I love the English language suggestion that Google provides when you search "GNSO"....

"Did you mean....?"  Yeah, that's what I meant.

Dave Winer has has a few notes about who "invented" podcasting. He traces his efforts at Userland to the January, 2002 release of Radio. All I know is that, in ICANN circles, we've been distributing MP3 sound recordings of DNSO meetings since May, 2000. We didn't automate the download from the 'net to the iPod (there weren't even iPods then), but "load and go" was what we were trying to accomplish. It worked too. We didn't invent anything to do it either: there was plenty of 'prior art' for downloadable "broadcasts" even in May 2000. What the rush of podcasting the last few weeks has shown though is that iPods and other portable audio storage media have reached sufficient penetration in the user market for the phenomenon to explode. That's the new thing. The incredible thing that Adam Curry and Dave Winer have done though is make the process easier. They've also pushed enough content to their existing audience to prime the podcasting pump. They got this thing to explode...and that counts for a lot.

If you want to subscribe to my audio feeds, you should add the following RSS feed...

http://blog.lextext.com/blog/audio/index.xml

to your aggregator or iPodder or whatever you're using to grab syndicated audio. I ran the feed through Dave Winer's podcast debugger and it checks out. Thanks Blogware!

A first for this site: a podcast...   more »

Pre-Registration:  "Registration is now open for the 1-5 December 2004 meeting in Capetown, South Africa."

I'd like to modify my blogware template, but the stylesheets are pages upon pages. I wish there were a guide to the different elements of the page so I'd know exactly what to change. Any help out there from experienced blogware customizers?

From GBlog.Info: "Um, okay. I figured maybe .post might be for blogs, but it’s for post offices? You know, those places that deliver things offline."

From News.com: "Friendster, known for breaking new ground in online social networking and promoting self-expression among peers, fired one of its employees Monday for her personal Web log, or online diary. Joyce Park, a Web developer living in Sunnyvale, Calif., said her managers told her Monday that she stepped over the line with her blog, Troutgirl."

From the Troutgirl archives: "So I was terminated from Friendster today. The reason given was blogging. The levels of irony on this are pretty deep...."

Archived Article from the Washington Post: "Stating opinions can be tricky, especially when those views relate to workplace issues, said Bret Fausett, a Los Angeles-based lawyer. Fausett keeps a Web log that chronicles the goings-on at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit organization in charge of managing the system of Internet addresses. It's one thing for people to use their personal Web sites to write reviews of, say, the hit TV show 'The Sopranos,' he said. 'As long as you don't work for HBO, that's great.' But 'it's another thing to say, 'Our server crashed today, and the idiot IT person at our company couldn't get the thing running.'''

Blogging your work is tricky. If we were all self-employed mavericks or tenured faculty (like many of the popular bloggers), blogging would be much more simple. In the real world, however, it's hard to blog your work. I do it very rarely...and carefully. Still, it sort of amazes me that an Internet-centered company like Friendster wouldn't have addressed the blogging phenomenon with a policy.

ICANN: ICANN Moves Forward in First Phase Commercial & Technical Negotiations with Two sTLD Applicants: "As the process for selecting new sponsored top-level domain (sTLDs) from a pool of ten applications moves forward, ICANN has entered into commercial and technical negotiations with two of the candidate registries, .post and .travel. No limit was set on the number of sTLDs to be designated and the status of the additional eight applicants is still pending."

Applications here: .POST / .TRAVEL.

Dotster Inc.:  "Dotster Inc. announced today a new way to register valuable expiring domain names....NameWinner customers will now be able to bid on domain names that were registered at Dotster and its partner registrars but have not been renewed by their owners. Beginning on the domain expiration date, a list of these names will be made available daily on the NameWinner.com site and bidding will be open until the 40th day after the domain expiration date. If the current owner chooses not to renew their domain, the name will be made exclusively available to NameWinner customers. Unlike the previous methods of auctioning domains, the winning bidder will be guaranteed the domain if the previous owner does not renew."

Houlin Zhao, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), has posted a draft document titled "ITU and Internet Governance." Like most documents from the ITU's Standardization Sector, the draft was posted, without irony, only in Microsoft Word.

A Must Read in Rolling Stone: "The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about."

NRO Press Release: "Today, the Number Resource Organization (NRO) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) signed a formal agreement that will allow those with the greatest interest in the strength and viability of the Internet to play a significant policy making role in the global distribution of Internet numbers. The agreement - a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) - specifically concerns the Address Supporting Organization (ASO). It stipulates how the NRO will fulfil the role, responsibilities, and functions of the ASO as outlined in the ICANN Bylaws. The signing ceremony took place at the biannual Public Policy Meeting of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)."

Letter from Madame Cj Duffy, Chair of the World Tourism Foundation, to Paul Twomey: "Dr. Paul Twomey - You, ICANN and more importantly, the Travel Industry are about to be .taken for a ride. by a small group of NY investors."

More on the World Tourism Foundation here.

Nice note over here on Nom de domaine: No sex.eu please, we're British. Why is that always the most popular domain name? Even in .pro, one the first names registered was sex.pro.

This is cool: ICANN Brochure. Now available (see right margin) in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Polish, Portugese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese. Awesome!

ICANN | Meetings: July 11-15, 2005 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg and April 4-8, 2005 in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

This thread on Karl Auerbach's CaveBear Blog is important reading. I'm not competent to talk about the technical ramifications of the discussion, but Karl is. And so are the folks at ICANN and IANA. Whatever the merits, it strikes me as the sort of thing that someone ought to be talking about publicly.

Here's a snippet: "In a few days Verisign will remove approximately 15% of the IPv4 address information that the domain name system (DNS) provides when DNS resolvers try to find the set of root servers and the .com and .net top level domains. The apparent motivation is to promote IPv6, which is used by approximately 0% of the community of internet users, at the expense of IPv4, which is used by approximately 100% of the community of internet users."