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Lots of interesting stuff happening!
I can’t say a huge amount of what’s going on here in KossoLand, but all I can say that it’s really very interesting and exciting! OK, so that’s not fair…

Since it’s ‘birth’ last year, I’ve been very interested indeed in the concepts of podcasting since working quite heavily on RSS-fed applications and interfaces – not reinventing any wheels here, I’m just looking at finding other ways of making RSS easier to understand, by presenting it in fun ways (especially for the likes of BBC – hello ‘creative archive’) – so I have been spending all of my spare time experimenting/developing/imagining and generally getting good experience of the whole phenom. Buying mics, cables, mixers, etc which pump audio into my Archos AV420 which records everything so I too can ‘publish’ an audioshow ‘podcast’ (I prefer the term ‘blogcast‘ – watch this space).

On my journey through the ‘castosphere’ I came across a podcast feed by none other than Dave Winer and Adam Curry, called Trade Secrets (now defunct) – finally I could hear two people talking the same language as me. This was very exciting, so I consumed every ‘episode’ they had done (such is the nature of podcasting – I can go back a hear shows from last year – i love archives). Such energy, enthusiasm and fun being fed from the past, to my ears. Great! Unfortunately, (depending on your pov) they seem to have gone their seperate ways. How I wish they recorded whatever went on, so we could hear (and possibly learn from) what happened. But it really is their business (or ‘non’ business, I suppose).

A few weeks/months later while reading Dave’s blog at Scripting.com, I noticed that he’d been after a logo for his personal podcast, ‘Morning Coffee Notes‘ (which I recommend listening to – he even sings! 😉 ) – so I did a few.. and then a few more, which Dave linked to on his blog. Hurrah!

Just to fill you in, another thing I have been up to is the BLUGGCASTER, a flash-based mp3 player fed by RSS podcast feeds from all around the world (the more interesting of which – imho – is the ‘Last 100 podcasts on earth’ feed from audio.weblogs.com – anyway, Dave spotted this and linked to it too! (yowza! interkarma!) – So I (white male) did what anyone would, and emailed him to thank him and also to say a few more things, and ask annoying questions etc… ($1 a pop ;)).. to my delight, I actually got replies.. answers… and advice… and then some jolly banter… 🙂 – so I ask if he’d like to do a ‘Skyperview’ (recording an interview over Skype – the free Voice-over-IP ‘telephone’ service) for our ‘show’ – and guess what? He agreed.. I sent our SkypeID and lo and behold! HE CALLED! And I must say, what a laugh we had! Listen/subscribe via this page, or even through the ‘bluggcaster‘ 😉 – We even kinda met his mum!

Since then, we’ve kept in touch and he has introduced me to a very interesting group of people, who I will talk about soon. I am looking at/learning alot about OPML, as Dave is creating a new ‘outliner‘ tool. OMPL *is* the throbbing heart of iPoddder, the massive (and growing) list of directories of podcasts. I also want to make sure he comes over to London to talk to everyone at work, as I know his knowledge, insight, experience and humour will be well received 😉

Now, the trouble is.. you try saying ‘XML’, ‘RSS’, ‘OPML’, ‘aggregator’, ‘podcast’, even ‘blog’ to most people and they look at you with a blank stare. (I’ve been online now for well over 10 years, and I used to get that response from saying ‘world wide web’ to people;) – it wasn’t until I took people online and showed them AltaVista (best search engine at the time) and asked ‘what do you want to know? (Before Bill Gates asked ‘Where do you want to go?’) They understood and were hooked)… sooo, here we are again, how do we get this technology out there to the masses (‘smart’ or not) without accidentally hitting the ‘glaze-eyes-switch-off-brain-no-idea-ignore’ button? Well, hopefully small green cartoon aliens might be the answer. And Flash. We’ll see. 🙂

THEN: While listening to Adam’s Daily Source Code podcast, I heard that he was due to come to the beeb for an interview with a BBC World program called ‘Click Online‘ (I used to work with an old presenter of the show) on Friday. So, Friday comes and I happen to contact the show’s producer and asked what kind of questions he would be asking. As it turned out, it became apparent that I knew a bit more about the whole phenom, so I was aksed if *I* wanted to do the interview! I’m no journalist and maybe I’m not ‘equipped’ to do this, so I suggested that Jo (my love) from News Online do the interview instead, as she is totally across what’s going on here. That way we could score a double-whammy : one for Click Online and one for News Online (the BBC News website).. So we did the interview! It was great fun. Adam’s a nice guy, and clearly very clever and shrewd. We both recorded the whole event, but his copy went out the day after to his 60,000 or so subscribers!! Complete with sidechat and ‘soundseeing tour‘ of London! (He thought it was ‘trippy’ when we told him the we are indeed, Blugg and Doctoe) 😉

But shhh.. don’t tell everyone…

No one actually *reads* this… do they?

In fact I think I will be doing more blogcasting on this site, as ‘Kosso’ – me. I never was much of a writer [edit: jeez: look at the size of this entry!!! — ooeer missus] , but I could talk the hind legs off the Sphinx! 😉

Catch you later, aggregators! 🙂