With the exception of hearing that some people can’t get their hands on an iPad quickly enough and that others can’t believe Apple would release a glorified iPhone/eReader, I’ve dodged all of the details about the device. So, what I’m about to share is based almost exclusively on the demonstation of the iPad during yesterday’s product announcement which I watched earlier today.

Like many Apple products, the iPad is a groundbreaking new form with the potential for incredible function. At the moment it’s somewhere between a MacBook and an iPhone, offering some of the greatest advantages of mobile convergence (save the phone) and desktop productivity, with the added bonus of having an eBook reader built in. This means the iPad isn’t going to compete with eReaders like the Kindle and its brethren based on the iPad’s limited battery life (10 hours), but a brand new technology that will likely displace the eReader because it does so much more as both an entertainment centre and business tool in a single device.

That’s right. The iPad is supposed to make you leave your laptop and Kindle at home. If it had a phone capabilities, you could leave your cell behind also.

The iPad is first generation, though. And that means Apple put it on the market to make waves and set the stage for something bigger and better. That’s to say, future releases of the OS will make the iPad a Blue Ocean of mobile computing. Imagine – and I’m speculating here – a stylus that turns the iPad into ePaper. You could take notes, doodle, draw, sketch and design, and have the ability to dog ear and scrawl notes in the margins of your eBook. Uh, oh! There’s the real threat to commercial paper AND eReaders.In fact, the iPad could also become a threat to the Livescribe pen if Apple unifies a stylus and audio recording capabilities.

Remember when I said I wouldn’t buy an iPod? Now I don’t even own a PC. Yeah… I’ll probably get an iPad. Just, maybe not until OS or hardware 2.0.

There’s no denying you need some form of passion to achieve any degree of success. In fact, I’d agree that passion serves as the foundation of success. It’s after this that Gary and I diverge in our thinking about the formula that’s led to his success as he describes in his easy-to-read and very insightful and entertaining book CrushIt!

Gary spends a lot of his time pushing the need to create lots of content. He notes that content is king in all forms: text due to it’s power when indexed by search engines, audio because almost anyone can speak without needing to be seen, video since it’s amazingly popular these days, and live streaming because it’s an oft overlooked way to engage with your audience. Gary suggests tools to use for each of these delivery mechanisms and then urges his reader to get out there and start producing content everyday.

I believe that content is one-third of an important equation for audience engagement, a dependency of media success. The other two-thirds are:

• Context: the elements that determine the meaning of the content. Context can be the descriptions that support all forms of media, the ambient sound of an audio recording and the visuals that create the setting of the video. Without context, the content is just words that anyone can read.
• Delivery: the way in which the message is delivered by the speaker or the media. Gary makes no apologies for his delivery which he describes the way most people describe a used car salesman. His style is certainly unconventional for the world of wine. Yet his delivery works because it’s a strong contribution to the equation, and while it may seem obnoxious to some, there is an authentic and relatable charm to Gary’s style.

There’s a catch to this equation; it’s not a sum of its elements. The audience engagement (AE) equation is a product of content (C), context (X) and delivery (D):

AE=CXD

If any of C, X or D have a zero value, then AE will be zero. Meaningful audience engagement depends on a positive value–even a decimal value–for each of the three elements.

“We” use this equation everyday without actually substituting the elements with numerical values. This is the equation that determines which actor made us connect with their character and the story, which news anchor we trust to tell us what’s going on in the world and which author writes the books we always want to read. And, for each of those scenarios, a casting director, producer or editor made a similar decision to select the best candidate for their needs.

It’s also the same equation that has made WineLibrary.tv a huge success, landing Gary lucrative speaking engagements, appearances on CNN and ABC news (among many others), the Ellen Degeneres Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and countless appearances in newspapers and magazines.

CrushIt! is a great read. Gary did a fantastic job weaving his own personal story with the story of his family, WineLibrary.tv and how to cash in on your passion.

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith aren’t just two people capitalizing on the the trend of pumping out books on the social web and digital engagement. They’ve been living the principles behind their book since before Twitter. They’ve blogged, podcasted and presented  their ideas for years which has created a following large enough to have made Trust Agents a New York Times Bestseller in the first week following its release this past August.

To make their ideas accessible, Chris and Julien have broken up the concept of being a trust agent into six components:

• Make Your Own Game
• One of Us
• Archimedes Principle
• Agent Zero
• Human Artist
• Build an Army

They use stories to map out relationships between social media, real life and pop culture to add depth to their ideas. I particularly like the way they stretch your thinking at various points in the book rather than serve you the obvious.

Readers of Trust Agents who are new to world of social media and whohave picked up the most highly recommended of these books may think very little overall has actually happened since case studies like Dell Hell keep coming up. We really need a new batch of stories so we need more people sharing them — something Chris and Julien ask people to do by sending their trust agent stories to stories@trustagent.com.

My biggest takeaway from the book was being introduced to a basic theory of improvisational comedy: “Yes, and…”. I love this idea for three main reasons:

• “Yes, and…” speaks to the importance of being curious, creative and adaptable, forcing us out of critical thinking and into creative thinking and collaboration.
• “Yes, and…” reinforces the  idea that we need to look beyond our own domains of specialty/interest and spend more time studying what other people do and how they do it, then figure out how to make it our own.
• “Yes, and…” abandons the word “but” which is routinely used and defended even thought it puts an exclusive spin on one end of a statement. “Yes, and…” recognizes both realities co-exist and then seeks to make progress.

This, of course, means that I have yet another book to read — Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson. It looks like 2010 is going to be a read-y one for me.

And… while we’re on the subject of reading outside your domain of specialty for inspiration and ideas, I recommend the following books:

• Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch (I particularly like the story about sameness brought about by institutionalized thinking on page 115)
• Thinkertoys: a handbook of creative-thinking techniques by Michael Michalko
• Zen Guitar by Philip Toshio Sudo (while the book is rooted in musical pursuits, it’s easy to apply Philip’s ideas in any creative pursuit)

To be clear, I love Daylite. It really is on the verge of being something incredible. As my teachers used to say of me to my parents, Daylite “has a lot of potential”. For the time being, it’s a decent tool for integrating projects, calendars, contacts and communications.

SUPPORT

Marketcircle’s support has been quite responsive. I’ve thrown a lot at them and they’ve been good about registering bugs and feature requests and have done their best to address outstanding issues. Unfortunately, some issues aren’t easily resolved. Read on…

SYNCHRONIZATION

If I had to pick a single deal breaker, it’s that synchronization between Daylite and other programs such as iCal and Address Book is spotty at best and failures cause Daylite to crash several times a week. Every time the application crashes, I’ve allowed Daylite to send email to the mothership for review and each time a different support tech sends me the same set of canned instructions. While the steps are clearly defined, they require some time investment to implement and then more time for Daylite to reset the entire sync. This can tie you up for quite a while if you have a large database. Oh, and the sync reset doesn’t always work.

EXTRANEOUS STEPS

Daylite includes a hook into Mail so you can associate all communications with contact records. This makes it easy to create an audit trail of communications — particularly important for project management and managing your wife’s medical calendar and communications relating to her cancer diagnosis and treatment. The problem is that categorizing the emails is a multi-step process when it should be a single click. That is, to categorize the email and then store it in a mail folder you must first select the email, make the contact selection, make the category selection, then click on a separate email, click back on the original email, then drag the original email to the desired mail folder. It may not seem like much, but try managing an active inbox and following those steps tens if not hundreds of times a day. Marketcircle has acknowledged this and opened a feature request.

USER EXPERIENCE

One of the great features of Daylite is the iPhone app, Daylite Touch. It makes it easy to manage your integrated projects, contacts and calendars while away from your computer. Unfortunately, Daylite has deviated from the familiar iPhone interface in a number of components which impacts the user experience. For example, the Daylite Touch contact list interface has no index along the side and no way to easily navigate all contacts the way the native Contact app does. Also, the interface for adding appointments and tasks uses the arrow button typically associated with replying or forwarding emails instead of the plus sign associated with adding new records. Marketcircle has acknowledged these and opened feature requests.

I’ve also suggested that they allow the user to associate default email and calendar categories with contact records, rather than defaulting to the last used category. If you’re not careful, a client record could get associated with your wife’s cancer calendar . Marketcircle has acknowledged this and opened a feature request.

Which brings me to another feature request. Once you’ve associated an email message with a contact and category in Daylite, the Daylite sidepanel in Mail changes to a button for opening the current mail record in Daylite. I’ve suggested it would be handy to see a summary list of associated contacts, communications records and appointments. Marketcircle has acknowledged this and opened a feature request.

MISSING FUNCTIONALITY

This one I haven’t sent to Marketcircle, yet. Daylite Touch doesn’t offer the ability to set reminders for appointments or tasks. You can create the records but you don’t have the ability to set an alert so you don’t forget.

CONSISTENT LANGUAGE

Finally — for now — the language used for status is inconsistent. Daylite’s calendar includes status options such as tentative, confirmed, completed and postponed while the task area has status options open, pending, deferred and done. Marketcircle has acknowledged this and opened a feature request to change it.

Sadly, my trial period expires in seven days. I wish the product were closer to being perfect so I could justify the expense particularly since I’ve invested so much time and have come to depend on Daylite to integrate Andrea’s medical calendar with related communications, reports and records (of course, that’s what trial periods are for). Instead, I’ll have to let the trial lapse and hope the best for Daylite.

Of course, the applause may have also had something to do with the presence of cinematographer Mark Ellam that the film’s creator, Brett Gaylor, was on hand for the screening.  You’d think he was a rock star the way the audience carried on.  And perhaps he is.  He’s a hometown boy, the movie is on a hot-button issue and the work he produced (like many of the works featured in the film) is a mashup in its own right.  And to prove RiP is part of the culture, not just paying lipservice to it, the entire film is available for remixing through the site OpenSourceCinema.org.  Representative mashups created by the community using footage made available during the production of the movie though that site found their way into the film.

RiP proposes a manifesto based on four assertions.

1. Culture always builds on the past
2. The past always tries to control the future
3. Our Future is becoming less free
4. To build free societies, you must limit control of the past

The assertions are then supported using some very interesting studies about several people including Girl Talk (the talented, creative and iconic remix artist), Larry Lessig (the forward thinking remix lawyer), Cory Doctorow (the popular remix activist) and Gilberto Gill (the Brazilian musician and progressive remix politician).  I particularly enjoyed learning about Gilberto Gill because he represents the first time I’ve heard of a federal Minister of Culture (for the administration of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) who was a contributor to culture, not a controller of it.

RiP is not a about making all things free and destroying progress.  The movie is about the changing times and how balance is needed to ensure that innovation is encouraged, not stifled; beneficial to all, not just the powerful; and becomes a matter of social and civil cooperation, not criminal justice.

Creators and consumers of social media are the best positioned to raise awareness of this movie and its message.  I highly recommend that you make an effort to see it so you can understand why.

I had really wanted to speak with Mark after the movie.  The line to collect our Mouse Liberation Front membership cards was long.  I collected mine, gave him my phone number and offered him a beer for the opportunity to speak more to him about the movie and how it was made.

On one particular occasion, we’d decided to take the quality of our audio recordings to the next level.  I’m not sure how that decision came about.  It was probably me (the Gear-Head that I am) wanting to use some spiffy new equipment even though my own gear was quite good and we’d perfected ways to capture the best sound from various instruments with it.  On the other hand, my tape deck limited us to eight tracks of audio so it may have been that we mapped out the arrangements and decided we needed more tracks.

We regularly rented microphones and effect processors and had on a few occasions even rented ADAT systems — digital tape recording machines that made it possible to record up to eight tracks of audio on each tape.  For this particular demo recording session, we rented a whole mess of equipment including high end Drawmer, dbx and Eventide processors, fantastic mics, preamps and two ADATs.  We made one ADAT system the master and the other the slave which gave us sixteen tracks of audio.

The recording sessions went very well.  Bob’s musical ideas were free flowing.  Combined with my occassional musical idea (or mistake that was turned into an idea) and my lyrics, the sessions were a creative success.  To make the most out of the time with the rented gear, I had programmed the drum machine the night before and then during the session I’d quickly get through my bass parts and then spend my time at the console.

On one particular day, the slave ADAT unit lost its mind.  As we worked on one particular song, the slave unit would get to a certain point in the song and begin rewinding which killed the recording.  It would rewind the entire length of the tape unless we stopped it.  Then I’d have to re-sync the two units and start over, again.  This went on for quite a while — always the exact same moment on the tape, always the same quirky behaviour.  It made recording the song impossible and the session itself amazingly frustrating.

We tried turning the machines off for short periods thinking they needed a break.  Apparently, they didn’t.  This went on for four hours.  Then, just as suddenly as this quirky behaviour had appeared, it stopped and the systems all began to play nicely together.

I’ve always been a Gear-Head.  On reflection, though, despite the improvements in sound quality and sleek new features that new technology offers, the best work I’ve ever done has been with equipment that I’ve spent hours working with.  It’s not just about figuring out what the equipment’s designed to do and how to do it, but how to make the equipment do things the way you want them to be done.

Despite the failings of my M-Audio Firewire 1814 audio card, failings that can only be overcome by using a beta driver that’s two revisions old (M-Audio promised me a fix back in August and fell silent since, which makes sense since it now looks like they’ve discontinued it) and the necessity for a USB dongle to make my Cubase software work, I love my studio.  I love that I’m able to use the same equipment in my home, office and on the road.

Podcasters should be come very close with their audio gear, learn its idiosyncracies, how to work around them and take advantage of them, the sonic qualities of their headphones and speakers and how to refine their production techniques.  Most of all, especially for the important projects, use the gear you know, not the gear that’s cool.

(I may dig through my old tapes and find some recordings I can share.)

This amazing little gadget works with a specialized notebook to literally capture everything you write in the exact position you write it — a form of geo-location on paper.  Coupled with its ability to audio record and timestamp everything as it records, you’re able to play back audio from any cue point by tapping the pen on some text at which you want the timestamped audio to begin playing.  Exactly!  Start thinking about lectures, meetings, brainstorming sessions, conferences, press events, interviews, etc…

The entire contents of the pen can then be syncronized with your computer — audio and paper complete with everything you wrote and drew on the page.  So, you end up with a recording and a facsimile version of your notes, be they text, charts, graphs and even doodles in the margin.  It gets better.  The desktop software can recognize your handwriting.  Whether you write in block print or cursive, the search function allows you to plain text search your notes.  And, it’s surprisingly accurate, even with messy chicken scratch (though, expect a few false positives).

I used mine in the first lecture of a night class I’m taking this term and I can barely find the words to describe how impressed I am.  But don’t just take my word for it.  The Pulse Smartpen won Best in Show at this year’s MacWorld.

By the way, the pen also doubles as a great portable audio recorder.  I used it to record a presentation I had to give to the class.

This is a product I will totally endorse and pimp!

Thanks to Whitney Hoffman and her LD Podcast interview with Dr. Andy van Schaack, the educational advisor for Livescribe.

* The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen even has some useful applications (e.g. calculator) and some entertainment (e.g. a piano application).  I expect more of this kind of thing will be developed over time.

In theory, it prints double-sided.  As it turns out, this great feature is also a great frustration.

My printer has a mind of its own and seems to decide when it will print double-sided and when it will waste my paper.  Despite my specifically setting the double-sided printing in my default printing profile and double-checking before each print, it still makes its own decisions.  Most notably, it will not print web pages double sided and seems to dislike printing double-sided, two-per-page print outs from Adobe Reader.  It’s completely random when it will print Word and Powerpoint documents double-sided.

Do you have a similar problem with your HP OfficeJet J6480?  More importantly, do you have a solution?

That’s what I faced when my MacBook Pro display was impossible to use, deemed un-fixable by Apple and my Apple approved service centre earlier this week and the decision was made to ship me a replacement unit (thank you AppleCare!).  The fact that the new system was to be the latest and greatest technology was only moderate consolation to the work that lay ahead.

That’s when the service tech told me that if I use the Leopard OS backup utility called Time Machine, I would be prompted during the installation process if I would like to migrate data from a Time Machine backup.  I’ve been a religious Time Machine user since I upgraded to Leopard in January so I felt the fear of the migration lift a little.

My replacement system arrived today.  I powered it on shortly after 4:00pm and followed the setup prompts.  Sure enough, within a couple of minutes I was asked if I wanted to migrate data from my Time Machine backup (if I had one).  I plugged my Time Machine drive into the computer and selected all of the available options (user data, applications, settings and some Mac files).  It calculated a 3 hour copy time for roughly 170Gb of data.  Perfect!

I picked up my daughters from camp, took one to her music lesson, hung out with the other, took them to the grocery store, went home, had a family dinner, hung out for a bit and then checked on my system.  All of the data and apps had been copied.

I checked for system updates and found there were a few to be applied including the Leopard 10.5.4 upgrade (I guess system updates don’t migrate).   While those updates were downloading I went through all of my applications and discovered that I had been negligent updating some so I downloaded and applied those updates.  Unfortunately, some of my apps also needed to have their license strings re-applied, perhaps because of the new hardware.  That’s a pain because I can’t find the serial number for one of them.

It’s now 9:40pm.  It took about 5 hours to get my new system running with my working environment exactly as I like it — complete with all of my applications and data (all 170Gb worth).  Most of that work was done for me and I didn’t have to be here for it.  I can’t imagine how long it would have taken me if I needed to manually reinstall everything and copy the data I required from the old system.

If you’re not already using Time Machine, what are you waiting for?

Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland looked and sounded very refreshed following a two month break. They opened with a ‘controlled’ version of Bring on The Night with Sting on acoustic guitar and bass pedals which gave the song a presence that could be felt in your rib cage. It wasn’t the whip-the-audience-into-a-frenzy start you’d expect from this tour. It was an entrance full of finesse. They saved the frenzy for their second number, a ripping version of Demolition Man. It was a one-two combination of songs they didn’t include in Montreal and both are very welcome additions to the set.

Sting seemed to enjoy himself much more last night than he did in Montreal. He moved about the stage more naturally and worked the arena with good banter, all in English (Sting has a history of fumbling through his French during previous appearances in Ottawa). He conducted the room through a few ‘sing-alongs’ that were more reminiscent of their heyday than last year’s performance in Montreal. Andy also seemed more in place last night and worked the arena on several occassions; a bonus. Stewart is always fun to watch.

At one point Sting recalled a 1979 performance in a theatre here in Ottawa. I remember an article in the Ottawa Citizen (many years ago) with the original Barrymore’s owner about his biggest regret being the cancellation of an appearance by The Police during their first Canadian tour. The cancellation was on the grounds that they were a punk band and he was having bad experiences with the punk scene in his bar. I hereby announce my intention to find out if they did actually play Ottawa.

While there were a couple of weak moments in the show (Invisible Sun didn’t carry enough umph and Don’t Stand So Close To Me remains a near show killer on this tour) the concert was filled with musical highlights like Driven To Tears, Voice Inside My Head/When The World Is Running Down, Synchronicity II, Message In A Bottle, Can’t Stand Losing You, So Lonely and a great if not slightly-slower-than-it-should-be version of Hole In My Life. Noticeably absent was their reworked version of Walking In Your Footsteps and thankfully absent was their watered down version of Truth Hits Everybody.

The concert ended on a high with an edgier-than-Montreal version of Next To You. It was their second encore and, by all accounts, the beginning of the home stretch of all Police collaboration. Too bad, really. The record industry would get a great lift if they produced a new studio album. Of course, this tour was never supposed to happen so we can always hang on to that hope.

Thanks for the Ottawa show, boys! It was great to be able to see you in my hometown. Good luck with the rest of the tour and thanks for the music.

Last night I upgraded my Delta 1010 driver to the most recent version, Delta_V32_5.10.00.5065.exe.  To my horror, M-Audio has decided to remove all of the flexibility and power I have come to enjoy with my Delta 1010 and dream to have in my 1814.  They have removed a series of audio routing options that have wiped out the ability to record the mix-monitor track without sending it back through the audio chain — a feature that allows me to record a local microphone and the input (or monitor mix) as separate streams in Cubase.

If you are a Delta 1010 owner, I highly recommend that you do not upgrade beyond Delta_WDM_5.10.00.5057v3.exe.  That driver is solid, powerful and feature rich.

• Error: Medium type not supported or invalid medium! when trying to import MP3 files;
• Missing export preferences for MPEG 1 Layer 3 File format in the Export Audio Mixdown window; and,
• Unexpected Error when trying to export MP3 files.

I checked the Cubase.net forums and saw that many other people had the same problem. Still, many had a seemless and error-free upgrade. A few workarounds and possible solutions have been shared in the forums with mixed results.

I submitted a ticket to Cubase support today and Lindsay was amazingly helpful and responsive with this Mac-specific fix that worked right away!

• Close all Steinberg applications
• Go to Mac HD–>users–>you–>library–>preferences–>
• Move all Cubase 4 and Cubase SX folders to the system Desktop
• Reopen Cubase 4
• It may take a while for Cubase to rebuild the preferences folder

While it may have been inconvenient and scary for a few hours, Cubase is worth these exciting moments. Of course, if I had lost data it might be a whole different story.

Thanks a million Lindsay and Steinberg!

That was the theory.

As I understand it, the technician used Migration Assistant, a data transfer tool that comes with the Tiger operating system. The process resulted in a new user path on my drive which broke all of the application and data hooks. My environment was a disaster. With the exception of Address Book, all of my applications crashed and reported errors when I started them. I was unable to save data to certain directories in my user environment because I apparently had insufficient privileges. I tried everything I could to fix the environment, drawing on my Unix experience. Nothing worked. Thankfully I still had the original drive in an external chassis and figured out that I could boot to that as an alternative.

By the time 11pm rolled around, I was at my wit’s end. That’s when I took one last look online and discovered Carbon Copy, a shareware tool by Bombich Software that claims to offer the “absolutely best fidelity in the industry“. I rebooted to my original drive, downloaded and installed Carbon Copy and started a drive-to-drive clone of my data. At 1:00am, about 25% into the transfer process, I decided to go to bed.

About twenty minutes ago I bolted out of bed and ran to my computer. Carbon Copy reported that it had done its job and I rebooted to my new internal drive. Sweet success! My system is just as it was before the upgrade, only with a larger and faster drive. All of my applications load, all of my data is accessible and I have privileges to my user environment.

Thank you Carbon Copy!!! A donation has been made.

The Zoom H4 has many of the same features as its direct competitors — the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 and Edirol R-1 (I can’t bring myself to consider the R-09 to be in the same league) which include internal mics that capture a great sonic spectrum and have nice stereo definition, and an interface that’s easy to understand.

There are significant bonuses with the H4. This device comes with two combination XLR-1/4″ inputs with phantom power (a huge feature), a built in limiter and other digital processing effects, and four-track recording with amp modelling (for all you musicians out there). All that and it fits in the palm of your hand.

The downside to the H4 is that the switches at the side of the unit are stiff, and I found the “joystick” control to feel delicate — I was concerned about breaking it.

The Zoom H4 is a great addition to the market and offers yet another great option for anyone looking to buy a portable recorder. Be sure to consider all features carefully and pick the unit that best suits your needs.

While some may argue that Podcasting is still too young to merit a “business bible”, the ambitious early adopters have been known to help explain and define the marketplace so the timing of their books will always be in question. Of greater concern is the accuracy of the facts and the nature of the vision.

Paul and Alex definitely have a good view of the Podcast marketplace and they open The Business Podcasting Bible with a solid discussion on what defines Podcasting. From page one they challenge the reader to think holistically about any Podcasting strategy, business or otherwise. In fact, I feel that this book has the strongest philosophical discussion on Podcast production and consumption to date — almost to the point that I questioned if the book’s title was accurate.

The Bible is a great introduction to Podcast-based business and marketing strategies, and definitely inspires exploration and innovation. There is discussion on both direct and indirect models of monetization, and the authors set the stage for further analysis of the use of Podcasts to market organizations and thought leadership. I believe that the “Podosphere” is just too oversaturated to seduce the kinds of sponsorship and advertising dollars that the early adopters had envisioned.

The authors encourage the reader to question the various elements of the decision to Podcast. The most important of these questions is ‘why?’ and ‘when?’, and the book guides you through the thought process.

If I could change one thing about the book it would be to turn the sidepanel discussions (some of which carry on for several pages thus forcing the reader to backtrack) into full-page panels.

Paul and Alex are clearly knowledgeable and excited about the power and flexibility of Podcasting. More importantly, they are very honest about its shortcomings. It is this combination that makes the book a great resource for anyone considering using a Podcast as a business or marketing (business OR personal) tool.

I installed FireStats on two of my WordPress sites today. The installation was typically easy and the interface is slick with a collection of important statistical information. Even so, one of my FireStats installations came up with nice tabbed navigation interface, the other did not. I posted a comment on the FireStats Blog to report the problem. Omry was right on top of the post – he replied within fifteen minutes. The issue appears to be with the way the Sociable plugin applies javascript to the WordPress administrative interface, and Omry is tracking the problem as issue 51 in his ticket system.

If Omry can add a graphs tab that provides graphical representations of hits and visits by hour, day of week, day of month and month of year (current, average and running totals for these graphs would also be great) I would have no reason to operate any other statistical plugins. For icing on the cake, I would love it if FireStats had full featured statistical gathering for the PodPress plugin since PodPress has some unresolved bugs and development efforts seem to be stagnating.

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read any of the previous books (in their entirety) – probably because I didn’t think they had anything to offer that I didn’t already know. However, I have read sections of those books while hanging out at Chapters/Indigo.

TotPM offers information that I haven’t seen in any of the books I have skimmed through. Rob and Mur have done a great job summarizing genres and identifying their standouts from these genres in a case-study style. They offer great insight into the challenges of Podcasting and make strong suggestions on surviving the hobby. The authors also offer ideas for various types of organizations (e.g. mainstream media, NGOs, government agencies, educational institutions, etc..) that may be considering Podcasting as a tool. What they do especially well is present ways to promote your Podcast and they provide a very realistic view of revenue opportunities and how to evaluate them.

Discussions in the book that I have concerns about include the chapter “The Art of the Interview”, and some of the technical areas such as editing and production. Specifically, some of my ideas on conducting and editing interviews are very different than the authors’, and there is a noticeable absence of any worthwhile technical details, a fact that the authors acknowledge in the text. I also feel that the comparison of a newspaper being able to cheaply adopt Podcasting versus a radio station having to invest millions to get into printing was weak; a more accurate and level comparison would have the radio station launching an informative, text-based website.

Podcasting books have been serving up great introductions to the craft. This is the first book that takes Podcasting information to the next level and introduces solid suggestions, creative ideas and realistic data.

If it were up to me, the next book to be published for Podcasters would offer more specific details on editing and production techniques without a slant towards music production.