list and find out, but even though I know it will be the authoritative source, I dread going there to try to find a quick answer. It would be a nice service if someknowledgablebody would summarize the list in an FAQ or something like one, and give an opinion on definitive answers to questions like this.

I'm getting tired of my podcast. I'd been thinking about taking a break anyway. More and more often, the idea of making enhancements or figuring out something feels like too much trouble, and I usually love figuring out puzzles like that and do it almost for sport. That's probably a big fat clue, doncha think?

Eyeballs, or pyramids or something else? 

The Webmaster Forums have been sold. They're not saying how the new owner will monetize the site, or even who it is, which seems suspicious. I'll be interested to find out because I've often wondered how web message boards might make money. Eleven thousand registered users is quite a lot for a forum site, but not a big number in the whole scheme of things for advertisers. So, either there are a lot of unregistered visitors who are being counted on to click on ads, or there's a premium content plan afoot. Or, heaven forbid, but it's too likely to dismiss the possibility, considering the audience, it's pyramid... I mean affiliate program money they have in mind.

Ugly image 

Gross and weird idea: this time around think of the tech growth spurt as a pimple instead of a bubble. If you leave it to run its course, it will last longer than a bubble. It can be popped before it naturally evolves away to nothing, but it takes more effort to end it, and you might get a scar.

Wet blanket 

People seem excited about the TechCrunch barbeque last night. It is exciting when things seem to be taking off. I don't mean to be a wet blanket in the bubble bath; I just hope lots of people learned things from the last time. I don't pretend to know all about it, especially the whole VC part of bubbles, but the startup I worked for supported a lot of other dotcom startups and I saw a few things I hope won't happen again.

Getting too much money. I've seen this discussed a lot around the net. From the worker bee's point of view one bad thing this breeds is staffing up like there's no tomorrow. I heard an internal recruiter instructed in 1998 that he should not think he could bring in too many people, or that he could do it too quickly. This is before there was business to support the staff. I think back about sitting in on some of those interviews and it breaks my heart to think about all the hopes we fed.

Pinning all the hopes on going public.

Children at the helm.

The wrong things get funded. Follow Dave on this one. I will be because I'd like to understand this part better. Sounds like a lot of the barbeque talk last night was about this angle.

Bandwagon people pile on. I had some pretty bad experiences with MBA types who didn't love the internet or technology. They just wanted "in on it."

Maybe I'll add to the list today as I think of other things. I might start another list of things I'd like to understand better. For balance, I probably should make a list of the thrills, like having to meet on the floor under the stairwell because the digs were busting at the seams. Fast growth is an amazing high.