Yesterday I was trying to make it easier for people to subscribe to War News Radio‘s podcast, so I turned on Feedburner’s service which allows people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail. Unfortunately, I realized today that Feedburner sends out e-mails daily (with no option to change the frequency of e-mails), and that you can’t control how many posts are sent at a time. We only publish one show every Friday, so there is no need to e-mail people about our last 10 shows every day. This is a really stupid and useless service, and they don’t even have a pro version with more functionality.

So I went looking for competing services, and I found plenty. The problem is that there are too many, and I can’t choose between all of them! Here are a few I am considering:

* FeedBlitz – Everyone agrees that it’s butt ugly and horrible, but for some reason massive numbers of people use it.
* Squeet – Also kind of ugly, and apparently doesn’t let you see the e-mail addresses of your subscribers, which is a win for privacy but a loss for functionality/convenience.
* Yutter – Looks simple and relatively pretty, but their blog seems a bit unprofessional, and they seem like such a small operation that they may very well disappear.
* Zookoda – Apparently very full-featured and customizable, but apparently a pain to set up. Also, I’m not sure whether the people who subscribe using it will show up properly in my Feedburner stats… FeedBlitz and Squeet are FeedBurner partners so they show up fine, and Yutter claims it will be counted in FeedBurner stats… Zoodoka doesn’t say one way or another in their FAQ.

Where the @#$% is a comparison chart when I need one? Comparison charts are really indispensable for making up one’s mind in situations with too many choices.

What should I do, folks? I’m seriously hyperventilating here.

UPDATE: As Asheesh points out, all of the above services are proprietary, and a self-hosted open source solution would be superior. What I really want is a WordPress Email Notification Plugin, but unfortunately the existing one is out of date / abandoned looked out of date/abandoned. There are rumors of an updated version being in development, and I would be willing to donate to such a worthy cause if it is in fact in progress. I’ve e-mailed them, we’ll see if they respond.

UPDATE 2: The people responsible for the plugin wrote back and said:

Nelson,

This is still active and we’ve not had any issues running the latest release on WP 2.0. If you know of any specific issues, please let me know.

Also, yes, donations would be extremely helpful in order to free up our time. (See: http://blog.watershedstudio.com/2006/03/anouncement-wordpress-email-notification-plugin-v30-development/ ) If everyone that used it donated a few dollars we’d be golden, but I believe that we have a grand total of $7 in the v3.0 development jar to date.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know.

Brian

I think I will put a little money in the pot… if this is something you might use, you should too ^_^

I’m hosting the first Philadelphia Copynight with Steve McLaughlin from Penn Free Culture (University of Pennsylvania). If you haven’t heard of Copynight, it’s basically a Meetup for people who are interested in free culture / copyright issues. If you’re in the Philly area, please consider joining us tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8pm, at the White Dog Cafe.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

* Fourth Tuesday of each month, 8 PM
* White Dog Cafe, 3420 Sansom Street (map)
* Hosted by Nelson Pavlosky and Steve McLaughlin, Philadelphia (at) copynight.org
* Join the Philadelphia mailing list

A couple of nights ago I dreamed about a superhero named “Vox Pop” who had the uncanny ability to speak with the voice of the people, i.e. he always said things which the general populace agreed with and they in turn supported all of his activities (regardless of their legality or relation to traditional morality). There was some debate as to whether this meant he was superhumanly good at surveys and statistics, whether he was reading the collective mind somehow, or his thoughts and speeches were superhumanly effective at swaying popular opinion. In other words, was he really good at understanding what the people wanted, or did his desires somehow cause the people to share his desires? Did he represent or did he lead, and was this a matter of his capabilities or his inclinations? Either way, he was a potent force, and a somewhat creepy guy.

In the dream, some other superhero was trying to convince Vox Pop to take a stand on some vital issue, and Vox Pop was being evasive and quiet. Of course, since they were underwear perverts, Vox Pop was being quietly evasive while the other guy was angrily trying to beat him senseless, and destroying lots of scenery. *sigh* Boys will be boys. Or perhaps action-addicted superheroes will be action-addicted superheroes.

I also dreamed that I had the ability to see monsters that may or may not be there. That is, I had hallucinations that sometimes turned out to be real, but this “second sight” was inconsistent in its accuracy. This was problematic because there were in fact invisible monsters running around eating people, but I was getting lots of “false positives” and developing a bit of a Cassandra or “boy who cried wolf” syndrome. Anybody have any plausible explanations for a such an affliction? (For the purpose of, say, writing a short story about it?) This was a bit too silly to be a nightmare, but the monsters were pretty disturbing and I’m glad that they’re not real. Or are they?

War News Radio is looking into getting a CD duplicator for mailing copies of our shows to people (and helping the rest of the college with its CD duplication needs). Do any of you know anything about CD duplication? What should we buy?

Do we want one that does printing as well as duplication? If so, Primera’s Bravo II CD/DVD Duplicator looks like a good choice. It does both printing and duplication for up to 50 CDs/DVDs in one batch, and comes with software for both Mac and Windows (but sadly not Linux).

Do we want one that stands alone and doesn’t need to be hooked up to a computer? If so, this Alera Technologies 1:11 DVD/CD Super Copy Tower 16x DVD/CD Duplicator Copier looks like it might be pretty good… I’m not sure what to look for in a CD duplicator.

I’m going to recommend the Bravo II for now, but if anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.

I was going to try to use Nicecast to stream audio from the conference, but (1) it’s proprietary and I haven’t paid for an uncrippled version, and (2) I haven’t figured out how it works yet. So no dice.

I finally met Jimbo Wales in person and got to talk to him personally. We discussed trying to do a tour of FreeCulture.org’s chapters for him next school year (he’s still interested), and also open access textbooks / wikibooks. Interesting part of the conversation: Jimbo notes that while in some ways a student is not qualified for writing the textbook for their class, obviously since they’re taking it they have something to learn, but in other ways they *are* qualified. I forget exactly what Jimbo said about why they’re qualified, but they’re engaged in the material and teaching others is a great way to learn.

Biella accuses me of being a “flosstitute” and a “flip-flosser”, apparently insults that originated with Mako Hill.

I also talked to Pat Aufderheide (sp?) and Peter Jaczi about their fair use in documentaries documentary, I think we should do screenings of it at our chapters… they said they could give us DVDs. All in all, a relatively productive conference, I think.

I’ll be attending The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age tomorrow at UPenn’s Annenberg School. Among the speakers are Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and David Weinberger. I will try to get an audio stream up online from my laptop if they don’t already have one… check back here for more details tomorrow.

Also, If I haven’t already mentioned, I am working at War News Radio full time this summer (where I’ve gotten permission to take a day off to attend the conference), so I will be around Swarthmore / Philadelphia for a while… I’m going to try to blog about my time at WNR a bit at Inside War News Radio, the unofficial blog I’ve just started. I think this is going to be a good summer ^_^

I propose that rather than calling all women Ms. (Miz) and losing the information about their marital status, we should instead also begin to use different titles for men that indicate their marital status as well.

Master is a term “used as a courtesy title before the given or full name of a boy not considered old enough to be addressed as Mister”, (Three quarks for Master Mark!) so I suggest that we use that to refer to young unmarried males, perhaps abbreviated as Mas. if there’s no established way to abbreviate it. I’m not sure what we should call married men, but the first term that comes to mind is Old Man, which could be abbreviated as Old.

I just picked up the latest twist on micropayments from locke61dv…. My problem with requiring micropayments before showing content to the user is that it places information behind “walled gardens” and leaves it inaccessible to those who cannot pay. Besides, it just creates annoyances and headaches… it’s very frustrating if you can’t look at your favorite web page because you have to feed the meter again. Ultimately you’ll probably just go visit some other web page that doesn’t require the effort.

indieKarma isn’t so much about micropayments as microdonations. The content is there, free to read and enjoy… it just displays an ad banner inviting you to join the indieKarma network, an ad which disappears once you join this microdonations collective. From then on every time you visit a web page that is part of the network, they get 1 cent from you. This is probably less objectionable than Google ads, really, if they can make the ad banner less annoying. Right now it’s very annoying and pops up on every web page on your domain name if you put it in your website template. Once they tone down the annoyance level I’ll be happy to put it on one or two of my new sites which are under development.

In the meantime, go sign up now! The first 5,000 users get $1.00 free to use with the service.

In other news, I thought my computer was breaking this weekend, b/c audio was only coming out of one speaker… but it was a false alarm. It turned out that somehow I had just panned my speakers all of the way to the left in System Preferences. How do preferences change themselves like that? I don’t remember doing that and I can’t imagine why I would do that.

At any rate, in my panic over possibly having to leave my laptop at the Apple store for repairs, I bought an MP3tunes subscription, so that I could back up my music. MP3tunes is a music locker service which allows you to back up your entire digital music collection to a website, with unlimited space, and then allows you to stream remotely, sync your computers with the website, etc. If you know your internet history, the last time Michael Robertson tried to start a music locker service at mp3.com, he got sued into oblivion… here’s to hoping this one doesn’t run into legal trouble. Interestingly DVD Jon is employed by MP3tunes, so that company has more than one troublemaker under its roof.

I am waiting for:

(1) Kiko, an online calendar, to get iCal syncing. Once it does, I am going to start using it… unless of course Google Calendar or some other service gets iCal syncing first, in which case I’ll use that, but Kiko seems to be the closest. I really need syncing… the only reason I use Gmail is that I can use it with my POP mail client, Thunderbird, which means I can access it when I’m offline. (Note: I won’t *necessarily* use iCal, I may switch to Sunbird or something, but let’s face it, Sunbird is not getting the attention it needs, and Chandler is so alpha as to be ludicrous. There is no good open source calendar, at least for Mac OS X.)

(2) Songbird, an open source media player that is supposed to integrate with websites, to get a working Mac OS X build. Once it does, I will switch away from iTunes, b/c Songbird supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and everything else natively.

The best way to find out when these features come out is probably to watch their respective blogs… but I’m not really interested in anything that they have to say on their blogs until they have these vital features. Phooey… I guess I’ll subscribe to their feeds anyway.

There are increasing numbers of quality books available online at no cost. So many, in fact, that it is a mistake to go looking for them, since if you try to read them all before doing your homework, your homework will never get done.

Here are a few online books that I have read in recent weeks instead of being productive:

* Monster Island by David Wellington – This excellent zombie novel features several unusual twists on the genre. The main antagonist is a man who figured out that pre-zombies get their brains damaged when they die, and that’s why zombies are retarded when they’re re-animated. The solution? Hook yourself up to some medical equipment to ensure constant blood flow to the brain throughout the dying process, and re-animate as a smart zombie!

* Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi – The aliens in this book are a bit too omnipotent for me… I think they have a bit of the Superman problem, i.e. “How do you make overpowered heroes interesting?” There are no real bad guys in this story, and a somewhat disappointing lack of conflict. Nevertheless, the premise is fascinating, the storytelling is excellent, and there is enough character development and plot twistiness to make the book worth reading.

* God’s Debris by Scott Adams – Another case of “Philosophy 101” syndrome, which Waking Life also suffers from, but Waking Life is my favorite movie of all time, so that doesn’t immediately prevent me from enjoying God’s Debris. I think the lack of character development annoys me. Waking Life, the Socratic Dialogues, and many other excellent cases of philosophy masquerading as fiction have well developed characters with personalities and souls. The way I see it, if Scott Adams is just going to produce cardboard cutouts, he might as well have written it as non-fiction and dropped the narrative style. That said, I liked the ideas in the book, and I’m interested in reading the sequel.

* Continuity – A comic book about a girl who can’t sleep because horrible things happen when she does. I’m just unclear on why she doesn’t have any good dreams that produce good things (except possibly at the end?).

* Transmetropolitan #8 by Warren Ellis – I’ve read this and several other Transmet comics… Warren Ellis was enlightened enough to let this fan-posted comic remain online. I recommend anything Warren Ellis has ever written.