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Following the - iTunes for your Mobile Phone - craze from the last weeks/months/year, I found back a post on the W2Forum I wrote in December 2004 on - podcasting on a mobile phone.

I was not the one who invented the term but I remember Google then had something like 38 entries with the term “mobcasting”. You should check this term now!

Checking Wikipedia on mobcasting, I got this: “Mobcasting is a term coined by Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network in January 2005…”

Reading Andy’s original mobcasting post I understood he actually created the 1st mobcast somwhere in January 2005. But the term was coined before, that needs to be corrected one day (by the one who did so?) in Wikipedia. Meanwhile Andy created also http://mobcasting.blogspot.com to keep his experiments in mobile podcasting going.

I just like the idea of technology serving people… more ‘voices’ become now in reach of many; the more diversification, the better for democracy!

Technorati tags: mobcasting podcasting mobile podcasting Google Wikipedia W2Forum W2F Wireless World Forum

We heard about the Mobile Web, Mobcasting, MoSoSo, etc. but this one beats them all: Mike Evans of Mobilementalism wrote an interesting article about MobSharing. Meanwhile Smartmobs and the Mobile Technology Weblog wrote about it too. The birth of a new hypeword or are we really that close to it?

Technorati tags help to find the stories around words… just follow this link and check back in 1 year: mobsharing

I discussed the topic last week with a friend in Belgium when I find the original article back through the “Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution“. The quote was originally mentioned in an interview done by Jon Pareles for the NY Times with David Bowie.

“The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within ten years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in ten years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. […] So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen… ” (June 9, 2002)

Always been a visionary, still a visionary…

Reading the “PalmOne’s sorry attempt at an iPod killer” article, it looks like Palm’s high-days are far away by now and it’s hard to see they will come back soon.

BlackBerry surpassed PalmOne allready in market share and the attempt to take on to the iPod looks a bit silly to me. Will PalmOne be able to build good smartphones or will the mobile phone manufacturers produce better handheld computers functionalities in their new models?

Reading John’s article on the Philips WAC700 Wireless Music Center, I was thinking what impact the current digital music evolution has on families.

My current family music delivery at home is the following:

- My three daughters listen while studying or playing in their room (computer, hi-fi system or mp3 player)
- My wife listens a bit everywhere in the house depending her tasks or moods (transistor radio, hi-fi or mp3 player)
- The children watch DVD movies, listen music or play Playstation games in another entertainment room
- I am listening when working in my home office (another computer or hi-fi)
- When receiveing friends or when we want to listen to music, we do it in the living room where we have another hi-fi or iPod connected to it.

Currently we have a mix of old hi-fi systems (3), transistor radios (1), computers (3), Playstation (1), DVD player (1) and mp3 players (4)… that are about 13 different audio systems in my house only. If we count in the 5 phones each family member has; that makes upto 18 music devices in my apartment only (!) I am stunned looking at it this way.

Oh by the way, you have to know that some music tastes we share, but everyone wants to listen to his/her preferred music style to at different moments at different places.

Now, let’s see what kind of ideal music delivery system I have to look at my next purchase… I think I need a music distribution server; capable of streaming different kinds of music to different area’s in my apartment. Philips has thoughts about that, that’s cool; now I can look at other manufacturers too what they have released and then make up my mind.

But that’s not all, things are more complicated; let’s just look at my family’s music content now; well nothing special I guess… the usual, CD’s, DVD’s, FM radio, online radio and still some old records being played here once in while (vinyl quality is still such a different experience!)

But nowadays we have to digitalise our whole music catalogue in order to hear it on whatever device, wherever and whenever we like it. So, we copy our CD’s to our computers and beam/send them to our mp3 players. Last year however some record companies find a new way to protect their business: some cd’s are protected with some special security code so people can only listened to the CD on one device and cannot copy its content to mp3 players (!) Too bad… My kids didn’t like that move at all; Anastasia lost all her credit; my daughters will not buy her next cd, that’s for sure.

So what about the next mobile music industry plans and its consequences for my family?

My daughters download ringtones quite often; sometimes they download the same ringtones 3 times to have it on each phone. Personally I always thought ringtones are a fabulous rip-off (1 Euro or more for a silly piece of data) but ok technology moves on and now we are ready to download/listen to some real music on our mobiles. But given this possibility, will I have to pay 5 times for the same song for every mobile I have in my family?

No no no, I think this business model just cannot be right… Actually it looks quite silly looking it from this angle. I am willing to buy once for music I love and store that on some home server for family use. I think something is just not right here in this future mobile music distribution model.

I need to be able to buy once and distribute that music seamlessly to all devices in my family neighbourhood whether they are fixed or wireless devices. Another reason for me to believe more in a subscription model as viable for the future.

On Smartmobs today: Analyzing Social Networks on the Semantic Web

The FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocabulary has become one of the most used semantic web ontologies and can be found in millions of RDF documents on the web. FOAF is used to describe basic attributes of people and relationships among them.

The UMBC ebiquity group has published a foaf dataset extracted from FOAF files collected during the Fall of 2004 from our work on Swoogle.
Interesting is… “This dataset is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (v2.0bmitlicense and packaged as a ZIP file of a SQL database export.”