Do you want to record a three minute explanation of some important geeky topic, by phone, on ReadWriteWeb?

I’ve been doing experiments with audio using Cinch lately and I listened to a wonderful short-form Gov 2.0 event today while walking my dogs.

I want to try putting these two ideas together and record a 3 minute explanation of something important and interesting to post online. I like the idea of a tight time limit: it puts a premium on succinctness and density of information. Put that kind of opportunity in the hands of an articulate professional and they’ll create a high-value experience.

Let me know if you’re interested in contributing a segment and if I choose you and your topic, I’ll let you know and give you a call. We have a few million people stop by RWW each month & I think at least a handful of them will enjoy listening to something like this a lot. Shoot me an email at Marshall@readwriteweb.com to suggest a topic.

I got my list of 100+ applicants for this evening news writing position at ReadWriteWeb whittled down to a list of top 10 applicants tonight. (Related story about how to get a job as a professional blogger here.) I mentioned on Twitter that in summarizing the pros and cons of leading applicants for the rest of my team to evaluate I’ve included an evaluation of their Twitter accounts. A good Twitter account isn’t a requirement at all but… it helps. A number of people asked me just exactly what that meant. And so I wrote a song about it, and it goes a little something like this…

It’s not really a song, sorry! It’s just me talking. It got cut off at the very end by an incoming phone call, but I suspect you may find it interesting none the less. Speaking of Twitter, here’s my account there. Let’s be buds if we’re not already, huh?

Direct MP3 download here, iTunes subscription link here and podcast subscription feed here.

Bloging makes publishing easier than ever, but given that I blog for a living at ReadWriteWeb, it’s been hard to blog here on Marshallk.com as well. Classic problem for people who work in tech. However, I have recorded 36 podcasts over the last 3 months using the Cinch iPhone app! Here’s my account there. The service is so easy to publish with! When things are going well, I try to publish there every day. The production quality isn’t everything it could be – this is super mobile podcasting – but I think the ease of publishing and quality of content outweigh the issues with background noise, etc. (If you disagree, let me know. But know that the choice is between these podcasts and no podcasts.)

I was just thinking this morning about the next podcast I want to record using Cinch, probably while walking my dogs, and it occurred to me: why on earth am I not posting those here on my personal site, where listeners will be exposed to my personal promotional materials instead of to Cinch’s on its website?

I love Cinch and am happy to promote the service, but I’ve got services of my own to promote as well. (ReadWriteWeb, the blog I co-edit, and my own personal consulting services, generally one single hour-long phone call per week. Drop me a line via marshall@marshallk.com – next week’s call could be with you!)

There will be a little more work I need to do in order to post my Cinch-casts here, I’ll spare you the details, but I think it will be well worth it and will not significantly raise the overhead on this super-easy service to publish to.

So without further delay, let’s play catch-up. Below are a few of my favorite, mostly tech-related Cinchcasts. If you’d like to subscribe to everything I record as a podcast, here’s a link for iTunes and here’s an RSS feed with enclosures.

RSS and blogging forefather Dave Winer has asked me to co-host a weekly podcast with him and we’re starting the first live episode in just a few minutes!
I’m very excited about it, as I’ve long enjoyed Dave’s other podcasts. I hope you’ll give it a listen, enjoy it, take your dog for walks more regularly (that’s the best time to listen to podcasts, in my experience!) and send feedback about how we can make the show even more awesome.

We’re going to be talking about cutting edge tech news and I’m sure Dave will be adding a lot of perspective from the early days of Web 2.o’s unfolding. He was there at the start and is still breaking new ground on a regular basis. It should be a fun show.

I was honored to be interviewed by Dave Winer today in a 20 minute podcast about the service FriendFeed and other RSS applications. Winer helped birth a wide range of technologies like RSS, podcasting and OPML (bundles of RSS feeds that you import and export from feed readers). He’s a tech hero and I don’t know what my life would be like without his work.

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.
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I just listened to the most amazing podcast about the future of the web and semantic analysis. It was an interview with BYU Phd student Yihong Ding, a researcher in what my ReadWriteWeb co-author Alex Iskold calls “the top-down semantic web.” The first 15 minutes of the hour long show are about Yihong Ding’s personal background, the next 15 about his research and the last 30 about his very compelling view of the future.

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there’s a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding’s research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what’s in h2 tags? that’s probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It’s fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I’ve heard yet. I’m just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I’m telling you – it’s good stuff.

Ding’s vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of “educated agents of meaning” (smart software applications is what I’m seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don’t know what else. It’s got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It’s a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers’ blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

Cross-posted from the SplashCast blog because I thought it would be of interest to readers here as well.

One of the promises of the internet is to democratize access to both information and publishing. That democratization, in theory, makes voices outside of the halls of power more capable of changing the world than they would be otherwise. The jury is still out as to how real all of that is. There are lots of people and organizations giving it a try. Good deeds alone rarely pay the rent, though, and a relatively small number of people online want to watch often-depressing investigative journalism when there’s so much fun to be had in other media sectors.

Liz Gannes wrote a good article last week about the monetization challenges faced by Alive in Baghdad, a project she called “arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world.” AiB is pursuing licensing deals with major media outlets but advertising doesn’t seem to be a very viable option for sustaining this fantastic project.

Who else is doing great investigative journalism in video on the web? I spent a fair chunk of time looking, and asking other people for their favorites. Here’s the best projects that I’ve found so far. Please leave more in comments so we can all be inspired.
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