TECHPopuli

TWIM's after-podcast

A couple episodes ago, the "This Week in Media" podcast began an interesting experiment.

In this experiment they do their "normal" one-hour podcast, then they end the show, but they keep talking. The idea is that this after-show is more casual, personal talk.

The thing I find most interesting about this experiment is that "casual" and "personal" is a return to what these roundtable podcasts started out to be.

The originals in this genre, podcasts like "This Week in Tech", began as a bunch of friends just talking in a conference call, which was recorded and posted on the web. But now they've become formal "shows" that have structure, and pacing, and even ads. And this informal after-segment is a return to the good-old-days of a year and a half ago.

TWIM started this after-show idea almost by accident, but the audience support was overwhelmingly positive, so they've continued. Make sure you listen all the way to the end.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Interesting article from divspace.com:

What exactly is SEO anyways? I guess for most people it would be fiddling around with the meta tags and then submitting your website to as many search engines and directories as possible. And in a way, they would be right, because that's how things used to work. But now we have all these fancy algorithms and rules that force us to reconsider how we optimize a website.

Where Do I Start?

All this time, and I never knew.

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job:

It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact, if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to support yourself. There are far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured servitude.

Read it all...

[via Paul Colligan]

MacHeist

I got an invite to participate in the MacHEIST online "game". I don't know very much about it, except the guys over at the MacOSG podcast were raving about it.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

New Quicktime Soon?

You heard it here first. Apple will be releasing Quicktime 8 real soon now.

How do I know this? Cause I just broke down and purchased the Pro version of Quicktime 7, and whenever I do this, Apple very soon after releases a new major version which has no upgrade price and requires buying it all over.

Here comes the Sun... err, Mercury

On Wednesday the planet Mercury will pass between Earth and the Sun. With the proper device we'll be able to see this. Just don't look at the Sun with your naked eyes.

This page has a cool animation of what the passage, also known as a "transit", will look like. And they have instructions on how to look at it live.

The method I think I'll try is to check in on the Soho website, which had "realtime" images of the Sun filtered in all sorts of ways.