Matt May is a Web accessibility specialist, and has written on the interaction of people and technology since 1995. He keeps his own weblog at bestkungfu.com, and produces a podcast called Staccato, which features Creative Commons-licensed music.
Alex Williamsblogs, consults and produces unconference style events, where people immerse in DIY media. These are fun occasions, designed for people who want to get together with authors, artists, technologists and leading thinkers to converse, eat, listen to music, write, shoot photos and post podcasts and videoblogs. Alex also works with companies to establish DIY approaches, where writing, photography, voice and video come together to create new conversations and communities. Alex is currently fascinated with digital photography. His girlfriend calls him a Flickrholic. Send Alex a nice message: alexhwilliams at gmail.com.
Nicole Simon loves blogging and podcasting, dashed with an European view. As consultant she helps to facilitate such tools for business purposes or personal publishing empires. She can be found at cruel to be kind and on her private blog Useful Sounds.
Roland Tanglao is a well known podcasting enthusiast and a passionate advocate of blogs, RSS, and social software as a means of online expression for people, organizations and businesses. He is a prominent participant in the blogosphere and online communities and one of the founders of Bryght and as Bryght's Chief Blogging Officer reads hundreds of blogs daily. He graduated from the University of Waterloo, worked at Nortel Networks where he ran its first internal corporate blog, has has been blogging since 1999, and was the first business blogging consultant in Canada.
Today, Apple announced a new 1GB iPod nano, priced at $149. The 512MB and 1GB iPod Shuffles drop to $69 and $99. Engraving is free on all of them at the Apple Store.
Showtime also joins the iTunes video lineup today, with first-season episodes of "Weeds", "Sleeper Cell" and "Fat Actress" available at $1.99 a pop. But be careful: having "Weeds" on your iPod may qualify as possession of drug paraphernalia in some states.
Remember my predictions are worth what you pay for them :-)
Prediction number 2: Apple will not introduce an iPod with built in recording (and leave it to 3rd party manufacturers which is OK but it would great for podcasters if they had an iPod for podcasters) nor will they introduce anything to record video (on a phone or otherwise). This is one prediction I hope will not come true because I think there is a market for a iPod for podcasters and Apple has the ability to make it a truly easy to use, seamless experience from microphone back to the iPod.
While everyone was busy checking to see that their podcast is in the iTunes directory (mine's not. All that bribery for nothing. hmph.), Apple had more news that speaks to the pod in podcasting.
All new large-capacity iPods are now iPod Photos. A 20GB iPod Photo is now available for $299, with the 60GB down to $399. (If you follow Apple's RSS instructions properly, you may even get your logo to come up on those cute little displays.) The 1GB iPod Shuffle has also dropped to $129, which leads one to wonder if a price drop on the iPod mini is in the near future.
In addition, college students who buy an iMac, iBook or PowerBook will get an iPod mini for free in the bundle. I am so ignoring this, having bought a new PowerBook yesterday when I could have bought one with my wife's college ID today...
Alex Williams
Matt May
Nicole Simon
Roland Tanglao
