I think it’s great and all that people like Nik, Steve and Dave are looking at this too. Let them pick up the ball and run with it. (Ermm. Did I drop it? Ah I see, there’s more than one! Heh)

The new Twitter stuff will enable developers to write ‘GroupWare’ too by delivering messages privately. I hope that Obvious add ‘groups’ soon though. Also the ability to distinguish/register an account as a ‘bot’ as opposed to a human.

BTW : Bots should not have ‘friends’ – only followers. That’s how a ‘client/user’ can register with the bot/service more easily. Simply add the user account.

I also use Twitter for server alerts too, letting me know when somthing has completed or gone wrong – this will help ‘privatize’ them without needing an ‘alt’ account.

I started out by asking my followers where I could find a decent search engine that can respond to a ‘human question’ – after not finding a good enough one with a decent API, I plumped for the Urban Dictionary, which can provide very amusing results

One of the unique things about Twitter is the difference in push/pull with info than we are used to. Usually we ‘push’ a post, then ‘pull’ the website or feeds. Here, we have also have Twitter not only ‘pushing’ email, but also SMS – for ‘free’.

That’s so incredibly useful. ESPECIALLY given all the places in the world where mobile phones work, but the internet does not. Third World etc. This should be exciting to people working in remote situations.

Open Sourcing the Twitter server without the SMS capabilities would make the central Twitter.com/Obvious server like the ‘Sun’ where all the other OS Twitter servers would connect like ‘Planets’ – Obvious could then handle and monetize all the SMS transactions (which the OS server might lack) by charging for this feature.

Tweet! Tweet! Kerrchingg!!

Oh and I’ve been building a new forum-like content/communications system with RSS and OPML at the heart of it. Imagine ‘structured Tweets’ – with the ability to also attach files – as a payload – can you imagine how easy it is to flow, connect and direct all these via RSS and OPML? Wow!

And Dave, was it really neccessary to draw a diagram? We already know where babies come from

( ! ) lol

Soon, you will be able to log in to podcast.com, create an account – get a super hot url for your podcast directory and fill her up!

The power of OPML inclusion will make it very easy to connect many different users’ podcast directories together to form an infinite growth of trees of directories, mashed up any way you like.

Update : Dave Winer is not allowing me to comment on his Blog Annexe – shame. My posts seem to disappear. Not totally unexpected, as he does not like me at all – but not what I would expect from Mister ‘Open and Transparent’ – The posts were relevant too – maybe this trackback will work, to his daily comment area.

Over on podcast.com, you will see many folders in the podcast directory you see there. One of the icons is a green feed icon : clicking it will display all the latest feeds (like a ‘NewsRiver’ for podcasts) The RSS feed icon link that appear there is the subscription link you need to stay updated to all feeds within that folder.

For the BBC podcast feeds though, we have set up a subdomain, pointing directly at the / Podcasts / News & Media / BBC folder.

This can be visited at http://bbc.podcast.com

From that subdomain page, you can also view the freshest feed by clicking the ‘freshest feeds’ button on the left menu. Again, the feed subscription link will appear there for you. For the BBC it is http://feeds.podcast.com/2417 and eventually we’ll make that easier my having bbc.podcast.com/fresh/feed or something.

Soon we will have some cool things for you to embed wherever you like, so you can keep updated and also see all the cool things you can easily put together using the feeds and data we have for you at podcast.com

A fresh feed can be generated of all the latest podcasts in all the feeds in any folder.

NOW – don’t forget folks – the directory you currently see at podcast.com is MY user account. Here is a different test account [ koz.podcast.com ]
SOON – you’ll be able to build your own podcast.com

All that data you manage there can be imported and exported to your tool of choice. We just hope we can make the discovery journey easier for you.

Maybe it's time to set up my own server?

And in honour of that, here's the first time I spoke to him. Dave Winer, while in Florida on a beach gave me his cellphone number, so I called it via Skype from London then hooked the three of us up for a goofy chat which we uploaded for a podcast Those were the days ))

 UPDATE: fixed the mp3 link – was going to the old box

I have an OPML file here, which lists all their podcasts.

Very soon (once I have ironed out a bug) I will use the alpha system at podcast.com to publish this. All I need to do is import the OPML, and then assign a subdomain, using the simple form (yet to be released) and bingo!! They’ll all appear within npr.podcast.com I did an identical process to create http://bbc.podcast.com

One snippet here caught my eye:

I think DMOZ and Yahoo’s directories are the wrong model, that this all needs to be opened up. There’s no single home page on the web, so why should there be a single home page for the global directory. Let a billion flowers bloom. May the best root win. May there be as many roots as there are points of view.

Now, I like that. Alot. It’s actually more or less the very model I am trying to work towards in thinking about and building a ‘platform’ on which to run a system like podcast.com, for example. Or ‘treedia’ – or feedgang – or feedhive – whateverlist (hmmm). Also, I’m trying to build it based upon ‘standard(ized)’ formats which already exist.

I have built many systems in the past based on made-up bespoke xml formats which I created to do what I needed an app to do – this for example, uses ‘OPML’ and ‘RSS’ (and time events), but none of it actually IS OPML or RSS. But they would have done the trick in retrospect. As would a load of other formats : SMIL, etc.

SMIL gets me thinking about the multimedia systems on the web I have always envisioned (I wrote and sold a SMIL based multi-user publishing system call Smibase a few years back – that’s how I ended up at the Beeb). MPEG4 does this too, or will more once we see more tools to ‘orchestrate’ content. Quicktime also has huge untapped power as a multimedia application wrapper – did you know you can embed Flash inside Quicktime and have the QT ‘talk’ back and forth to the Flash ‘track’? You can. It’s pretty cool. BUT the tools out there to manipulate such formats are few and far between. LiveStagePro was one I used a few years ago to come up with a solution to put up-to-date news on massive screens in UK railway stations. I ended up going back to Director10 (which I hadn’t used since version 4!!) and built it in Lingo, with a WYSIWYG Flash based back end.

The point I’m trying to make is that there’s all these great formats out ALREADY. But people will keep reinventing the wheel and trying to come up with new formats, when I think what we should be doing is building TOOLS to test/evolve/bolster/work the formats we already have. I’m usually pleasantly surprised when I do that. But I admit to ‘making stuff up’ if I can’t find things or am pushed to find a solution (which I know can be fixed later on by someone who rally knows that part of the system – if need be)

And about ‘winning’: Dave and I once had a chat where the subject of ‘heroes’ came up. I think Dave would like to be ‘a hero’ of sorts. And to many he is. My take on it is that you don’t need to be the winner to be the hero or the ‘legend’.

It’s about hearts. Not prizes. They last longer (we pray).