Category: Interviews

Any questions for David Berlind?

David Berlind is the executive editor at ZDNet. David is also one of the founders of Mashup Camp.

What is Mashup Camp? According to the About page Mashup Camp is:

an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the Internet software mashup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup where new relationships are formed, old relationships are nurtured, ideas are shared, mutiple balls are moved forward, and innovation happens in real-time.

David is involved in the organisation of Europe’s first Mashup Camp which will be held in Ireland on 10th-12th of November (07).

I will be interviewing David for a podcast tomorrow morning (Oct 25th – apologies for the late notification). If you have any questions you’d like me to put to David, feel free to leave thm in the comments.

New podcasts coming up – any questions?

I will be conducting a couple of interesting podcast interviews in the next few days for podleaders.com.

The first is with dotMobi CEO Neil Edwards and the second is with Microsoft’s Silverlight Project Manager, Brad Abrams.

If you have any questions you’d like me to put to them, leave your questions in the comments of this post, or in the comments on the relevant podleaders posts.

Any questions for Ross Mayfield?

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be interviewing Ross Mayfield, co-founder and CEO of Socialtext for a podcast on PodLeaders.com.

Socialtext makes enterprise social software for collaboration – i.e. Wikis, for corporate customers mostly.

If you have any questions you’d like me to put to Ross, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post.

Lie detector software for Skype?

The BBC is reporting that there will very shortly be a plugin for Skype which acts as a lie detector by analysing:

audio streams over a Skype call in real time and illustrates the stress levels of the other person

Most of my PodLeaders podcasts are recorded Skype conversations – this could add a whole new dimension to the interviews!!!

Audacity aiff import problems

Audacity is an open source, cross-platform sound editing application. It is the sound editor I use for producing the PodLeaders and it@cork podcasts.

The process I use for producing the podcasts was:

  1. Record the interview using Skype and Wiretap Pro (with Wiretap Pro set to save as mp3)
  2. Import the mp3 file to Audacity and edit
  3. Export as mp3 and publish

After a recent conversation with Doug Kaye, I decided to try his Levelator application to get the levels on the recordings the same. This meant I had to change Wiretap Pro to output to aiff ( a lossless format) instead of mp3.

I did this and recorded a number of interviews successfully, saving the interviews as aiff. However, yesterday, when I went to edit the first of those interviews, I was disappointed that the Levelator couldn’t work with the files (gave an error and stopped trying to level them).

However, I was horrified when I tried importing the files into Audacity only to find that the imported files had massive echo problems, echo problems (!). No matter what I tried I couldn’t get rid of the echo and it made the audio useless.

Finally, I hit on a solution:

  1. Import the aiff files into iTunes
  2. Export from iTunes as mp3
  3. Import the mp3 file into Audacity – no echo (phew!)

I should have hit on this solution sooner but it had been a long day!

Any questions for Kim Cameron?

Kim Cameron is Microsoft’s Identity Chief and as such is responsible for developing InfoCard – Microsoft’s successor to the much reviled Passport. Kim elucidated the Seven Laws of Identity and is developing InfoCard to conform to those laws. If he manages this, he will have changed fundamentally how Microsoft deals with people.

Kim is also responsible for Microsoft recently releasing 35 pieces of IP and promising to never charge for them.

I will be interviewing Kim this coming Tuesday (Oct 24th) for a PodLeaders podcast – if you have any questions you’d like me to ask Kim, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Any questions for Dan Bricklin?

Dan Bricklin is the inventor of the spreadsheet. Dan, along with Bob Frankston released the world’s first spreadsheet, called VisiCalc in 1979.

Dan has worked on many projects since and recently has started work on wikiCalc – an open source, online spreadsheet application.

I’m interviewing Dan this coming Tuesday afternoon (10th Oct 2006) for a PodLeaders podcast. We will be talking about VisiCalc, his new application WikiCalc and anything else that may arise in the questions!

As always, if you have questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll put them to him.