Michael Baze­ley in today’s San Jose Mer­cury News has an arti­cle on a very interesting-looking new blog appli­ca­tion called Bubbler.

… Bub­bler is a hosted blog ser­vice, not unlike Blog­ger or Type­Pad. But instead of updat­ing their blogs through a browser-based Web form, users post entries through a free Bub­bler desk­top appli­ca­tion. This makes it sim­ple to drag pho­tos, audio and video files, office doc­u­ments or just about any other type of file into a win­dow and have them uploaded to your site.

What Reid is try­ing to bring to Web pub­lish­ing — design sim­plic­ity and ease of use — is rem­i­nis­cent of what Apple did for per­sonal computing. …

My lat­est inter­view with a tech CEO is up at Engad­get: The Engad­get Inter­view: Elliott D. Frutkin, CEO of Time­Trax. The startup, which has been described as TiVo for satel­lite radio, has been doing some pretty impres­sive pio­neer­ing work in the field. Worth a look.

San Jose Mer­cury News:

Jef Raskin, who dreamed up the afford­able, user-friendly com­puter that became Apple’s Mac­in­tosh, died Sat­ur­day night at his Paci­fica home. …

He was employee No. 31 at Apple when he joined in 1978. By the next year, he began to pur­sue his goal of sim­pli­fy­ing the com­puter user’s expe­ri­ence, focus­ing on a faster and more log­i­cal inter­face. And the com­puter should sell for less than $1,000.

He named the project after one of his favorite fruits as a child in Man­hat­tan: the McIn­tosh apple. The computer’s moniker was spelled dif­fer­ently to avoid trade­mark issues. …

Time­Trax is soft­ware that lets you turn your PC into a TiVo for satel­lite radio. Vet­eran jour­nal­ist J.D. Lasica spoke with CEO Elliott Frutkin about the upstart startup’s prospects, its dif­fi­dent rela­tion­ship with the RIAA, the future of music sub­scrip­tion ser­vices, and whether the record­ing of satel­lite trans­mis­sions will be out­lawed.

Tell me your back­story. I under­stand Time­Trax was cre­ated by Scott Maclean, a lone pro­gram­mer in Toronto who
didn’t like miss­ing cool radio broad­casts in the dead of night.

I found out about Time­Trax the way other peo­ple did, through an online tech news roundup. Scott wrote an app to
record a Blondie con­cert that was on in the mid­dle of the night. There turned out to be tons of inter­est in it. He
posted it and it was hugely pop­u­lar and peo­ple started ask­ing him to add new fea­tures. He decided to spend more time on
the soft­ware and start sell­ing it for $19.99, and it just kept grow­ing. I then got in touch with Scott and we put
together a deal to for­mu­late a busi­ness around TimeTrax.

So how many employ­ees do you have today and where are they based?

We have seven peo­ple we’ve put together on ad hoc basis. We’re at an excit­ing stage — we are just fin­ish­ing up rais­ing
some angel fund­ing which will allow us to open an office and step up our efforts.

Why does Time­Trax Tech­nolo­gies do, in a nutshell?

Time­Trax allows a user to record or cap­ture to their com­puter or their iPod as MP3 files, or one of six other for­mats,
any kind of broad­cast on satel­lite radio, namely Sir­ius or XM Radio. What makes it com­pelling is that it divides the
con­tent into use­able chunks. Instead of just record­ing an hour block of time, it records indi­vid­ual MP3 songs and tags
them — say, Bruce Spring­steen, Born in the USA. So you end up with a library of con­tent that you can lis­ten
to, which is what makes it really cool.

This is the final step in show­ing that dig­i­tal media is going to replace tra­di­tional radio. Instead of pro­gram
man­agers decid­ing what col­lec­tion of talk and music you’re going to lis­ten to, now every indi­vid­ual user will have that
abil­ity themselves.

Any­thing beyond name and title?

If you’re a talk radio fan, it will become an expert in what pro­grams you like and make sure there’s some­thing always avail­able for you. That’s really the ulti­mate goal of where we’re going.

Why is this a big deal?

The big key for us is XM and Sir­ius. We’re gen­er­at­ing files that work on any MP3 file, and we’re not load­ing it down with sur­round­ing it with so much dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment and restric­tions that it’s dif­fi­cult on the end user. We’re try­ing to make things work as uni­ver­sally as possible.

If you sub­scribe to XM or Sir­ius, it doesn’t mat­ter what tuner or MP3 player you have — Winamp or Win­dows Media Player — you can use our software.

The biggest value propo­si­tion for users is that they can turn their satel­lite radio sub­scrip­tions into portable per­sonal media.

Right. To me, that’s the value propo­si­tion that we would like to see the record­ing indus­try embrace. That’s the biggest chal­lenge fac­ing the indus­try right now. How do the copy­right hold­ers con­tinue to make a living?

How do you see that shak­ing out?

Well, instead of shelling out 99 cents for a song, peo­ple would pay $5 a month for a ser­vice, and all the peo­ple in the chain would get a cut of that. I just think that’s a more real­is­tic approach. Sure, I bought an iPod and early on I bought 20 or so tracks on iTunes, but at the end of the day that got expensive.

>From a record com­pany per­spec­tive, this holds real oppor­tu­nity as far as intro­duc­ing new artists. You could apply a few of the meth­ods we’ve learned about match­ing up peo­ple to the music they like and iden­tify the tar­get audi­ence for a new release. Based on the feed­back we get from our users, we can tell a record­ing com­pany: Look, here’s a way to get your new release on he iPods of 100,000 peo­ple who might buy it as a track or sub­scribe to the service.

I saw a Nap­ster ad where they asked peo­ple, would you like to buy 10,000 songs at a buck apiece, or have a mil­lion songs avail­able to you at 10 bucks a month? So you’re in tune with the idea that a celes­tial juke­box sub­scrip­tion ser­vice is the wave of the future?

I def­i­nitely think so. The record com­pa­nies have to look at what’s real­is­tic. Is it bet­ter to get noth­ing from some­one who’s annoyed by the propo­si­tion of spend­ing $10,000, or do you get $60 a year from that many more people?

So how is Time­Trax a bet­ter choice than Nap­ster or sim­i­lar ser­vices?
 

Nap­ster is one of the ser­vices that wraps a lot of restraints around how you can use a par­tic­u­lar song. With a lot of these ser­vices, you can only use it on a cer­tain num­ber of reg­is­tered devices, and if you ever switch or upgrade com­put­ers there are a lot of has­sles to go through. Try get­ting a man­aged song from iTunes onto any other MP3 player other than an iPod.

We’re doing a totally dif­fer­ent thing that has kind of freaked some peo­ple out. Real­is­ti­cally, it’s just where the indus­try going. Orga­ni­za­tions like the RIAA are pro­vid­ing a valu­able front to record­ing indus­try — they do the kick­ing and scream­ing for the record com­pa­nies, but frankly I think the RIAA itself is work­ing toward obso­les­cence. The record com­pa­nies real­ize what’s going on, and they’re let­ting the RIAA pur­sue what’s nec­es­sary in the short term. That’s their role. There’s always some­body who wants to sug­gest that what we’re doing amounts to steal­ing music. We vig­or­ously dis­agree with that.

And yet, the RIAA hasn’t slapped you with any law­suits.

Although they have pub­licly repu­di­ated what we do, we haven’t heard from them. We’ve heard rumors that they’re up to some­thing, but we haven’t heard anything.

In terms of lit­i­ga­tion or reg­u­la­tory action?

The RIAA is lob­by­ing Con­gress to change what the rules are with copy­right laws and the def­i­n­i­tion of fair use. Ever since the inven­tion of the tape recorder and the VCR, the indus­try has tried to stop tech­no­log­i­cal progress. But for the movie stu­dios, it’s a good thing in the case of the VHS and DVDs that they didn’t succeed.

Let’s exam­ine where things are going and to build a busi­ness model around it. Time­Trax can do for the music indus­try what the VCR did for the movie industry.

What do peo­ple need to make Time­Trax work for them — soft­ware, hard­ware and a satel­lite ser­vice sub­scrip­tion, right?

Cor­rect. We have com­plete pack­ages for both XM and Sir­ius that includes every­thing they need: soft­ware and hard­ware. The only thing we don’t do is set up the user’s sub­scrip­tion. For peo­ple who are a lit­tle more adept tech­ni­cally, if they already have satel­lite radio or buy the hard­ware on eBay, we do sell just the soft­ware or just the USB adapter to con­fig­ure it themselves.

How much does it cost?

The soft­ware starts at $44.99 and our top-end prod­uct, Time­Trax Dock­trax, is $199 and includes a dock for your iPod.

Is Time­Trax strictly for desk­top com­put­ers or for portable devices as well?

It’s mostly for desk­top com­put­ers. You need a line-in jack on your sound card — a lot of lap­tops don’t have that. We do have a hand­ful of users who use a laptop.

So you can’t hook it up to your car?

You can. A lot of cars being sold today are satellite-radio ready, and some peo­ple have built a quick-release mount sim­i­lar to a CD changer, so they plug in their tuner and they just pop open their trunk or reach under their seat, and grab the tuner when they want to use it. It’s the same tuner you’d use with your desk­top, so that’s pretty cool. You don’t have to buy a sec­ond subscription.

How much do sub­scrip­tions run?

$9.99 a month for Sir­ius and $12.99 a month for XM. XM has a fam­ily plan with a lower rate for addi­tional subscriptions.

What are folks record­ing with Time­Trax? Music, talk radio, com­edy?

There are a lot of peo­ple record­ing things other than music. A pop­u­lar show on XM is “Opie and Anthony” — it’s their shock-jock ver­sion of the Howard Stern show. I per­son­ally record about half talk and half music. In the morn­ing, I like to lis­ten to news and talk and music in the evening. Overnight, I’ll set my sys­tem to record an hour of talk con­tent and an hour of music, so when I grab my iPod off my desk in the morn­ing and pop it into my car, it has the two hours of con­tent I need for my commute.

Have you heard about other kinds of uses?

In early Jan­u­ary we got a call from some­one in mil­i­tary. He’d got­ten together with a bunch of his fel­low sol­diers just before they shipped out to Iraq, and they pooled their money to buy a Time­Trax Com­plete setup and an iPod. They used Time­Trax to record 20 or 40 giga­bytes of con­tent and take it to Iraq with them. It makes you feel good in some ways.

I see cer­tain par­al­lels with pod­cast­ing.

Sure, although pod­cast­ing is some­one else mak­ing a pro­gram­ming deci­sion for you. In our case, you’re pick­ing and choos­ing the pro­gram­ming. Our soft­ware has all the func­tions of a TiVo. You can sched­ule a par­tic­u­lar show or chan­nel or block of time each day. What I think will be pop­u­lar in future is the abil­ity of the sys­tem to know you well enough to record a show based on how you’ve eval­u­ated other programs. 

What kind of DRM do you use?

We don’t want to encour­age peo­ple to dis­trib­ute what they cap­ture with Time­Trax over the Inter­net, so we encode the satel­lite sig­nal into each record­ing that’s made, with a spe­cific iden­ti­fier for each user. Besides that, we don’t have any other restric­tions on what peo­ple can do with their record­ing. We just want to encour­age peo­ple to be respon­si­ble, and yet not pun­ish them at the same time.

That sounds per­fectly rea­son­able. Are you insane? What if this catches on?

You know, this approach takes the respon­si­bil­ity off us in a cer­tain way and puts it on the user, where it belongs. We’ve shared our method­ol­ogy with Sir­ius and XM and told them, if you find users who are vio­lat­ing your copy­right you can take them to court or unsub­scribe them.

And what was their reac­tion?

They tell us it’s cer­tainly a step in the right direc­tion vs. hav­ing no pro­tec­tion at all. That was the first thing I did when I took over the com­pany. We real­ized that we needed some kind of con­trol mechanism.

When we announced our approach, we expected some push­back from our cus­tomers or from pri­vacy advo­cates. While heard from a cer­tain num­ber, the crit­i­cism we got from our user base was negligible.

I’ll guess that the crit­i­cism has been muted because you don’t keep a cen­tral data­base of people’s lis­ten­ing habits. It’s encoded in the record­ing, not sent to the mother ship, is that right?

Exactly. We don’t keep those kind of records at all. It’s all done on the user’s PC.

You don’t have a for­mal rela­tion­ship with Sir­ius or XM, is that right?

Right, we don’t. We’ve cer­tainly had con­ver­sa­tions with them. They’re still in a posi­tion of decid­ing what they’re going to do going forward.

Why is your ser­vice restricted to satel­lite radio rather than Inter­net radio?

Partly for legal rea­sons. There is a dif­fer­ence in the law between what an indi­vid­ual can do with a broad­cast brought into their home vs. a pro­gram deliv­ered elec­tron­i­cally over the Inter­net. There are sep­a­rate legal rules that gov­ern each, and that’s why we’ve stuck to satel­lite radio. But we’re look­ing into related ser­vices, like work­ing with cable providers to deliver a choice of music sta­tions that can be streamed into people’s homes. 

What’s your next big fea­ture?

In the next month we expect to roll out a new ver­sion of our soft­ware that lets lis­ten­ers scan satel­lite radio chan­nels and record songs by spe­cific artists.

How many cus­tomers do you have?

We don’t release a spe­cific num­ber, but we will say the soft­ware has been down­loaded more than 350,000 times and we have tens of thou­sands of cus­tomers, and we’re grow­ing exponentially.

And the busi­ness out­look for this year?

This year we expect to be avail­able in retail stores by Christ­mas. Today you can pur­chase Time­Trax only directly for us, but we hope to be in Best Buy, Cir­cuit City and other major retail­ers by the hol­i­days.
 

What’s the legal out­look for record­ing satel­lite or other audio trans­mis­sions?

I think over the next few months you’ll see pub­lic posi­tions start to form about where the indus­try sees this stuff going. We’ll know where orga­ni­za­tions like the RIAA and com­pa­nies like XM and Sir­ius and maybe the record­ing com­pa­nies come down on all this.

What’s your stance on the audio broad­cast flag?

We’ve been fol­low­ing that very care­fully. The RIAA con­tin­ues to empha­size that there’s a carve-out for satel­lite radio. That’s a big step in the right direc­tion for us. The satel­lite indus­try is a major source of rev­enue for the record com­pa­nies, so it makes sense. They pay roy­al­ties at a higher rate than ter­res­trial sta­tions and the RIAA doesn’t want to rock that boat. The satel­lite com­pa­nies have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with the RIAA.

J.D. Lasica is author of the upcom­ing book Dark­net. This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared at Engad­get.

Adam L. Penen­berg in Wired News on Whither The Wall Street Journal?

The Jour­nal faces an intractable prob­lem. Because you have to sub­scribe to access both cur­rent news arti­cles and the archive, the Jour­nal is leav­ing only a faint foot­print in cyber­space. As with The New York Times, which insists that read­ers reg­is­ter to view news and pay $3 per arti­cle in the archive, the Jour­nal barely shows up on Google or any other search engine. I googled “Enron” — an issue the Jour­nal cov­ered exhaus­tively, and which two of its reporters even wrote a book about — and not one arti­cle appeared within the first 25 pages (250 results.) …

I spoke at length about this at the Blo­gOn con­fer­ence last sum­mer. I think Adam’s point is a salient one — and I know that edi­tors at online news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines are well aware of the dilemma.

Each pub­li­ca­tion must make its own deci­sion. But there had bet­ter be a good finan­cial rea­son to opt for irrel­e­vance in cyberspace.

Dis­clo­sure: Adam quotes me briefly here.

In the March issue of Wired mag­a­zine: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star.

Also in the March issue is this lit­tle nugget by Paul Boutin. It’s not online (though should be); it’s on page 131:

Pod­cast­ing at a glance

How it works:

1. The pod­caster records a show as an audio file.
2. Then, he adds a hyper­link for the show to an RSS feed on a Web server.
3. The listener’s pod­cast soft­ware checks RSS feeds at set inter­vals, down­load­ing and adding new shows to a playlist.
4. When the lis­tener docks his portable player, it updates with the lat­est shows.

How to get it.

To down­load pod­casts to any portable (not just the iPod), start with the right soft­ware. Wired’s pick: iPod­der.

How to make your own podcast:

1. Plug a USB head­set with ear­phone and micro­phone into your com­puter.
2. Install the free Audac­ity MP3 recorder for Win­dows, Mac or Linux. Make a record­ing, then save it as an MP3 file.
3. Upload the MP3 file to your Web site or blog. Fol­low the instruc­tions at ipodder.org to cre­ate an RSS feed on your site.

What’s next

Our­me­dia (ourmedia.org), a grass­roots media project backed by the Inter­net Archive, will pro­vide free pod­cast­ing tools and per­ma­nent host­ing for pod­casts begin­ning in mid-2005. Also, broad­cast­ers such as the Cana­dian Broad­cast­ing Com­pany, BBC and NPR are cur­rently exper­i­ment­ing with podcasting.

Oh, yes. Our­me­dia will pro­vide free host­ing for audio files sooner than mid-2005. Much sooner.

As it hap­pens, today’s San Jose Merc ran a story by Michael Baze­ley, Sports-talk providers get in on pod­cast game, that con­tained a side­bar: How to tune into a pod­cast.

1. Down­load soft­ware that reads RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosed audio files from sites like www.iPodderX.com for Macs, or iPodder.NET for PCs.

2. This soft­ware auto­mat­i­cally down­loads audio files to your com­puter and moves the tracks to iTunes or other music man­age­ment soft­ware for trans­fer to your iPod or another dig­i­tal music player.

3. Sub­scribe to the feeds you want. Sites such as www.iPodder.org, www.iPodder.net, www.Podcasters .org or www.Podcast.net are good places to start your search. Your com­puter does the rest. It will auto­mat­i­cally search for the lat­est pod­casts and move the audio files into iTunes or other media juke­box software.

4. Syn­chro­nize your iPod or other portable dig­i­tal music player with the com­puter to trans­fer the podcast.

5. If your media-management soft­ware doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally down­load the pod­cast to your dig­i­tal music player, you can drag the audio file directly into the player, as you would any MP3 music track..

PhysOrg.com: Slim­ming cure for dig­i­tal videos.

The future, high-speed DSL lines will no longer be the sole pre­serve of com­puter users. The TV set will also become a mul­ti­me­dia device, capa­ble of down­load­ing videos for instant view­ing via tele­phone cables. Up until now the required data vol­umes have been too large for trans­mis­sion with good pic­ture qual­ity. Researchers from Siemens and Main­Con­cept have now devel­oped a sys­tem apply­ing the lat­est video stan­dards to com­press the huge streams of video data.

Thanks to unmedi­ated for the pointer.

Om Malik points to this post­ing by James Enck at Eurotel­coblog about what’s going on with the BBC Dig­i­Lab, fol­low­ing up on an inter­view he had late last year with Euan Sem­ple. (Unfor­tu­nately, there’s no link to the Dig­i­Lab, so I don’t know if it has a Web address.) Excerpt:

The sec­ond tool we put in is a social net­work­ing tool that lets users set up a page of info about them­selves and can then be searched for par­tic­u­lar skills or inter­ests. It also allows users to estab­lish inter­est groups which are becom­ing a really effec­tive way of iden­ti­fy­ing and sup­port­ing var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties within the BBC. We are in the process of com­bin­ing the bul­letin board and the net­work­ing tool and once we have that I think things will really take off. …

Get­ting a good RSS aggre­ga­tor is going to become more impor­tant as the vol­ume of activ­ity increases. It is impor­tant to get what is being writ­ten seen by the right peo­ple to give con­trib­u­tors the oxy­gen that makes it worth continuing. …

We’ll have social net­work­ing and RSS baked in to Our­me­dia, so I’ll have to take a look at what they’re doing over at Dig­i­Lab. Luck­ily, I met Daniel Mead­ows of Cap­ture Wales last sum­mer at the Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling Festival.

John Markoff in the New York Times reports on a new startup called Odeo founded by ex-Google guy Evan Williams and Noah Glass. (Ev, a famed blog­ger, is a friend.) From the story:

The pri­mar­ily ama­teur Inter­net audio medium known as pod­cast­ing will take a small, hope­ful step on Fri­day toward becom­ing the com­mer­cial Web’s next big thing. …

In pod­cast­ing, there are already a num­ber of small com­mer­cial efforts to cre­ate audio pro­grams espe­cially for lis­ten­ing to as mobile down­loads. And there are both hard­ware and soft­ware sys­tems that make it pos­si­ble to con­vert over-the-air and Inter­net radio broad­casts for mobile stor­age and lis­ten­ing on MP3 play­ers. One recent exam­ple is Radio Shark, a small device that sells for $70 and enables users of Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers to auto­mat­i­cally record over-the-air radio pro­grams and con­vert them to MP3 files for later, on-the-go playback. …

While still too much in its infancy to be con­sid­ered an imme­di­ate threat to the radio indus­try, pod­cast­ing does present the prospect of a grow­ing army of iPod-toting com­muters who take pro­gram­ming deci­sions out of the hands of broad­cast­ers and cus­tomize their own listening.

Here is Ev today on How Odeo hap­pened:

One day, Biz Stone and I were dri­ving home from work, it all clicked for us. We were talk­ing about how Audioblog­ger was great, but we didn’t tend to actu­ally lis­ten to the posts much, when we came across them on the web. How­ever, there I was, pay­ing for and down­loaded spoken-word audio from the web to lis­ten to on my iPod. Why, we thought, couldn’t you get the inter­est­ing, new audio-blogged posts on your iPod when you synched it and lis­ten to them where it made sense?

Ding-ding-ding-ding! …

The sim­ple idea that, even though peo­ple had been putting audio on the web for years, a lit­tle piece of soft­ware on the client, some RSS, and the ubiq­uity of iPods (and like-devices, and broad­band), could cre­ate a killer new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel for a whole new genre of con­tent was hot. …

I’m super-excited to see where this goes. Pod­cast­ing is going to be freakin’ huge. I don’t have time in this post, because it’s 2am and I gotta be on stage at 8am, to give my pitch for why. But it’s the same story as blog­ging (with sev­eral unique cha­ras­tics of its own), but in a whole new medium that is much big­ger than peo­ple think. And it’ll hap­pen much, much faster.

It’s about per­sonal media, time-shifting, and the long, long tail. And I love that shit. Amaz­ing things are going to be created.

Absolutely true. And it’s the same dri­ving force behind Ourmedia.org (com­ing very soon). I’ll be talk­ing with Ev about it next week, because Our­me­dia is offer­ing pod­cast­ers free stor­age and free bandwidth.

By the way, I reg­is­tered the domain name podworld.org a while back, if any­one wants to acquire it for the right cause. :~)

Sandeep Jun­narkar in Thursday’s NY Times Cir­cuits sec­tion: Blog­gers Add Mov­ing Images to Their Mus­ings. Soft­ware for cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing Web logs now offers tools for adding audio, pho­tos and video — and even updates by cell­phone. A look at the lat­est offerings.