Jottings.com: "Let’s go back exactly 17 years - to November 30th 1987. You want to register a domain name. To date, only 99 .com domains have ever been registered. Yours will be the 100th. So, what do you get?...."

A demon ate my hard drive. At least that's what seems to have happened. I have XP (with SP2) and the latest Norton Antivirus, but some demonic program still found its way to my hard drive. It even killed the Lavasoft malware remover that I tried to use to get it off. The only thing I could do was wipe the hard drive and go back to my initial factory settings. (This is relatively easy but time-consuming on my IBM Thinkpad X31.) I'm travelling today (in San Franciso, not Cape Town), so I'll have to wait to reinstall all of my software.

I had planned to do a podcast last night from my hotel room in San Francisco, but I instead spent the evening reclaiming my laptop. No podcasting for at least a few more days until I can get everything reinstalled. This is painful.

E-mail today from the good folks at MarkMonitor: "Dear MarkMonitor Client, Tajikistan has deleted all previously registered tj names and is now taking applications for the top level (.tj) extension. Currently only the .tj (tld) level is available. .TJ is unrestricted and is available on a first-come first-served basis. All other .tj extensions are currently unavailable, but are being considered by the registry. It is not possible to re-register any previous .com.tj, .net.tj or .org.tj names at this time. MarkMonitor is securing the .tj version of any previously registered names. For more information, please contact your MarkMonitor Client Services Manager."

"Delete all previously registered tj names"? Yeah, I can't wait to get one of those .TJ names. I'm sure there's a story here. Anyone have it?

From Susan Crawford: "Complete with UN-style document numbering, [ICANN's new Strategic Plan is] clearly the product of a great deal of work by the staff and by consultants to ICANN. The only problem is that it's a plan without limiting principles or a clear recognition of ICANN's limited role in the world. Some specifics...."

Susan recognizes the same flaws that I discussed in my recent audio blog entry, and she identifies several specific places that ICANN could scale back.

Planning to be on a plane for 24 hours over the next few days? I have just the thing: a combination ICANN Blog Audio entry and Internet Pro Radio show. I talk my way through the ICANN agenda and play a few tunes to keep you company. It sure beats anything the airlines will be playing.

File Deleted

Is it time to bring back the election of At-Large Directors? I think so. I've been reading the ICANN Strategic Plan. It's a nice document. These are all fine goals. But when you step back from it and think about the totality of what ICANN is trying to do, you realize that ICANN hasn't made any hard choices about priorities. The new budget allows it to fund everything. So let's get back to the At Large. Remember, one of the reasons we abandoned the concept of global, online elections was because it wasn't "affordable" (see 'Whereas' Clause #14). The new ICANN, however, can afford it. So when can we start?

PR Newswire: "DENIC eG, the registry for .de domains in Germany, today confirmed that it will submit a proposal to take over the administration of the .net Top Level Domain (TLD)...."

If you wondered what happened at the last four ICANN meetings -- held in closed session, with no reports or resolutions posted for months -- someone on the ever-expanding ICANN staff finally found the time to give us an update.

Rick White writes to Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans to endorse Verisign's management of the .NET registry. First, Evans resigned. Second, even if he hadn't, why would he care? The last time I checked, the U.S. Department of Commerce wasn't involved in the rebid.

The sounds of bugs. Plenty of them. But I'm getting better, even if it's not quite so obvious to the handful of listeners out there. Podcasting in 2004 is a lot like blogging in 2000: few tools, lots of technical mistakes by the podcasters, and voices still under development. In 2000, professional publishers could easily smile down at the bloggers, confident that their place as the source of news and commentary was secure. I'm sure audio broadcasters feel the same about podcasting. Howard Stern and Mel Karmazin are pronouncing satellite radio as the future of audio, but I see the future of radio as the user-enabled network. Unless the users can send their own broadcasts over the satellite, Sirius will remain at the margins of mainstream radio. I've never aspired to be a DJ, but I do get excited when I see the future. And the podcasting wave is too exciting not to hop on and see where it takes me.

I'm now doing my podcasts in real-time. This is a big change for the better, but it also means that I have to learn how to fix a whole new category of bugs and mistakes. I consider my set-up a "Reverse-Adam-Curry." At Bloggercon, Adam explained that he was using his Powerbook as the source material for his music, sound clips, microphone and mixer and then using a line-out to an mp3 recorder to make the real-time recording. I'm going the other way. I have my music on one station (a Powerbook, an iPod, or a MP3 player). From the headphone cord of that station I connect to the line-in port on my PC. I also connect a microphone to the PC and use the Wave-Out Mix setting in Windows to combine the two. Sony Sound Forge 7.0 on the PC is where I make the sound recording. I now have a set-up capable of providing excellent sound quality, but I still have to solve two more problems. The first one is to find the optimal encoding that matches high quality sound with small file sizes. That's as much as matter of taste and download tolerance as it is a technical problem. The last podcast was 22,100/16 bit, but checked in at 35 megabytes. Above average sound quality but I'd like to cut the file size by about 10 megabytes. What's the right compromise? I don't know yet. The other problem will only be solved by practice. I don't yet have the timing down for starting and ending songs or fading them in and out. At Bloggercon, Adam described this as the Nintendo-skill part of podcasting -- in other words, I have to get faster with my hands juggling the sound levels and the play and pause buttons. It's just a matter of time. In the meantime, I could edit out all the mistakes or just continue to post the new podcasts warts and all. I'm going with the latter approach. Chirp, Chirp.

I finally figured it out. Still a lot of warts, but getting better. This is how we learn... (File deleted 11/23/04).

From yesterday's Los Angeles County new case filings: "Snapnames.com v. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers / Tortious interference with implementation of a 'waiting list service' / Civil Action No. BC324782, November 18, 2004." I'll post a copy of the complaint later today. Update: Copy attached (1 Meg. PDF).

CNN.com: Clinton to unveil presidential library.

Library link here. My Mom is a docent, so if you're in Little Rock and want to see the library, make sure to ask for the Fausett tour.

ICANN Email Archives: "ATTN: PRESIDENT/CEO. I know that this message will come to you as a surprise since we don't know each other before, but for purpose of introduction, I am Mr. William Ofakosa the Chief auditor of AMALGAMATED BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA (ABSA)...." And just in time to allow ICANN to pick up the funds in person.

From Theglobe.com Press Release: "Theglobe.com intends to exercise its purchase option for Tralliance upon certain conditions being met, including final approval to be the registry of the .travel top-level domain from ICANN. If and when theglobe.com exercises its purchase option, it will issue 1.5 million shares of its common stock in exchange for all the capital stock of Tralliance."

Keep in mind that, to the best of my knowledge, Tralliance has no significant assets beyond the value of its cash on hand, its employees, and its prospective contract with ICANN. In other words, virtually all of the company's value comes from the registry contract. With Theglobe's stock trading at .50 cents today, that places a value on .TRAVEL at about $750,000. Not a bad return on that $45,000 application fee.

Ethan Katsh: "...the appointment of the [ICANN} ombudsman, at this moment, is highly troubling and seems to be an endless process with unexplained and unexplainable delays."

Amen.

As I've written over the past couple of days, I'm licensed up and ready to roll with my Internet Radio podcasting station. I've filed all the paperwork and paid filing and initial royalty payments with the Library of Congress, Soundexchange (the RIAA collection agency), ASCAP and BMI. I promised to talk about the details of that process with Ross over a Skype interview, so I'll save that for a few days. 

The next step is set up a reporting system so I can accurately report how much I owe to the various rights organizations. I think a few Excel files in which I chronicle the list of songs I play and the dates and number of downloads will be sufficient. Adam says we don't have any tools yet for podcasting; he's right, and we certainly don't have any tools for automating licensing reporting and royalty payments.

All this preparation though has made me realize how expensive RSS might be as a delivery device for licensed content. For example, under the webcasting statutory license, I'll pay a royalty fee on every download, whether the person on the other end of the subscription feed listens to it or not. If other RSS readers and podcast subscribers are like me, they subscribe to waaaay more stuff than they can actually consume. I've also noticed that iPodder occasionally downloads enclosures that I already have, but under the statutory royalty scheme, I pay royalties on redundant downloads. I'm still convinced that RSS is the best way to deliver webcasts/podcasts. It just means that a revenue model has to support the "waste" (poor word choice, but reasonably accurate) inherent in the way RSS data is consumed.

In order to avoid finding myself with a RIAA bill that requires me to take out a second mortgage on my house, I'm going to start slowly and just to see how it goes. The first thing I'm doing is putting my RSS feed of RIAA-licensed music behind a blogware restricted category. Any subscriber to my weblog (see the subscribe button in the top margin) will have rights to read the category and download the shows. Anyone else with a blogware reader account, just post an "Add me" comment in the space below or send me an e-mail with your blogware account name, and I'll add you too. (You don't need to provide your real name when creating an account, so you can be anonymous if you choose.) 

After I've played with the medium a little bit and gauged whether revenue from GoogleAds and my Amazon Associate account is sufficient to pay for the likely royalties, I'll open it up to everyone else.

I expect to post the first podcast into the "Internet Pro Radio" category (see right margin) later tonight.

Theglobe.com Announces Purchase Option for Tralliance Corporation: "Theglobe.com (OTCBB:TGLO), an Internet communications company, today disclosed a loan and purchase option agreement with Tralliance Corporation. Tralliance Corporation has entered into exclusive technical and commercial negotiations with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to become the registry for the .travel top-level domain."

ICANN Press Release for Strategic Plan: "The Strategic Plan is a rolling three year plan covering the fiscal years 2004/5 - 2006/7, subject to change as new issues emerge and new priorities are established. Because an initial version of this plan was prepared in 2003, some figures include the 2003/4 fiscal year, as well."

Karl got first.

Police officers and District Attorneys (especially those on television) have a derogatory phrase for suspects and defendants who retain an attorney: "lawyered up."  As in, "we can't talk to him because he lawyered up." That was the phrase that kept popping into my head today as I was completing my licensing applications for podcasting. I've "licensed up." It's neither straightforward nor easy, and I promised Ross that I would try to explain it all once I get to the end of this.