Robert Cringely has made an impact with his latest piece from the PBS bully-tech pulpit. (catch it here http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051020.html and also the tech.memeorandum coverage here)

I design reliable power systems and data centers for a living.

In general terms, you don't need 3 to 4 times more electricity for cooling a data center than you need to power the electronic loads. The rough rule of thumb is 1 to 1. That means 1 watt of connected data center load will need 1 watt of electricity for connected mechanical loads. A watt of electricity does not automatically become a watt of heat; some of that electricity is converted to light and motion. Cringely overstates the actual (as opposed to the name-plate rated value) power consumption of the drive arrays by at least double. He also gets muddled up when he discusses data center floor space; mixing up total square footage with the square footage of the connected load space. He uses an incorrect approach to calculating "necessary" space to support "equipment" space. He makes some incorrect assumptions about the types of drives used in many of the arrays. The Cringely argument also completely overlooks load diversity in a data center. Even if 6,500 square feet required 330 Watts per square foot, the total equipment foot print over the remainder of the space would have a much lower density on average. We refer to stacked racks of blade servers and drive arrays as "spot" loads. You don't need to provision the entire facility at the load density of its densest loads; what you do have to do is provide the flexibility to power those loads in a range of locations and to provide appropriate cooling for installation conditions. It is true that load densities are starting to increase over the norms of the last few years, however.

It's worth noting that Cringely is treading down a path we've been on before and the evidence regarding actual data center electricity utilization demonstrates different usage patterns than what was predicted.

If you're interested in discussing data center electricity usage and design with me Robert, then call me at my Calgary office at (403) 541-6475 (Updated: 2006/12/10)

Here's a new tool that seems pretty darn effective and I'm sure it's going to raise Ethan's profile considerably, given some of Technorati's problems.

It's Google Blog Search... Lots of info here.

When the world is completely Google-fied will all of these services still be as good?

Golly gosh. According to the Guardian of London, and -- because the Guardian is the "Guardian" -- as reprinted in my local newspaper, the internet is celebrating a 10th birthday. This very week!

"The 10th birthday of the internet as a mass phenomenon is rightly being celebrated this week to mark a decade since the explosive stock market debut of Netscape."

Since when did we start celebrating the internet on the basis of an IPO? Maybe electricity got invented by Enron?

But wait there's more. There's always more. Do a Google search on "Netscape IPO". There you will find dozens of other 'the web got started with the Netscape IPO stories'. There's a bunch of boilerplate stories on how Netscape begat the web. Pack journalism around a story is often triggered by good PR. I wonder who planted this seed?

Netscape was a tremendous enabling technology but the web was not born the day they went public.

Hmmm...

Gnomedex -> Boris is there -> Simple List Extensions -> Marc Canter's at Gnomedex too -> Media RSS -> ourmedia.org -> drupal.org -> modularity -> support for Simple List Extensions and Media RSS within what period of time?

I think Drupal will be the first CMS platform to support all of the major extensions to RSS and also become the best web-based multi-media aggregator. It may also become a pretty good OPML tool as well.

gnomedex

Yesterday the CRTC approved all of the satellite and digital audio network applications it had before it. As a side bar they also announced their new marketing slogan and branding initiative, which will be based on the theme: "Now, more useless than ever."

My intial read of the exceptions list in the decision indicates that this is just another Canadian fine whine. Sure Canadians can have all the satellite radio they like, provided each channel is offered in both official languages on equipment that only plays artists sponsored by the Canada Council while owners of the service drive unicycles in each province simultaneously while rubbing their bellies shouting "we are Canadians, we are not Americans".

In deference to Tod, if the CBC wants to be on the bird (they are partners with Sirius) why do they need all the schlocky, 1971 pro-Canadian, "protect our culture" crap wrapped around their programming. Why not compete straight-up against the likes of NPR, C-Span, BBC World, WRN and PRI -- all of whom currently have Sirius channels. In a global context, the CRTC's decision is one of the most protectionist actions of the last 15 years. What happened to the concept of a marketplace? In its place the CRTC imposes rules on the number of channels that must be "Canadian" (ie: at least 10% of all available channels). Of those, 25% must be in French. Hello, CRTC? If I live in Restigouche and I want Sirius, um, it won't be for the stunning variety of French language programming services available to me. In Quebec and New Brunswick, terrestrial radio has and will provide vastly superior French language programming variety than the paltry number of quota derived channels the CRTC is demanding. Give me a freaking break.

This country already has inadequate satellite TV service, with a steadily decreasing choice of programming, from networks that have learned how to block program across dozens of time zone and channel combinations. Now we have the thought police introducing a bunch of new rules for same-think broadcasting elites to play with on a new medium. Satellite radio here won't be excellent, it will just be Canadian.

Meanwhile, media and Government wonder why podcasting is taking off.

It was a day of planes and cars, as I set my gaze westward to do some business in Calgary and Edmonton. The value-add with this post is that it contains a Bradcast podcast too; so consider these your show notes. Click on the link here to get the show or let your podcatcher do the work.

With Todd's big show 64 coming up on May 13th, I thought it was best to put our plan's for "Cooking with Technology" on hold until next week. I don't want that show to get lost in the podcast ether. Speaking of which, it's getting harder and harder to differentiate podcasts in the expanding universe of audio files that are floating around out here. Now more than ever we need a catalog of tags in a central repository that can be searched. Some podcasters at techpodcasts.com have reported that the MSN searchbot has been downloading files from their sites so let's hope that is a sign that the big search companies are starting to address the problem of trying to find the podcasts you want to hear.

Wednesday, I was at the final breakfast meeting for the 2004-2005 program of the Golden Horseshoe Venture Forum. Things will pick up again in the fall, beginning in September. GHVF is dedicated to creating community between investors, entrepreneurs and service companies in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe with a special emphasis on the bend of that shoe; Greater Hamilton. One of the leading champions of GHVF is Jay Rosenblatt of Simpson Wigle. Jay talked yesterday about being inspired to form a group like GHVF after listening to Bob Young talk to a group of key business innovators at the Mayor's Wired Conference in 2000. I was there too and was similarly inspired by Bob. Well Bob was back yesterday to provide the keynote address and his message was typically "Bob". Seemingly off the cuff and delivered while pacing around using a hand-held microphone, Bob talked about the "ABC's". A is for Alignment, lining up your business plans and making sure you focus on what you do best. B is for "being your best". C, which Bob focused on, is about Customers. (How ironic that later that same day I caught up with Chris Pirillo's outstanding 2 part podcast with Robert McLaws of the Longhorn Blog wherein they mentioned the return to customer focused thinking at Microsoft and elsewhere.)

What Bob Young spoke so passionately about -- and make no mistake Bob is one heck of a passionate business guy -- was the need for business to spend most of its time with customers. At Redhat, according to Bob, customers were very important in reducing the company's reliance on banks and consultants. As Bob figures it, customers will give you money and it's better to get money from customers than from the bank. Somebody later asked Bob how Redhat gets paid for free software and, as we all know now, Bob explained that Redhat is not a software company but is a services company.

Returning to the theme of customers -- those "people we hate" -- Bob talked like the "Fuller Brush salesman" that he says he really is. We may not like dealing with these ornery, obstinate and constantly whining people but they pay us and every moment not spent with customers is potentially wasted time. Internal business meetings are the biggest waste of time. "At lulu.com", says Bob, "we go into every meeting realizing that it is a waste of time. It's not just the cynic in the corner, it's everyone in the meeting room." The goal is to have a targeted agenda and get out of there with ideas in less than 60 minutes. No meetings can be longer than 60 minutes. Bob pointed out that it's easier to have meetings with your co-workers than it is with customers. Extrapolating from Bob's point, many companies have "meetings" cultures because many employees are so far removed from customer interaction. Surely corporate structures will re-visit the stupidity of developing inter-company bureaucracies and get back to the idea of moving as many employees as possible back to customer focused activities.

In talking briefly about lulu.com, Bob stuck to his theme of customer orientation to describe how the lulu.com philosophy is different from old-line content distributors like publishers and music companies. Bob slammed the RIAA -- the music companies -- for suing customers who were, and are, doing things for themselves that the companies don't want to provide. The idea behind lulu.com is to put content distribution in the hands of the creator with things like "Books on Demand". So that's got me thinking... maybe it's time I started working on the ultimate un-business, un-book book. Hmmmm.....

Start-ups at the meeting were all in the nascent business of technology services for the medical world. They were:
Gateway Medical Group
Big Pond Insight Inc.
eHealth Solutions

If the internet stands for anything, the truth should be part of it. I looked at www.wikipedia.org the other day and was somewhat distressed by their article on podcasting. Given that the articles there are subject to continuous editing, some of the more egregious omissions may get corrected -- or not -- it seems that anybody can come along and change things. So I thought I would take a small stab at providing a quickie, encyclopedia-like definition of podcasting since I get asked about it so often.

***

Podcasting is a form of on-demand media utilizing unattended software to download a media file to a local storage location for dispatch to either a computer based player or, more preferably, a mobile playing device. It requires a content provider to link to media in a standardized and repeatable way so that an individual user can use a client program to pull down the media reliably.

While it borrows its current name in part from Apple's Ipod, it was not an invention of Apple, does not require an Ipod and existed as a technique well before the term "podcasting" was coined. Contrary to some popular mythology, podcasting was not invented by a VJ. A variety of tools and techniques over the past several years have been utilized to deliver audio and video payloads to devices that can read and understand them. Companies like Audible.com have deployed technologies similar to the podcasting clients of today, but these were largely commercial efforts that were in aid of delivering subscription based content.

Modern "podcatching" software owes a great debt to the software development efforts of Dave Winer, who has contributed enormously to the effort of syndicating content over the internet. Mr. Winer's inclusion of an "enclosure" tag in RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) provided a means of pointing to a media file as part of a stream of syndicated content. The first regular user of this feature was Christopher Lydon, who with Dave Winer's assistance, began a series of interviews that were distributed from his blog as an RSS 2.0 feed in the summer of 2003. It was Chris Lydon who began "podcasting" regularly fully one year before the major surge of notariety for the technique.

The current popularity of podcasting probably has more to do with the number of portable players in use rather than the efforts of one or two people. Nobody is sure how many podcatchers are currently in regular use. It would appear that the popularity of the topic of podcasting may well outstretch its actual impact as a medium at the present time. Some shows purport to provide up to 80,000 downloads per podcast however there are no verifiable metrics or data to support these claims.

Distribution of large files in quantity over a short period of time (ie: a few hours) will lead to server and network problems without major investments in advanced internet technologies. For the time being it would appear that podcasting is ideally suited to distribution by small groups and independent communicators that utilize the diversity of the internet to distribute their targeted messages. Homogeneous delivery of thousands of podcasts by an existing broadcaster or even a well funded start-up seem largely unsustainable due to a lack of revenue generating models for the medium. Some "podcasters" have relied on micropayments over the past few years, however their number is small.

***

Do you have anything to add? What clients or techniques did you use before podcasting got "invented"? I never thought the hacked up and horrible attempts at scripts that I wrote to automate the downloads of Chris Lydon's mp3 interviews could have lead to pop deification. I'm sure there are hundreds of us who feel that way and yet one man continues to take credit for something for which there was known prior art and available hacks. If we let podcasting rest on its current foundation of deceit, hype and hysteria we really are renovating Studio 54.

(I'm posting this without links initially.)

The IEEE Computer Society has announced a series of RSS feeds offering magazine and technical transaction content. The feeds are in RSS 2.0 (can enclosures be a part of the plan?).

I'm going to track the IT Professional Magazine and Transactions on Mobile Computing in my news aggregator