What to do for KYOU?

“On today’s podcast I ponder the possibilities for tomorrow’s broadcast podcast for KYOU-AM in San Francisco.”

Dave is preparing for a podcast broadcast on KYOU and is considering different options for the content. He reflects on the changing media landscape, with users becoming their own content creators, and how this will impact the political system in the future. He is open to becoming the “Dick Cavett of the podcasting world” and engaging in more interviews, but is waiting for Skype to improve its recording capabilities.

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do- do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
Here we go, everybody.
Morning Coffee Notes.
It’s the 14th of May, 2005.
And here’s Dixie.
You get ready.
You get ready to part it down, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

• Everybody, that was the song that I was, that was the MIDI that I was trying to get to play the other day and I don’t know what.
  I don’t know what was going wrong.
  I mean, it wasn’t music MIDI day here at the beach because today I went to the site and I thought, okay, you know, I’ve got to get this music to play.
  It’s like, that’s gonna make me feel happy.
  And so I went to the site and thought, okay, I’ll fiddle around some here and there or whatever.
  And I clicked on play and gosh, it didn’t start playing.
  So what the hell’s going on there? Anyway, so let’s do that one more time.
  This is a song I was trying to get to play the other day and I spent, God knows, 40 minutes on a podcast trying to make that music happen.
  And it just didn’t happen.
  And then today, of course, there it is.
  So we only put the arches down.
  So that’s how I’m doing, recording like about half of my podcasts are being recorded these days via Arcos.
  And the other half I’m just doing on my laptop.
  So here we go.
  Let’s do one more time.
  ♪ Oh, wish I was in the land of cotton old times there ♪ ♪ And I forgot and look away ♪ ♪ Look away, look away, Dix ieland ♪ ♪ Wish I was in the land of cotton old times there ♪ ♪ And I forgot and look away ♪ ♪ Look away, look away, Dix ieland ♪ ♪ I wish I was in Dixie, array, array ♪ ♪ In Dixieland I’ll take my stand to live and die ♪ ♪ In Dixie, away, away, away down south ♪ ♪ In Dixie, away, away, away down south ♪ ♪ In Dixie, in Dixie ♪ Okay, one more time.
  ♪ Land of cotton old times there ♪ ♪ And I forgot and look away, look away, look away ♪ ♪ Dixieland, I wish I was in the land of cotton ♪ ♪ And I forgot and look away, look away, look away ♪ ♪ Dixieland, I wish I was in Dixie, array, array ♪ ♪ In Dixieland I’ll take my stand to live and die ♪ ♪ In Dixie, away, away, away down south ♪ ♪ In Dixie, away, away, away down south ♪ ♪ In Dixie ♪ Yep, there’s nothing like singing a beautiful song in all this Saturday morning.
  So, anyway, what’s on my mind this morning is what should I do on KYOU? Well, that kind of rhymes.
  Let’s try that again.
  What should I do on KYOU? And I don’t even know if it’s important.
  I mean, I asked for feedback on this on podcatch. com and, you know, what was funny about it was, you know, the sort of two schools of thought.
  You know, I should try to do something kind of unnatural and just sort of like do a lot of mixing and integrating and whatnot.
  And you know, that isn’t what I do.
  And I’m gonna trust the guys at KYOU to do that and that they sort of have a pretty good idea of what to present on day one of, you know, podcast as a broadcast thing.
  And that, you know, if they wanted me to do that, well, they would have asked me to do that.
  And frankly, it ain’t what I do .
  I mean, I got an email today from Rogers Kadenhead, who’s my neighbor in Florida here, and a friend.
  And it’s kind of one of those funny things where Rogers wrote, there’s like exactly one book on Radio Userland in the world.
  And Rogers wrote it.
  And Rogers lives like 10 minutes away from where I live on the beach, and you know, you might think, well, you know, I just chose this place because it was so close to where Rogers lives.
  But that’s not true.
  I chose this place because this is where I’ve been coming for 30 years.
  And I like it here, and I feel comfortable here.
  And so, you know, this is the old theory about there’s a little bit of God in like everything in our lives, and you know, how did Rogers come to live in St. Augustine, and how did he end up living here? I’ll have to ask him someday, how did you choose this particular place, this beach, Rogers? And you know, I don’t know, how did he choose it? Anyway, and in case you can’t place Rogers, not only did he write the Radio Userland book, but he also was the guy who registered the Pope Benedict XVI site, and was on the Today’s Show and every, you know, MSNBC and local stations, and I became a media star and became famous for his hair.
  He’s got very thick hair for a guy his age.
  It’s gray hair, and people were all the comic controversy, the big controversy was, “Yo, Rogers, is that your hair?” And then people don’t get that his name is Rogers, and Rogers’ Cadenhead, and it was funny because Rex Hammock, Rex Hammock was posting on Rogers’ site talking about me, and somebody pointed out, he says, “Dave has friends “who sound like they were in a mystery novel, “or detective novel. " And you know, it’s the, you know, Rex Hammock, it doesn’t sound, and you know, why does Rex Hammock sound that way, Rogers’ Cadenhead too , but Rex Hammock, ‘cause it sounds like Dash’ll Hammock, right? And you know, there you go.
  So I’m gonna sort of nix the idea of doing the roundup.
  You know, if I was gonna do the roundup, well, you know, who would I put in there? I’d put it in the podcast that I listen to, and you know, it’s a small field, you know? I would sort, and I would put in, I would like to see, like, you know, and then the question came up, you know, what do I listen to? I listen to IT conversations, basically.
  Doug, thanks so much, and Steve Gilmore, get your ass going, ‘cause man, I miss the Gilmore gang, Doc Searles, You Have to Be podcasting, and the whole Gilmore gang, you know, basically, I just like the dynamics of that thing, and even though I thought that they were, well, they were getting there.
  I mean, they were, like, you know, if they were still doing it, you know, if they hadn’t, like, taken their hiatus, the way Steve did, I think that they would’ve gotten to the piece of podcast that I did a few days ago, I think they would’ve gotten there.
  They realized that un-confer ences, and podcasting, and blogs, and into monoculture , and making money on the internet, and all these things are all, and then, you know, throw in the Clue Trade Manif esto, which Doc was co-author of, and you got a whole sort of, like, it’s not about the long tail for crying out loud.
  The long tail is like, the thing about the long tail is that it’s a statistician’s dream, you know, it’s like, oh, I finally found a way I can measure this, and, no, that’s point number one, point number two is, I can put myself at the top of the pyramid, and that, you know, like, ever, that’s why it’s to hit with the reporters.
  They love it, because it says, well, you know, if they’re out in the tail, that means that I’m up here, and I gotta have a pretty good deal, because I’m up here, which, you know, it’s 20th century thinking.
  It’s a transitional idea.
  It’s sort of like, how do you explain the idea of the citizens, you know, being their own media, and by the way, the political system, of course, falls under this as well, and, you know, you will see the House of Representatives will be filled with bloggers, in, you know, 10 years, and what the guys say is, oh, well, you can never get a candidate to blog.
  They’ll say, no, of course not.
  Where’s you can’t get a candidate to blog? And they say, well, then, well, where’s your, then where’s your great vision then? And I say, well, it’s kind of like what I said in making money, how to make money on the internet, version 2. 0, I said, it’s easier to teach a user to be a manufacturer than it is for a manufacturer to become a user.
  And so, the same thing, just change manufacturer to politician.
  It’s like, it’s easier for a user to become a politician than for a politician to become a user.
  And that’s the problem.
  That’s what we’ve always been seeing is our disconnect between us and our leaders, is that, you know, once they become politicians, then they’re no longer users.
  They’re no longer, like, in the system, they’re insulated from the system.
  They have this sense of elevation from the system, and therefore, we don’t get the government that we need.
  You know, we don’t get leadership.
  We don’t get problem solved.
  We end up, you know, driving ourselves off of political and economic and social environmental cliffs.
  And, you know, eventually, we’re gonna be suffocating in our infumes here pretty soon.
  And I don’t hear any Rush Limba ugh guys telling us, explaining to me exactly how we ’re gonna, like, avoid that, you know.
  They’re not scientists, they’re sort of anti-scientists and anti-intellectual.
  Frank, most of them still don’t even believe in evolution.
  And I’d like to know how you’re gonna solve the problems of our planet when you don’t even accept science.
  You know, like, it’s just, like , daunting, whatever.
  Anyway, where the hell was I? Yeah, so Rogers, let’s pop the stack all the way back.
  Rogers says, why don’t you become the dick-cabot of the podcasting world? To which I say, yeah, yeah, you know, I could do that really well.
  I love to ask people questions.
  And I love to hear what they have to say.
  I like pointing to people.
  I like reading what they have to say, you know.
  Can’t tell you how many times, you know, I get an email from somebody and I wanna say, geez, this is really good, why did you send me an email? Why didn’t you post that on the web so that I could point to it so everybody else could read it? So, you know, yeah, it’s sort of like in my genes.
  It’s sort of in my upbringing, it’s the way I think, you know.
  And y’all, Rogers also said something really charming, really nice about me that I really like.
  He said that he knows how to order his unsweet tea.
  Took a while, I mean, they told me, you could ask Ed Cohn, as I was headed south on my first trip south in the sort of grand tour that I’m doing, this continuing tour of the United States that just won’t quit.
  He explained to me how to order iced tea in restaurants.
  He said, first of all, you don ’t have to call it iced tea, you can just call it tea, because there’s like, if you wanna order the other kind of tea, say hot tea.
  Because, and any of you think about it, it makes sense.
  In Boston, tea is hot because Boston’s cold most of the time, okay? Or like it gets really cold and hot tea is, you know, it’s important, you gotta be drinking your hot tea or hot coffee or hot something to get yourself warm.
  Well, you know, it does get cold in the south at times, but that isn’t the predominant thing.
  Predominantly, it’s hot.
  And, you know, iced tea, for whatever reason, is really, really refreshing.
  And it’s got the caffeine kick to it and it’s kinda nice.
  I love my iced tea, but I don’t like sugar.
  I just don’t like it when I was a kid.
  It’s the one thing I gave up to try to, you know, I gave it up, I used to drink sugar, soft drinks.
  When I was in my 20s and early 30s, and then I wanted to like lose weight when I was in my early to mid 30s, and I found that I could give up sugar and not really miss it, you know? And so I started drinking Diet Pepsi and then started drinking Diet Coke.
  And so I don’t like sweet tea, although I have had a sip of it .
  Boy, is it sweet.
  I mean, it’s like, you wonder why the sugar just doesn’t like precipitate out of it, you know? And because it is so incredibly sweet.
  So Rogers wrote, he says, you know, Dave’s becoming a, you know, he ’s becoming a passable, I mean, he’d quite say it, this is what I heard.
  He’s becoming a passable Southerner.
  And I like that, he says, you know, he can almost say y’all without like embarrassing himself.
  You know, yeah, yeah, you know, it’s like, I like to think that I could do that before because I went to college in New Orleans which is deep South and there are a lot of Southerners in New Orleans, it’s a Southern city.
  And so I always felt like, and one of my slogans was namaste y’all, y’all, nam aste y’all because what I wanted to say is that I got a little bit of the new age from California.
  I got a lot of the new age from California, okay? But I’m an American.
  I’m an American, I’m an American, good old USA and I can sing Dixie, albeit not like, you know, Bert Reynolds, of course, Bert Reynolds probably isn’t the guy I’ve been thinking of about singing stuff.
  Yeah, it goes back to my point about like, who gives a shit if you’re the best? You know, I think about what Charles Cooper wrote.
  Charles Cooper doesn’t get it.
  Charles, my man, Charles, you need to like really study up on this whole idea of, it’s not the long tail, Schmucko, it’s about this whole sea of information that you live in and how the hell is it being created, you know? I talked about this in the piece of podcast which I hope everybody listens to, really, I put it all, I put it all into that.
  I put it all into it, you gotta listen to it, okay? Is that, you know, you got this conundrum where we want more information on the one hand but on the other hand, the newspapers are shrinking.
  Tell me how we’re getting that information.
  We’re doing it for ourselves is what’s happening.
  That’s what’s happening.
  It’s love of data, it’s love of information, it’s love of being informed.
  We have become information junk ies in this world that we live in, in the online world.
  If you use the web, you’ve discovered how beautiful information can be and how powerful it could be and we’re just beginning to appreciate that.
  And so going back to Rogers’ email, Rogers, you know, Rogers said, “Well, why don’t you become the dick habit of podcasting?” I said, “Yes, yes, yes, I’d love to. " But for, we have yet to work out the kinks in Skype.
  Skype is the mission critical killer app of podcasting.
  It really is, it’s the one we ’re all waiting for.
  It’s sure a pod scope was something that it’s good to have it because now it addresses one of the criticisms of podcasting that people have is that you can’t ego surf on a podcast.
  How can I tell if somebody’s talking about me? Well, pod scope took care of that.
  They understand the spoken word and transcribe podcasts into text and then let you search them.
  So, you know, bing, check that one off.
  Ka-ching, you know, let me see.
  Check, that’s the sound.
  Ka-ching, like that.
  Check it off, it’s done.
  You don’t have to worry about that one.
  But the one we’re really waiting for, the more prosaic one, it really seems like a shame that we don’t have it.
  First of all, we’re waiting for the bugs.
  We’re waiting for Skype to get truly reliable, okay? I mean, a really reliable Skype would be like, and it’s getting better.
  And I don’t know if it’s like they’re making the software better, actually it can be, because I haven’t downloaded any Skype in a while.
  I think it’s just that the network gets more saturated.
  We get more Skype users.
  And as we get more Skype users, Skype gets better, because it’s decentralized.
  It’s using all of our wires to hop from here to wherever it is we’re going, and it’s a marvel.
  But there’s one more thing that we need from Skype, and then we’re done.
  And then we’re ready to shoot into the next dimension of podcasting, which is we need the ability to record to MP3.
  It doesn’t need to be a direct record to MP3.
  It could be recording to a WAV file as an intermediate.
  So it doesn’t have to do the compression on the fly, if it can’t do the compression on the fly.
  But you think about it, it’s like this data is flowing through this application.
  So all that we’re missing is the ability for that application to capture the data.
  And it doesn’t seem like it could be all that difficult to do.
  So we’d love to do that, Rogers .
  It would be great.
  And it would be really cool to be able to do that.
  And I’m sure at some point, that’s exactly what’s going to be happening.
  I would love to have a talk show.
  I’d love to just say, let’s give Rogers a call right now and see if he’s there, and ask him a couple of questions, and then say, well, we’ve got to go and I’ll call Ed Cohn.
  And I’d say, Ed Cohn, could you give the folks a tutorial on how to order iced tea at a restaurant in the South? What do you say? How do you sound like a Souther ner? Or how do you at least not sound too ridiculous as a Sout herner, as a non-Southerner existing in the South? Why do we care, even? Well, we care.
  Because we remember about those civil rights workers from in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
  And the South has a reputation for being a badass place.
  And it’s not completely undes erved.
  A lot of the people that I knew here, when I used to come here as a kid, a lot of them were dead.
  And it’s not because they were living particularly healthy lifestyles .
  They didn’t die of old age, OK, because they weren’t that old.
  They just died because this can be a really hard-living place.
  So anyway, so then the question , well, what should I do on my podcast, on the broadcast podcast, which we need a contraction for, the podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast, we ’ll figure it out.
  One of the ones that I thought of doing let’s go back to the beginning.
  Let’s go to Casso, who’s doing the podcast software, said, some of the ones that I did on the road and I’m not sure if he was talking about on the road in August of 2004, and I would be on the TransCanada Highway.
  There was some really great moments, I thought, there.
  I love driving on that highway.
  It just had such nice energy.
  I wish the highway went on for like 25,000 miles.
  I wish that highway went around the world.
  It would be great.
  It’s just exactly the kind of highway you like to stretch out and do lots of miles on.
  If you ever have a few extra days going across country, head north and go across in Canada, you won’t be disappointed.
  It’s really beautiful, it’s kind of empty, and the Canadians are really nice.
  And they even are nice to Americans.
  God knows why.
  So that was one option.
  Another one was the sound-se eing tour that I did of Boston during the Democratic National Convention.
  I thought it was kind of interesting.
  We went from Copley Square, where we went to get our blogging press badge.
  We took the T, which is the mass transit, the train in Boston, over to Haymarket Square, which is by Fadiel Hall.
  And I interviewed a delegate from Iowa, a very young woman, who is just fascinating.
  I forget who she was.
  She was an Edwards delegate, or I forget who she was a delegate for.
  It’s on the podcast, though.
  It’s on the show.
  And it was kind of cool.
  I did some from the blogging booth in the Sky box at the Fleet Center, which is where the convention was held.
  I did one with Rebecca Blood, which was very short, but really totally a God cast, completely.
  God was in there.
  That was a good one.
  Then Steve Gilmore’s favorite is the one in September, where I explained why I was releasing the Frontier Colonel as open source, and what my goals were, and sort of the philosophy of it.
  I had a story to go with it.
  There was a story on Reuters, I think, where AP, one of the wire services, about a 108-year-old man who took up smoking again.
  And somebody had sent him a box of Cuban cigars or something.
  And he had stopped smoking, not because he wanted to be healthy , but because he couldn’t afford to.
  And he sort of said, well, I’m 108 years old.
  Why the hell shouldn’t I smoke? And so that was my story.
  My story was, well, Frontier has been around for so long.
  It’s been through so much.
  It’s done commercial, non-com mercial.
  It’s been a scripting system for the Mac.
  It’s been a cross-platform thing.
  It’s been the runtime environment for Manila.
  It was the spawning ground of the whole blogging thing started inside of Frontier.
  The content management system in Frontier was the sort of lizard brain of the blogging world.
  They’d go back and look at the original bloggers in 1997 and

They were all using it.
And it was where XMRPC got its start.
It was where RSS got its start.
I mean, it has really served us well.
And then when I got sick in 2002, it became really clear that I couldn’t work on it anymore.
And I couldn’t and be healthy or be alive, actually.
Healthy isn’t really an option.
Alive is the option.
Excuse me, he coughs.
We’re reasonably healthy for a person of my condition.
And it was pretty clear that U seland, in its new incarnation, was just never going to get around to doing anything with the kernel.
I still don’t believe they are.
Maybe they will.
I don’t know.
Maybe they will.
But so I thought, I want this thing to continue.
I don’t want it because there ’s a lot of good stuff in Frontier that the idea of an object database and outliner as an editor for scripts well, the way RPC over the internet is integrated into the environment, that’s just some of the things that are you just don’t see them anywhere else.
And they’re important ideas.
They eventually will be core ideas in the way programming works.
So I did a podcast that explained that.
And then that podcast should go with the kernel wherever it goes and should explain to them why I did things the way I did them.
And honestly, I think that the podcast should survive me, as should the kernel survive me .
These things should have a life independent of their creator.
And then I thought maybe, well, some of the trade secrets that we did, those were pretty good.
And then there’s the Thunder storm podcast.
It’s only 17 minutes long, but it kind of gets there.
And then there’s the piece of podcast, which they say sort of builds too slowly to play on the radio .
But I don’t know.
I mean, podcasting isn’t fast.
And that’s the thing that I think that you want to be wary of if you’re going to try to adapt podcasting to radio.
And if your goal is to speed it up and sort of jazz it up, sex it up, or wherever you want to put it, to make it like radio, it’s really not going to be good radio that way .
So something that’s a little slower is not such a terrible thing.
So I kind of thought that one was pretty good.
And then there was one that I did on the road in Alabama.
It was pretty good.
I thought it might be a good one to use.
Or then I thought maybe I’ll just go take a little mini road trip tomorrow, drive over to Orlando or something like that, or to Gainesville, or maybe even as far as Tallah assee, and find a Starbucks and upload the damn thing.
Do it while I’m driving.
I don’t really feel like doing it though.
Sort of like I think you should do what you feel like.
I think a podcast should have something to do with what you feel like.
And maybe this is the one.
I don’t think I’ve used too many four-letter words in this one.
And God knows I did open with a song.
And I don’t think that the song

I will have to check it out is Dixie in the public domain? Do we have to play? Do we have to pay a cover fee to play that? I don’t know.
It’s on the government website, I mean, who knows.
But I figure you play it once, play it again, right? So let’s see how long we’ve been going here.
I don’t think it’s been anything like 40 minutes.
No, it’s 25 minutes seems to be the new length.
We’re 27 minutes and 44 seconds .
So I think that if we play Dix ie one or two times now, we’re going to hit 30 minutes.
And I’m going to say that’s a really good podcast.
And up we go.
Right? That was I don’t know who the hell I was telling you that was in southern, wasn’t it? Yeah.
OK, everybody.
So we’re going to go out on a note with Dixie here.
And I don’t know.
Tune in tomorrow if you find out what the hell podcast of KY E the first broadcast podcast in the great old US of A is going to be you’ll find out what it is when I find out.
Anyway, hope you’re all doing great.
Have a great Saturday.
Have a great Sunday.
Have a great rest of the weekend.
Have a great rest of your life.
Here is Dixie.
[MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”] Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton and old tarps there.
And I’d forgotten the way, the way, the way, Dixie land, Dixie land where I was born.
Away, Dixie land, I’ll take my stance with a guy.
Dixie, away, away, away, down south.
Dixie, away, away, away, down south.
Dixie.
[HUMMING] [MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”] [MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”] [MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”] [MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”] [MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”] [MUSIC - Dixie, “DICKSIE LAND”]