Imagine – no real time to blog! That’s been where I’ve been at all this week, hence pretty light posting in recent days. No signs of that improving, sorry to say, until early next week. This is also affecting my ability to respond promptly to comments left on various posts. Lots of great conversation-starters, and […]
Hot Recorder is hot for podcasters!
If you’re a podcaster, and you don’t have any kind of professional-type hardware (a mixer, for instance), and you’re looking for almost the perfect way to record interviews via Skype relying just on software, then this is the solution for you. Purely by chance, I discovered HotRecorder this afternoon. And let me tell you straightaway […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #36: May 26, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (on Autodesk’s blog and podcast combo; which non-tech companies use blogs; how to structure Desert Island Discs); podcasting in the news: going mainstream; Blogebrity and reality or not; looking for writers via blog posts; the virtues of print; RSS comes to Microsoft’s Knowledge base; the London geek mega-dinner next month. Show […]
Nokia’s rap on the knuckles
BBC News: Phone maker Nokia has been reprimanded by Finland’s financial market watchdog and stock exchange for not releasing positive earnings news quickly enough. Listed in New York and Helsinki, Nokia followed US rules but did not abide by Finland’s, the regulators said. Nokia should have told investors about the improved fourth-quarter earnings and sales […]
Star Wars is simply a great story
Ten days after it opened, I finally managed to see Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith yesterday. And what a phenomenal film it is! If you haven’t seen it yet, do go. And if you do plan to and don’t want any spoilers, then don’t read the rest of this post. There […]
When travel isn’t pretty
Regular listeners to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report will know that my co-presenter, Shel Holtz, travels a lot. Much more than I do at the moment. In fact, during the past month, Shel’s co-presented our show from the road on six occasions. And there’s more travel for him coming up in June. […]
Solving PDF irritations in Firefox
Don’t you find it really irritating when you click on a link on a website or blog and then discover that the link is to a PDF file? That usually happens after you’ve clicked the link. The PDF starts loading and takes forever because it’s a big file, or has loads of graphics, it’s a […]
Boeing takes second step with 777 blog
Aircraft maker Boeing launched a new blog ten days ago – Flight Test Journal, a place where the engineers and test pilots of Boeing’s new 777-200LR Worldliner talk about their work in getting the world’s longest-range commercial airplane ready for commercial service. Only two posts so far, but it looks like the scene has been […]
Who understands the EU constitution?
So the French voted ‘non’ yesterday to the proposed European Union constitution. That shouldn’t be a surprise, really, given the broad lack of general understanding in Europe about what the constitution means and what all its effects would be. You can’t say there’s not plenty of information about the constitution – take a look at […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #37: May 30, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (on podcast vertigo and rich media search; full-content RSS feeds are the way to go; garbled ID3 tags); getting on an email blacklist – and getting off it; more Naked Conversations; tips on presentations; Flash-based RSS aggregator; good and bad business podcast listening; Flash-based media players and MP3 files; Desert Island […]
The consequences of email blacklisting
During last weekend, Shel and I learned that the domain of For Immediate Release, our podcast blog, was included in a couple of email blacklists. These are databases that include the addresses of domains known to be the source for spam email. And on Monday, I learned that my domain, the domain of this blog, […]
Mainstream media knows more than you think
BBC News: Newspapers are far from dead, despite the challenge from online news and blogs, media executives have been told. […] The challenge now for established newspaper groups is not just to respond to changes in the consumption of electronic media, but to start profiting from the new ways that audiences access their media. I’ve […]
TypePad blogs to get spam-fighting features
If you have a TypePad blog, here’s some good news on what Six Apart is planning to implement as part of major improvements in everyone’s efforts to combat comment and trackback spam. An announcement yesterday on the Everything TypePad support site includes this news about enhancements Six Apart is working on: First, we’ll provide support […]
Orders of magnitude and overload
As I sat at my PC at gone midnight last night, doing email catchup, reviewing comments to various blog posts and RSS feed scanning, I thought – this is ridiculous. I have various software tools that are supposed to help me be more productive and all I’m doing is spending more time on a never-attainable […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #38: June 2, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (on how to track podcast listeners); fighting email spam – an open source PR project; US government PR gaffe; blogging as a corporate job; more podcasting developments; Boeing’s test pilots’ blog; stealing RSS content. Show notes for June 2, 2005 Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a […]
Flaky Gmail servers
I’ve been seeing this more frequently in recent days: This is a Gmail error message which pops up from your system tray in Windows when the Gmail notifier – a very useful tool – can’t connect to the Gmail server, with the little icon in the system tray showing an exclamation mark. I realized just […]
PubSub tool measures links in RSS feeds
Blog matching service PubSub has introduced LinkStats, a very cool statistics tool that enables you to see the inbound and outbound links to and from your (or any) blog. Once you enter a blog URL, it will return the results for the past 30 days. Not only do you get a text table listing inbound/outbound […]
Where to get your podcast listed
If you’re a podcaster, you’ll know about some of the places to get your show listed. iPodder.org for one. Podcast Alley and Podscope are two more. But did you know that there are at least 30 places where you can submit your podcast for inclusion in an online directory or search engine? Robin Good has […]
EPIC update 2015
Is this a vision of the very near future? Brazil, 1984, Blade Runner and The Matrix all rolled up into one? Or perhaps an Elliott Carver-esque future but without the mainstream media (or James Bond)? Whatever you might think of how we all will publish and consume news and information in the coming years, and […]
MSM: ‘Bloggers are here to stay’
I wrote a post the other day that said that mainstream media knows more than you think about blogging and other new-media communication channels. I’ve just read a very good column from last Sunday in The Observer (the online paper, not the blog) by John Naughton, a mainstream media man who clearly does. In his […]