I was rocking some Keith and the Girl this morning, one of my favorite comedy podcasts…a couple in NYC doing a show from their home.  Great, great stuff...my daily delight.  15 minutes into Episode 896 and I hear a weird noise…then I hear nothing.  Nothing at all.  I glance at my iTouch screen and it’s black.  I try the center button, nothing.  I try the top reset button….nothing.  I try plugging it into my charger even though I know it’s got a full charge….nothing.

I quickly went through my mental checkbook, realized it would be 4 pay periods before I could part with $220 (recent Wii purchases have killed me financially), and nearly splattered my drawers.  2 months without an iTouch?  No way, can’t do it.  I’m too hooked.  My Podcasts, my Pandora, my AOL Radio, my other apps.  Just 13 months into owning my first piece of Apple equipment, the iTouch purchased in January 2008, I realize how much I need the iTouch.  After just a seconds worth of thinking about it, I need my October purchased MacBook. 

Apple HAS me.  I have become so dependent on my daily routines, which center around having the iTouch in my ear nearly all day and the MacBook connected to my fingers all night, that I can't fathom what it would be like not to have my iTouch...not to have my Macbook.  If it came right down to it, if my iTouch crapped out on me this morning, I'd be going to the Apple Store over lunch, buying the newest 8GB iTouch, and then spending the next 3 weeks eBaying things from around the house that "I don't really need" in order to finance the "emergency" iTouch purchase.  Am I disgusting?  Am I sick in the head?

Yea, I have a few other MP3 players laying around that would do the job (sort of) to get my daily podcasts pushed into my brain that I could use while I save up $50 at a time in order to pay cash for a new iTouch...but they're nowhere near as epic as the iTouch. I realy feel that going from an iTouch to anything else would be such a downgrade, such a step backwards, the perfect example of devolution that I just couldn't handle it.

Luckily after holding the button on front and the button on top for about 10 seconds, the lovely, glorious shiny, silver Apple logo appeared on the dark screen and moments later I was back into the Keith and the Girl episode.  Now, though, I am worried that the year old iTouch is on the brink of death.  I better start saving up for the inevitable now...

Apple flat out has me.

Just found this out, thought I'd share.  For some reason, iTunes skipped downloading a podcast episode last night of http://www.keithandthegirl.com and since I have listened to every show of theirs in order, all 871 of them so far, this freaked me out.  872 was missing, but 873 was there.  So I went to iTunes using my iTouch, selected the episode for download, and off it went.  A few minutes later I thought it would be a good time to update any Apps I have on the device.  Two updates were available and when  hit the "Update All", the iTouch crashed back to the desktop.  Tried again, same result, tried again, same result.

It appears that, unlike a PC/Mac that can handle downloads from multiple sources and stores them in some sort of queue, the iTouch / iPhone doesn't have this ability.  If you're downloading App store updates, you can't download a podcast from iTunes at the same time....and visa versa, as I described above.  The apps are so independent of each other and the iTouch / iPhone seem not to notice or care, that nothing running on the device knows what else is running on the device and when you do something super crazy like try to download a podcast and update your apps at the same time, all hell breaks loose.

I guess I shouldn't complain...The podcast download is nearly done, I'll be listening to my show in no time, and then  can update my app store apps.  I just found it odd that such a whicked cool device like my iTouch can only download one thing at a time...

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I've had an idea about creating a Digg-style social news network called www.BlogFloat.com devoted to New Media, bloggers, podcasters, video podcasters, social networks, and the like, for a while now and until recently couldn't muster up the man hours it would take to create one from scratch using the tools I am most familiar with (Visual Studio and ASP.NET). After the extensive programming I did on my Twitter-like site, www.bubeasy.com, I was sure this idea would remain in the idea realm and never materialize (like oh so many of my other concepts).

In search of an alternative route, I recently stumbled onto an article on Digg titled How to Build and Launch a Social News Site in 21 Days.

After reading the article and doing the mental calculations on how I could grab 21 days worth of time from my normally hectic schedule, I set out to research a bit more about the Content Management System featured in the article, Social Web CMS. I came to the conclusion that due to the fact I would be using a shared hosting account at GoDaddy and not having to run my own server (which would involve installing PHP, mySQL, and who knows what else), I should be able to get something up and running over a weekend.

Step one was to download and install the files on a free hosting GoDaddy account I had associated with another domain name. I wanted to test out the SWCMS before I plopped out any cash for the adventure and since I already had a Windows hosting credit, I thought why not? Unfortunately, after hours of heartache and visits to the SWCMS forum, with lots of support from a variety of folks over there, I opted to go ahead and buy the domain name I wanted, www.BlogFloat.com, along with some Linux hosting.

From there, I uploaded the files (I had some trouble using Filezilla on a Mac, as it seemed to only be willing to upload one sub-directory....if there were sub-directories within sub-directories, I had to manually upload them), did some slight tweaking, and then set out to Admin the new site. With great pleasure, everything seemed to work quite well.

I set out to try to tweak the graphics of the site by finding some Pligg-based templates on the web. After trying this one and that one, finding that things like the nav menu became broken or that certain pages wouldn't load at all, I re-uploaded the original files and basically started from scratch. Actually, I went through this procedure several times over the weekend as any time I seemed to tweak anything with a non standard template, things went to hell. Not that there is anything wrong with SWCMS, nor the templates, but I have been in the .NET world for a very long time and my PHP skills are foggy.

Administering the site proved simple, too. There is a module store that allows you to easily add existing modules to the new site, pretty much every setting for the site you can imagine is located in the Language menu, and the only notepad editing I had to do for the entire site was to re-write the FAQ page to suit my site's needs.

So over a weekend, purchasing the domain name and hosting on a Friday, tweaking, testing, and reloading from scratch a few times on Saturday, Sunday rolled around and I was pretty happy with the admin settings and layout (the default template “yget” is just pretty, I like it). I spent the day attempting to upload blog post links, editing a bit more in the Admin section, and that was it.

I showed off my new site to a few friends at work and was met with “wow” and “how long?” responses. The next step for the success of the site is to build the user network. My intention is to hit up every podcaster forum I can find, contact podcasters I know personally and ask for their support, and somehow I need to get the word out to the blogosphere, as such users would really, really find a site like this handy.

Imagine as a blogger that you are able to write a post, then post it at www.BlogFloat.com with a nice description and rise in popularity on the page based on the content of your writing. If people like it, you get hits. If not, then you try again with your next blog post.

I'm exicted about the future of www.BlogFloat.com. If anyone is interested in more details on how I made it work, feel free to contact me. Or, heck, just write a blog post, post it over at BlogFloat.com and I'll see it!

-Corby-

I was sitting at work today when I received an email about the joining of Blogworld's expo and the New Media expo into one event.  I attended the first Podcast Expo (had a great time, met lots of awesome people) and the second which I believe was changed to "New Media Expo" the following year, both in Ontario, CA.  Although I haven't been able to go since, due to family and work, I still follow all of the happenings in the podosphere and in the new media expo world.

The email I received today was titled "BlogWorld Expo & New Media Expo Merge to Create One Huge Event for the Entire New Media industry!" from Rick Calvert, founder of Blogworld and New Media Expo and Tim Bourquin of the Podcast and Portable Media Expo (later named New Media Expo).  The two gave their perspectives on how the joining expos came about one, big mega nerd get-together.  The full contents of the email from Rick's perspective was published over at  Blogworld.com and Tim's perspective at newmediaexpo.com.

Ah, the old days of sipping beers in the Ontario, CA Marriott hotel bar with the likes of Keith and the Girl, Brother Love, Dawn and Drew, the guys from Nobody Likes Onions, Rob from Podcast 411, Nate and Di, Swoopy, Bibb, and countless, countless others....  (my old Flickr photos of the first year's event can be found here)

It's nice to see the two groups getting together and hopefully an official "sticking it to the old media man" expo will come out of this.  As active in the podcasting community as many of us are, either as content creators or fans/listeners/viewers, we new media folks need all the togetherness we can get.  I think that by these two forces joining together, we might be in for some of the best new media expo adventures yet!

-Corby-