Ahh, the price of notoriety. The next step is when people start doing Barry Bonds interviews with you. Have you ever noticed that they like to start interviews with Bonds with questions like, “Why do you hate the media so much, you lying steriod-abusing asshole?” Only with you they will start asking, “Why are you such a grumpy dickhead?”

You can, however, take some small comfort in the fact that if you were simply mediocre nobody would give a rat’s ass what you said or did.

Go, James! Hahaha!

Sorry, Dave, I’m just pulling your chain because you’re my favorite podcaster to jab in the ribs.

Your brother does have a good point at the end there. People give a rat’s ass about your opinion and deeds. But as you’ve seen with Doc Searls slight misrepresentation of the facts, (hmm, he does that often, doesn’t he?) notoriety is a mixed bag.

At any rate, I hereby lay claim to having invented instant messaging, all in my head, back in the late 70s, when I wished there was a way to chat in real-time with my best online friend from a BBS in Iowa, while I was loggin on with a VT110 dumb terminal attached to a 300 baud modem in Puerto Rico.

And no, I don’t think the IRC folks can claim to have invented IM, because those idiot savants had to put up the whole needless TCP/IP infrastructure to do the right things.

Also, ‘grumpy dickhead’ is just a fucking hilarious slam. I’ll blow 15 bucks on the shirt for sure.

Then I can download podcasts at home, but will still need to load them on my MP3 player for the commute (rather than have them streamed to my vehicle), or to listen to as I walk around the property.

I was having breakfast with a friend of mine on the weekend, he left the table and I stole his new Axim (PocketPC, VGA screen), er, borrowed. I was browsing various documents he grabbed with AvantGo. Something not entirely dissimilar to Podcasting clients. (automatically fetches webpages for later browsing on a Palm Pilot or PocketPC.). Not as slick as grabbing RSS feeds, but it works.

When he got back to the table we discussed AvantGo. I’ve used it previously but never been satisfied with it, but one of the improvements that made me appreciate it more was the Axims VGA resolution screen. No change in AvantGo itself. Then the discussion veered to offline news readers. (specifically from the fido era, grabbing a bunch of topics, disconnecting from the BBS and being able to spend time offline reading & composing your responses before connecting up and submitting them.

He told me how cool he thought it would be if he could download messages from some specific web-forum software, compose his responses and then reply, using his PocketPC.

I laughed, I said it was a great idea, but by the time it was done we’d have 24/7 wireless access to the net anyway. I was mostly kidding.

If we all had fast wireless access to the net all the time then ‘downloading’ content to playback later would make little sense. Indexing it might make sense, but actually acquiring a copy of it would be a waste of time and effort.

But that time isn’t yet. For now those of us with highspeed net connections are the lucky few.

Podcasting might be a short term fad, to be replaced by some other method to make audio/video content available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

That doesn’t make it any less important as a stepping stone on the path which will be traveled to get there.