Welcome to the second daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of the Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from yesterday, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

For this episode, Steven and Mark take a look at the growing trend of the blog subscription model.  This is a new trend that is suddenly cropping up with the like of GigaOM Pro and Ars Premiere leading the way.  Mark also discusses how SiliconANGLE (a site both Mark and I work for) is pondering a similar model.

Push the big green button and have a listen to the first of the daily episodes!

For a company that gets so many thing right, Apple sure doesn’t seem to know what to do with the iPod Touch.

The iPod Touch was introduced in September 2007 as an alternative to the iPhone for those that wanted the bonus features of the phone.  It was a great idea, people who avoided the iPhone for various reasons snapped it up, and the device has now taken on a life of its own as a handy PDA, and quite often as an “add-on” to BlackBerry users, such as myself.

In 2008 the iPod Touch received an update along with all of the other iPods.  The only additions were an external speaker, some physical volume controls and an upping of the devices memory capacity.  There was nothing quite compelling enough to get owners of the first generation Touches to update, so everyone looked forward to this year to bring a lot of updates to the device.

Well, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has returned from his medical leave, and as his first public duty since his liver transplant, he introduced this year’s new iPod line-up.  And, once again, the iPod Touch got the shaft.

While rumors had been mounting of the iPod Touch getting a camera and an external microphone, instead what we got was a faster processor and another increase in memory.

… really?  That’s it?

One of the cornerstones of the iPod sales success all these years is doing enough changes to them each year to make people want to constantly keep upgrading.  Well, seeing as the run down of upgrade since generaiton 1 iPod Touches is as follows

• External speaker
• Physical volume controls
• Faster processor
• Increased memory capacity

Where is the motivation for anyone to upgrade?  Sure, all of those things would be nice to have, but none of them are a “killer upgrade” that just makes me go crazy without it.  The most exciting thing to happen to the iPod Touch today is that you can now manage your applications inside of iTunes instead of dragging your finger all over the screen.  Whee.  And guess what, it works in my first generation iPod Touch, so it still isn’t a reason to upgrade.

Don’t get me wrong, if my iPod Touch was to die, I would immediately buy another one, they are great devices.  All this means is that I think Steve Jobs has forgotten how he created that early success in this product line: repeat customers.  In all honesty, Apple did me a favor today, they actually saved me from spending any money, so perhaps I should thank them for constantly doing silly upgrades no one really needs to the iPod Touch.  Thanks,Apple!

Welcome to the first daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of the Cynical Bastards!

This is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe.  The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself.  You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

For this first episode, Steven and I take on Technorati and just what the heck this once powerful name in the blogosphere has done to itself, what it plans to do and where we think it will ultimately end up.

Push the big green button and have a listen to the first of the daily episodes!

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

Continue Reading ->

I’m finally catching up on posting these! Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, my fellow Cynical Bastards, and myself took on, a full load of subjects, and got in a good amount of Gillmor’ing.

- Sarah Lacy is an idiot

- Google gto a patent for their homepage… say what?

- For the second week in a row, RSS is dead… I’m tired of going to the funerals

- Apple chat bubbles are now a reason for apps to not be approved… what’s next?  Color choices?

- Who was the Dickwad of the Week? You’ll have to listen and find out.

- Starting September 8th something exciting is happening with CobWEBs … listen to the final 15 minutes or so to find out

Push the big green button and have a listen

If you haven’t heard of Spotify yet, don’t worry, many others haven’t also. However, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t become a household name within the next few years.

Spotify is a fairly young music service that launched on Oct. 7, 2008 in Western Europe.  While it has been in its invitation only beta stage the service has stayed tied to Europe for licensing reasons, but a United States release is expected in the not too distant future.

So, why is this service a game changer?  Well, the answer is pretty simple in that with the licensing agreements the service has struck you can essentially pull up any song by any artist at any time and listen to it.  If you want a free account you will have to go through advertisements every so often, but if you have a paid account you don’t even see the ads and can enjoy endless musical selections of all your favorite performers.

Where Spotify is really set to change the game is with its just released iPhone & iPod Touch and Android applications.  The apps, just released today, is only for use by the paying customers, but one feature alone may be worth it.  I have embedded the demo video below for you to watch, but essentially you make a playlist of your favorite music, tell the Spotify app you want that playlist to be available while you have no 3G or Wi-Fi access (i.e. on an airplane), and it will save the music to your device memory so you can play all of the selected tracks while you aren’t near a connection.

Now mind you that you do not own these tracks, and they can’t be transferred off of your device, but who will ever need to buy music anymore when you can just have a monthly Spotify subscription and make a bunch of offline playlists?

While I have been a huge fan of services such as Pandora for ages, the problem is that I need to have some form of access to listen to it.  I also have no say in what songs come up on Pandora, but with Spotify I can have access to a basically limitless stream of music from just about any artist you can think of.  Once this hits the United States, you don’t think this is going to be the most talked about music service on every college and university campus?

Take a look at the video and I think you’ll quickly why this is such a huge game changer for the mobile music market, and quite possibly the music industry as a whole.

Another week, another batch of posts I’ve written around the Web.  Enjoy!

Photo.BLORGE.com

• Samsung WB5000 offers up 24x optical zoom
• Panasonic introduces the new Lumix DMC-GF1 Four Thirds-style camera

SeanPAune.com

• Over 100 Pounds Lost
• Walt Disney Buys Marvel For $4 Billion In Stock And Cash
• Duggar Family To Add 19th Child
• Rocky Horror Picture Show Remake Canceled
• CobWEBs Episode 18 – A Tale Of Two Segues
• Scattercast Episode 58 – GOOOAAALLL!
• Boston Area School Dumps Library Books For Ebooks

SiliconANGLE.com

• Mobile Monday: Mobile App News for Week of August 24th

SitePoint.com

• 11 Contextual Ad Alternatives to Google AdSense

StarterTech.com

• License To Surf May Be Around The Corner
• Have Gift Cards You Have No Use For? Why Not Sell Them For Cash!
• Apple Officially Announces iPod Event For September 9th
• RunMyErrand.com Lets You Make Money Running Errands For Others
• Top Posts For August
• New Movies Could Be Coming To YouTube
• One Quarter Of Xbox 360’s Still Failing
• WordPress Blogs Must Be Updated Immediately

Tech.BLORGE.com

• Australian crime expert calls for ‘license to compute’
• Wikipedia to begin color coding trustworthy text
• Official: eBay sells Skype for $2.75 billion
• Sale of Skype won’t stop eBay from launching an IPO in 2010
• YouTube getting ready to make customers pay for some videos
• Amazon attempts to make good with customers who lost ‘1984?
• WordPress blogs under serious attack; immediate upgrades the only defense

It seems that the digital age is coming to schools at long last, but are they really going about it in the right way?

Cushing Academy, a private, co-ed day and boarding school for grades nine to twelveabout 90 miles west of Boston, has decided that it is time to embrace the digital age and is getting rid of all 20,000 of its library books.  The books are being replaced with 18 ebook readers from Amazon and Sony according to The Boston Globe.

James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and the spearhead behind the movement had this to say on the move:

Instead of a traditional library with 20,000 books, we’re building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books.  We see this as a model for the 21st-century school.

No, Mr. Tracy, you are building a virtual library with 18 books, not millions.

While I see what his thought process is, and I am sure the school enrollment is much lower than your traditional public school, 18 readers for an entire school verges on the idiotic.  Will you get the teachers to coordinate their lesson plans so no more than 18 books are ever needed through out the school?  What about the student that wants to work ahead?  Leisure reading?  Apparently none of those things will factor in to these mere 18 ebook readers that Cushing is purchasing.

So, what do you do with a room that used to house 20,000 books and now will only hold 18 ebook readers?  Good question, but get ready for the silly answer:

• Three flat-screen TVs to display information from the Internet – $42,000
• Laptop-friendly study carrels – $20,000
• Coffee shop – $50,000 ($12,000 just for the cappuccino machine)
• Ebook reades – $10,000

Here’s an idea, how about you dump the coffee shop (that blew my mind) and buy 90 more ebook readers?  I know, I’m crazy with the ideas.

While I feel that the digital age is coming for sure, especially in the field of text books, replacing the entire library just seems a bit extreme to me.  Heck, why not keep the books and phase in the readers instead of dumping everything in one shot?

Who knows, this is a private school, and if they need a $12,000 cappuccino machine, why not?

Scattercast is 59… and trying to score a goal!

- This week’s episode actually has a running theme of “goals”

- My life is seriously lacking in a goal right now, and I explain why that is, and it may not be why you think

- Weight loss goals and some other thoughts on my losing 109 lbs so far

- Thanks to Jo at JosCafe.com for recommending for recommending the Grizzly Bear Egg Cafe podcast to me, but listening to it makes me want to change some things about Scattercast to be honest.

- Some announcements about my other podcast, CobWEBs

Here’s

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

for those who wish to download it, subscribe to Scattercast via iTunes.

I’m finally catching up on posting these! Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, my fellow Cynical Bastards, and myself took on, a full load of subjects, and got in a good amount of Gillmor’ing.

- Sean visits an Apple store and laments the lack of unicorns, rainbows and mermaids

- RSS IS DEAD! … again

- Ad clickers are losers and stupid (hey, we just report it, doesn’t mean we agree with it)

- Venezuela to ban violent games

- MOON FRY?!?

- Who was the Dickwad of the Week?  You’ll have to listen and find out.

- Starting September 8th something exciting is happening with CobWEBs … listen to the final 15 minutes or so to find out

- And a whole lot more… listen as Steven masters the art of the segue!

Push the big green button and have a listen

Hot patootie, bless my soul, there will not be a remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

Last July I reported that MTV was planning to remake the schlock classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  As I said then, and I still believe:

I really don’t care who is involved, this is a monumentally bad idea.  No matter how much of the original you maintain, this was a horrible script at its core.  Now, you add in new actors who are conscience of the phenomenon, and they will never be able to pull this off without thinking things like, “did I pause long enough there for the audience to say their lines?”

Well, the good news is that we don’t have to worry about this any more for the time being.  For some unknown reason, MTV has put the project on indefinite hold.  Hopefully that will just turn into “nope, we’ll never do it.”

This is one of those situations where there is just no conceivable way this could have turned out well.  The original is a rare confluence of factors, and I am convinced you could never properly duplicate it.  Just leave us with the original, and let us sing along… to the late night… double feature… picture show…

The Duggar family, stars of the TLC series 18 Kids and Counting, have announced that Michelle, the mother of the family, is pregnant with her 19th child.

What sort of insanity is this?

While one of the great things about the United States is that you have the freedom to make whatever choices you want, and that includes having 19 children.  Does it make it right?  Of course not, but that it isn’t stopping the Duggars.

I have never watched one moment of this series, even when it was 17 Kids and Counting, and I have no desire to ever watch any of it.  How can anyone possibly glamorize this family?  Say what you will of Jon & Kate Plus 8, but at least there 8 children were the result of extreme luck with fertility treatments.  The Duggars are doing this the old fashioned way of popping out one child after another.

It is the right for every family in this country to have as many children as they want, but is it really the responsible thing to do?  According to The Inquisitr, the Duggars are part of a religious movement known as QuiverFull which deals with Psalm 127: 3 – 5:

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

I am all for religious freedom, and worshiping as one sees fit, but isn’t there a point where practicality and social responsibility finally kick in?  What about the strain on the planet?  The Earth is already over populated, and here we have a family with 19.

Some years ago I knew a girl who was the 15th of 17 children, and since I haven’t talked to her in 15 or so years now, I can safely say she was messed up by it.  Her siblings I met were also rather ‘out there’ and all seemed desperate for whatever attention they could get, and by whatever means necessary.  This isn’t to say all large families have similar effects on their kids by any means, but it certainly was an eye-opening look into that kind of life.

It’s difficult to say that enough is enough as this does fall under religious freedom, and if it’s something they believe in, they should be allowed to practice under the freedoms of this country, but it certainly doesn’t mean I have to agree with, or condone it.