This is a great quote: "It's a way for the demand side to supply itself."

The Boston Phoenix (via Susan Crawford): "Podcasting...could evolve into the most serious challenge to commercial radio since television. Radio’s descent into bottom-line-oriented irrelevance, sped by the 1996 repeal of any meaningful controls on corporate ownership, has been well-documented. Other than public radio, which is thriving, the best-known alternative to the commercial AM and FM bands is satellite radio, which got a big boost in visibility in 2004 thanks to former NPR host Bob Edwards’s move to the XM network and Howard Stern’s $500 million deal with Sirius. But satellite requires a new radio receiver and costs around $10 a month. Podcasting, by contrast, is free...."

At the ellipsis, I excised the words "could be a passing fad — or it" because I didn't think "passing fad" was a realistic alternative. In my mind, it was sort of like saying that the Internet or RSS "could be a passing fad." For example, even in my own amateur way, I think I've added something valuable to radio. Today's podcast played all of the songs nominated for Grammy awards in Grammy Category 40 ("Best Country Instrumental Performance: solo, duo, group or collaborative performances, without vocals"). These songs are never played on commercial radio, but they deserve to be. They are terrific. In preparing for today's podcast I realized just how much I've been missing in commercial radio.

So c'mon, Susan, join in. I can't wait to hear the SCrawford podcast! What will you play?

One of the best aspects of ICANN's new deletions policy (n.b., I served on the GNSO task force that drafted it), is the requirement that registrars provide a description of the way in which they handle the deletion of domain names. Rationale: transparency is a simple solution to a lot of problems experienced by registrants.

Received in the mail today was this: "Dear Valued Network Solutions(R) Customer: ICANN recently implemented a policy that requires Network Solutions to describe the details of our deletion policy and processes. In accordance with this new guideline, you may now view our deletion policy."

The policy reveals much about the way this registrar handles deletions. I read the part about "Direct Transfers" with interest.

I've done a slight redesign of my podcasting page at www.internet.pro.  First, I removed all of the Amazon Associate links. They had been there for a month and generated exactly $0.00. I've been fairly disappointed with the Amazon Associates program, both on Internet.pro and this weblog generally, so unless I'm planning to talk about the exact item featured you won't see any more Amazon ads. Second, I expanded the Google Ads from one featured ad to four. The Google Ads have been terrific so far. I'm not only impressed by the revenue flow these can generate, I'm also impressed by the close matches between my content and the advertising content.

I intend to keep the podcasting page fairly simple: three links to the most recent podcasts and a link to the RSS feed. The "back-end" is a category of this weblog, but the simple internet.pro page has more the look and feel of radio. And the graphic of the guys with headphones, courtesy of the National Archives, is still one of my favorites.

As always, suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Press Release from Internet NZ: "InternetNZ (The Internet Society of New Zealand) is delighted that's its immediate past-president, Peter Dengate-Thrush, has been elected to the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)."

Web Hosting News is reporting that GoDaddy has purchased an advertisement on this year's Super Bowl telecast.

Is this news? I think so. Super Bowl ads are notoriously expensive (the rate last year was reported to be $2,300,000 for a 30-second spot), and the fact that a registrar is buying one says something about the way GoDaddy views both itself and the domain name industry.

Jim Wagner, who writes for InternetNews.com, has an interesting new story on .MOBI's Contentious Ride.

Approved Board Resolutions for 20 December 2004: "The Board approved these resolutions by a vote of 8-1, with an abstention by Mouhamet Diop."

This is where my 75 cents is going? What other charitable contributions does ICANN plan to make? Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least a half dozen similarly worthy causes. This really strikes me as wrong.

My take is that ICANN is making a voluntary, chartitable contribution to a quasi-government agency discussing things outside ICANN's core mission. If ICANN has $100,000 to drop on this, then it can fund At Large election of directors or lower the fees charged to registries and registrars (and hence domain name registrants). This is a bad development and even worse as precedent.

Having demonstrated its previous efficiency with the consecutive letters "I" and "N" in .INFO, Afilias has been selected to provide the registry services for .IN....Afilias Press Release.

I'm a realist about Digital Rights Management. I'm neither a knee-jerk DRM hater nor a DRM zealot. I've worked with enough content companies to understand DRM's importance. What I don't like, however, is a bad implementation of DRM. Here's what I mean. On Friday, I recorded what I thought was my finest podcast ever (yes, a pretty low bar, but still....). Friday's podcast was a review of all of the Grammy-nominated songs in one of the country categories. I even got the file size down to svelte 45 megabytes. I put it on my iRiver 180 to see how it sounded, and it was terrific. So far, so good. I then decided to see if I could slim the file size down even further. That's when I made my mistake.

I didn't think I needed to back up the original recording because I had a copy on my iRiver. Makes sense, right? So I resampled the original and saved it in its new 34 megabyte size. The sound quality was mediocre, with a fair number of crackling artifacts from the compression. No problem. I still had the original on the iRiver. Big Mistake. That's when I learned that I can move files from computer > iRiver but not back from iRiver > computer. This makes no sense. But I suppose it does put a stop to all of those kids trading iRivers for a night and copying each other's music. Was that ever a problem? And isn't breaking the device for the honest user a bigger problem? Grrrrr.

I won't be so careless on Monday.

E-Commerce Times: ICANN Stands To Reap Windfall from New Domain Fee.  "In the short term, the tax could add US$4 million annually to ICANN's coffers, an amount that could skyrocket to more than $30 million if it is extended to additional domains...."

'Should 75 cents appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all....'

Declan McCullagh: "ICANN Proposes New Net Tax. The international organisation that oversees domain names has levied a 75-cent-per-domain charge. Why are they doing it, and can they get away with it?...."

Another Internet Pro Radio show over at the ol' podcasting station. Nothing ICANN-related, mostly music.

From CNET: "'Mr. Ballmer, now we still have to type in 'weather.com.cn' to check the weather. Most Chinese people can't do that. They just want to type in 'tian qi' (Chinese for weather),' he said. Short of a more concrete answer, Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft needs to work better with the various domain name authorities to resolve this problem."