Graves On SOHO Technology

It’s well known that I’m no Apple fan-boy. While I do admire the company for their design and marketing prowess, I’m uneasy about the extreme control they wield with respect to managing who runs what on iOS devices.

Not long ago I heard a lot of what makes me uneasy about Apple expressed in a more general manner. It was Cory Doctorow addressing 28C3 (Chaos Communications Conference) in December 2011. IT Conversations has the podcast.

There’s a video version, too.

Further to this CBC’s Spark Plus podcast interviewed Cory on the same topic. It’s a little different. He certainly illustrates his points well.

Of course the matter reaches well beyond Apple. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure that we’ll be hearing more about this.

Last week longstanding VoIP blogger and fellow Canuck Alec Saunders penned a nice post on the Calliflower Blog offering a collection of guidance for podcasters called “10 Podcaster Tips!” It’s a good read…not long…you should go read it now…then come back here. I’ll wait.

Over the past few years I’ve listened to a number of Alec’s Squawkbox podcasts, even attended a handful live & in-person. I respect and admire the man.

Taken in the context of the Calliflower conference service Alec’s post provides some sound, well-considered advice. Even so, I find there to be merit recasting it in a broader context and revisiting some of his points.

By “broader context” I mean specifically considering how someone could record a better sounding podcast by bypassing the legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN).

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As I travel I often fill my down time listing to various podcasts. The IT Conversations series have been a great source of inspiration and education. Today they posted a podcast of  Jonathan Christensen, General Manager, Audio & Video at Skype. He was speaking at the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference on March 3, 2009. In his keynote presentation, called Codec Evolution and Industry Proposal, he announced their new, in-house developed SILK codec and the fact that it was being licensed to third parties for free.

This is definitely worth a listen, and good study for me as I set about preparing for my Astricon 2009 presentation about HDVoice.

Oh yeah. One last thing. I listened to the podcast using the new Skype FreeTalk Everyman Superwideband Headset. More on that later.

I’m on-the-road again the next few weeks. This week I have meetings in Burlington VT. That’s just about as far from Houston as you can get up the East coast. The pity is that the northeast has been having Houston style weather, hot & humid. I had hoped from something of a break from it during my travels.

As I travel I amuse myself by listening to podcasts. This week I’m contributing as well. I’m part of a group of volunteers that have stepped up to help Dan York & Jonathan Zar with audio post production on their Blue Box VOIP Security Podcast. It’s a lot of fun. I takes me back to a time when I earned my living as an editor. That’s something that I did for almost ten years.

So in collecting some podcasts for listening as I travel I downloaded several shows from IT Conversations Network. I was pleasantly surprised to see Asterisk as the focus as a portion of one of their shows in May. The show is curious as it basically traces a path I followed several years ago. One of the guests is getting started with AsteriskNOW! and using it as the basis for a couple of business ventures. It’s an interesting listen. I’m reminded that the developer community needs to stay focused on the experience of the user community. User experience matters, even on open source projects.