EGC Clambake for October 29, 2006

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for October 29, 2006.

I play a song from Michelle Malone; I talk about Ze Frank, Andrew Baron and the Nerdfight; I talk about Halloween; I play a song from Tom Waits and try to get out gracefully.

You can subscribe to this feed via RSS.

To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5.

Links mentioned in this episode:

PlayPlay

Ze Frank vs. Rocketboom

Andrew Baron posted his end of an odd vidcast argument that Ze Frank started here. Chris Brogan comments on that episode as David Berlind does as well, although Berlind is not addressing the Rocketboom diss but the TV networks diss.

Having watched the show, I think his attack is milder than I was expecting from Drew’s post and given the whole Ze Frank schtick but is nonetheless bullshit. He points to Alexa statistics as supporting his contention that Rocketboom isn’t really serving 300,000 downloads an episode. Uhh, right. I went to the Rocketboom website about once for every 50 episodes I watched. I’m on a Mac, so Alexa wouldn’t count me anyway. Propping up his argument with Alexa is not a winning strategy because those numbers are far from definitive. And besides, what kind of foolio complains about having 30,000 downloads in such a show? Waaaah. There is no crying in baseball and there is no crying in vlogging. Ze (or Frank or however you shorten your name), don’t be such a baby.

I used to subscribe to Ze Frank’s show, but I don’t anymore. Here’s my list of issues with his whole setup.

1. His feed system sucks but hard. I don’t know whether it’s his problem or Revver or what, but its just lousy. I couldn’t use Juice to subscribe, because every single file came down named “video.mov” and if I had more than one day getting downloaded, I had to catch it by hand or every subsequent file would overwrite the previous one. That’s just stupid level stuff. At that point, someone has paid the bandwidth for serving me multiple files, and I have one sitting on my computer to watch. Not smart. If I throw that in a directory with 20 gigabytes of other vlogs on an external drive, I had to rename every single file or they would all overwrite each other. After a while, I got so sick off hand renaming files that that I just unsubscribed. Some days, the enclosure just isn’t there in the feed. It sucks and is the most ridiculous failure of a simple task I have ever seen in podcasting in two years. The people who hand code their XML do a better job. I liked the show, but not so much for it to be worth all this trouble. I doubt I’m the only person with this experience.

2. He has no usable show notes or links of any kind. In fact, if you follow the links to his site you’ll get a bland page with no description. [It took me multiple looks to realize that “vb #2” is a description. It’s just such a bad one you can’t tell it is.] Just like you can’t tell one day from another via the filename of the download, you can’t tell shit about it from looking at the page. Is this the day he went off on Rocketboom or was that the day before? Have to watch the video to find out. Maybe that’s part of the master plan (requiring extra views to even know what the subjects are) but it is a lousy strategery. No google juice, no return links, no trackbacks, etc. The basics of this world are the more you give the more you get, and Ze Frank don’t give anything.

3. His show has a lousy and non-distinctive name, “The Show”. Rocketboom has no other uses in the compound form than the show so if you see it as one word, you know what it is. “The Show” ain’t got that property. On its AmigoFish page (a name created by a similar process as Rocketboom, btw), “The Show by ze frank” has less than 1/20th the ratings of Rocketboom. That’s skewed by the fact that AmigoFish has been mentioned on Rocketboom, but if you subtracted out the number of people that joined in the two weeks after that mention, the margin would still be greater than the 10 to 1 disparity in downloads. Some of that might be that you can’t search on it easily and find it by its title, only searching “Ze Frank” will turn it up. Despite the perceived injustice by Ze, he has less traction by the only statistics I have access to. I think a big chunk of that is his own fault.

So there you go. Even though “The Show with Ze Frank” has a certain belligerent and insane charm, I don’t bother with it anymore because it is more trouble than its worth. Despite Ze’s insinuation, Drew Baron has worked hard to make his show useful, available via many channels and play a part in the vlog and blogosphere ecology. Ze has apparently not put a goddamn second into that end — the “making it useful”, good user experience sissy stuff. I guess when your gig is being an aggressively ironic, post-modern and bat shit crazy … whatever he is, you can’t be bothered trying to be useful.

Update: More conversation by Jeneane Sessum on likeability. I thought she was going another way until the very end because Ze Frank has a lot of positives but likeability isn’t one I’d ascribe – more like “manic creepy charisma.” Perhaps she means the show as a whole is likeable. I think it is offputting by design rather than likeable but however you want to score it. Scoble suggests engagement as a metric which is not unlike what I’ve been saying for the last two years.

To clarify my position, I did indeed like the show (or “The Show”) but not enough to jump the hurdles put in my way to watch it in my desired manner. I can’t set it and forget it via RSS because the feed is so screwy. There is no video website that I am willing to go to every single day. I’m an outlier in that case. I don’t generally want to watch them synchronously and wait for them to download, and I’m never going to remember to go back every day. That’s, like, why I subscrbe to the damn RSS. I hear about how popular YouTube videos are and I see them embedded in blog posts all the time and I never click them because when I’m reading stuff I don’t want to watch videos. I’d rather watch a batch of them when I’m in the mood for it, much like I watch TV.

Update 2: According to the people in the Ze Frank Fanboy Forum I’m an idiot because his feed doesn’t work right with my podcatching clent. That’s home field advantage for you, kids. I’m beginning to get the sinking feeling I have once again gotten involved in a food fight with fanatics. This is the true power of the blogosphere – reducing the time between entering a conversation and regretting getting involved to all-time lows. Here is the knee-slapper of the thread so far:

Nah, just the accountability of established media from an experimental form. Philistine.

That’s right, Ze fans, you drive by a blog you never heard of before today and you know everything about it. What I really want from Ze is to be more “old media”. I think reading more than a single post would point what a truly frigging stupid observation that is.

Update 3: Jon wins the award for my favorite Ze Frank fan so far. He actually is conversing, as opposed to driving by, leaving a bag of burning poop and peeling out. That makes this whole thing much more fun and alleviates a little of the dread I was getting.

If you are coming from Ze’s forum, please do me the favor of reading all the comments so far before leaving one so you can get an accurate assessment of the back and forth to this point. Thanks.

BTW, for the dudes you think I’m an old media guy, you might be wrong. I’ve, like, done this podcast for over two years, done a show for IT Conversations for over two years, etc. I’m just saying.

Update 4: The Ze-slide appears to be winding down. They sure are tetchy on the forum, aren’t they? In the final analysis, probably no one on there said anything harsher than what I usually hear over the XMas dinner table. I like the people that point out that my post “wasn’t really about the content of his show.” Uhhhh, yeah. Ze tacitly accused Drew Baron of lying about stats. I pointed out a lot of ways that Drew makes Rocketboom work for maximal audience that Ze falls down on. So yes, friends, that’s not about the content. From a sheer artistic standpoint, Ze is better – no argument on that point. I found his delivery systems to be such a failure that the effort to get it exceeded its value to me. If he wants to get all numerical and get his up, that might be a fine place to focus some effort. If not, he can just toss around accusations until everyone gets tired of him. Either way the numbers take care of themselves, sports racers.

Update 5: Heather Green and Rob Walch look at the logs and find that Rocketboom is not getting 300,000 downloads a day, only 211,000.

Update 6: Something occurred to me today. In the forum, a number of people laid into me as being anywhere from a lazy turd to immoral for knowing Ze’s RSS enclosure feed is boned but merely unsubscribing rather than pushing back and trying to get it fixed. I’d argue that it’s not the responsibility of those who can take or leave a show to verify its technical correctness, but whatever. But – they are rabid Ze truefans, and although apparently not a single one of them was able to figure this out on their own they all know now. As of today the feed is still screwed up. I’m subscribing via NetNewswire just to see if/when the videos ever come down with a different filename. If it doesn’t ever get fixed, then either they are just as lazy as me or it would always have been useless to let him know. We’ll start the count at Day 2 of Ze Feed Watch.

Update 7: On November 16th, Asi from Revver left a comment that they had changed their architecture in a way that allows you to subscribe without overwriting your files again and again. From original post to that, 21 days. I think it was fixed a few days before that, so under 3 weeks from the start of the count to things being changed. Better than I would have thought.

In the final analysis, even though the feed has been made more subscription friendly I’m not planning on subscribing again. Having a bunch of rabid Ze fans yelling at me for being stupid because I can live without his show definitely sucked out any remaining warm feelings I might have once had. Nice work. I haven’t watched it in many months and I haven’t missed it at all. If you love it, great for you. I don’t, the end. From me, this topic closed. Amen.

EGC Clambake for October 22, 2006

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for October 22, 2006.

I play a song from Michelle Malone; I play a clip from Rocketboom with Steve Garfield; I talk about Lenny Bruce, Madge Weinstein/Richard Bluestein and me; Heather Gold on RU Sirius sticking up for Kansas!! I play a clip from Alison Bechdel on the Bat Segundo show; I play a clip from John Perkins’ from his Authors on Tour podcast; I discuss my bummedness at missing ConvergeSouth; I talk about the PayPerPost furor; I play a song by Jeremy Messersmith; later (sweet po) taters.

You can subscribe to this feed via RSS.

To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5.

Links mentioned in this episode:

PlayPlay

Say It Ain’t So

Now that I’m working out of the house, I don’t see a lot of blogosphere stuff and email until the end of the day. That’s why I didn’t see this bit about Amanda leaving Rocketboom until just now. I watched the video and like Doug Kaye, I really wanted it to be a hoax. An insider who knows much more than me, Chuck Olsen says it isn’t in both that post and the comments.

Amanda and Andrew have been very good to me, giving me some Rocketboom link love for both my podcast and for AmigoFish. I wish both of them the best in their subsequent endeavors. It seems unlikely that the lightning can be put back in the bottle, but where there is life there is hope. My hope is still that it’s a hoax, just a very convincing one with a lot of co-conspirators.

Update: Now, more detail on the situation direct from Amanda. Esperanza muere ultima. I do kind of agree with some of the commentary that I’ve seen that in this case, Amanda is probably in better position without Rocketboom than vice versa. According to her post above, she and Mario were doing the show by themselves lately anyway. Sadly enough, I’m so far behind in my vlog watching that I haven’t seen any of the shows in this whole time period.

In the best case, Amanda goes on to something else and it’s great and Rocketboom continues with a new host and a new chemistry and it’s great. Fingers are crossed. In that post, Amanda sounds like her situation isn’t currently very good. My advice, take as much of Calcanis’ Netscape money as you can possibly get out of him or even use it as the fuse to ignite a bidding war. We don’t have a big wealth of experience in new media, but what we do now is that things come and go quickly and one must strike while the iron is hot. We also know that the iron can cool quickly, so the good offers will have about the shelf life of shellfish.

EGC Clambake for January 29, 2006

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for January 29, 2006.

I say goodbye to GoDaddy and give you the complete rundown on the coupon situation; I talk about the one year anniversary of my God episode; I play a song from the Arts and Sciences; I play a found clip bashing Rocketboom and talk about the hating; I play a song by Cagey House; I talk a little more about Uplifters; why is the TailRank robot so poorly behaved; I play a song by the Decemberists and … scene.

You can subscribe to this feed via RSS.

This episode is sponsored in part by GoDaddy. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media.

Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. For the time being, $25 of your purchase goes to the Mercy Corps.

This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5.

Links mentioned in this episode:

PlayPlay

EGC Clambake for October 14, 2005

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for October 14, 2005.

I talk about being mentioned on Rocketboom; I discuss the “talk radio voice” and why that just turns me off nowadays; I play a prerelease song by Michelle Malone; I talk about feeling emotional and expressing love and learning to put that dude machismo behind you; I talk about meeting Marjane Satrapi; I play a song by Jonathan Coulton; shirts are in; bye.

This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at iPod Observer and Reel Reviews! Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package.

This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0.

Links mentioned in this episode:

PlayPlay

Converge South, Day 2, dinner and evening

Wow, this is taking a long time. I need to wrap this up before I forget all the details.

After the last session, I went back to the hotel. I had intended to take a nap but I ended up in IM conversations and phone calls and then eventually I had missed the nap window. I went down and hung out with Dan and Janet in the hotel lobby consuming the free wine and cheese for a while, and then everyone went to their respective hosted dinners. I went to the one hosted by Amanda and Mario of Rocketboom at the Minj Grill. My new buddy Mark was there, as were a number of cool folks. Jimmy Wales and his wife and daughter were also at this one. The conversation was good, as was the food. Before leaving the hotel, Ed said if he wasn’t hosting a dinner he’d be going just for the food there and that I should get the wings. I never get wings but I did and they were indeed fantastic. The only downside is that in a situation like this where you are talking to lots of folks and sitting across the table from people of whom you are a fan, wings may not be the best logistical choice. Still, it was pulled off, I think without disgusting anyone. The liberal application of wet naps mitigated against the faux pas.

We talked a lot about (obviously) new media, videoblogging and IP TV, podcasting, Wikipedia and the new power structures of information. Don Moore at the table has worked a lot in television so we got a lot of stories about how things work inside the building and I got the sense from him that as someone in the know about the present day of big media, he has a lot of faith and anticipation from where the new media are heading. It was a good mix of people and the knowledge coverage was really good – we all had enough in common to have subjects to talk about but we also all had different areas of expertise such that a lot of knowledge came out. I enjoyed it a lot and would be glad to eat at Minj again.

After this, everyone broke up and went their respective ways. Amanda and Mario and I went back to the hotel and did the interview in the lobby sitting around a table. I don’t remember why I felt so confident but I did it zero note style. Usually I have at least a scrap of paper to keep me on track but this was as free as it wheels. I think having talked to them earlier in the day when they agreed to do the interview and having seen the presentation, I just felt it would all take care of itself once the conversation got rolling. Lo and behold it did. The mobile rig did splendidly in its first trip out of the house except for being too noisy when moving the mike from person to person. We talked for about 15 minutes on the mike, a few minutes afterwards, a few more minutes when Ed stepped out of his dinner he was hosting in the Biltmore dining room to talk to us, and then we broke up to get ready for the evening.

I ditched my stuff, made a phone call home, and headed out to Solaris. Amanda and Mario had left first, but by the time a group of us including the usual suspects as well as Antonella Napolitano got down the street, we caught back up with them as they weren’t quite sure where they were heading. We walked there and then a few members of the party realized they didn’t have the ID to get in (and look really young, so there was no wiggle room.) We trekked back and back again, and then we were inside. Even after all that, the show hadn’t yet started. During the walk, I got to talk a lot with Mario who blew my mind with some of the stuff he wants to do. Since some of that includes making independent film, I told him my idea that formed from my talks with John Rogers about forming collectives or cooperatives around the production and how to make your crew working for free actually participants in the process.

The musician was Alana Davis, a performer lots of people seemed hyped about but with whom I was unfamiliar. I really enjoyed the show, even though I moved to the bar area for a while to converse with people. I liked the music but I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to all these people while I was in the same room with them. I ended up showing several people the CVS camera and talking about the cable hack several more times. Eventually, I ended up having a long and emotional conversation with Mario and Amanda about the fun and opportunities and pressures of what is happening right now with media, new and old. We all sort of mutually agreed that we feel that something special is on the cusp of happening, that there is a window to create a new world with new access to more people, more engagement and less passivity and that a smarter public could emerge from it. Obviously, this includes getting tech out to more people and connectivity out to more people who are presently unconnected, which is a big issue. We also know that if it gets screwed up now, the existing media and power structures will build up antibodies to this and perhaps entrench deeper in a way that immunizes them against changing. That’s the responsibility part. Can a few minutes of dada video daily change the world? I think so, but don’t take my word for it. You can watch it happen.

Unlike the previous night, I took it a little easy on the brews so I was coherent enough for conversation all the way through the evening. In another of the many surreal moments, I found myself in a cluster of folks including Mark, Chris Daniel and Duncan “Atrios” Black in a conversation that ultimately turned to the technology of how GWAR does what they do and the democratizing power of Monty Python. I got my Alana Davis CD signed, got her permission in person to use her music in the podcasts and as the soundtrack to the video of the conference. She really seemed tickled when I told here that at first I got the permissions in order not to get sued, and eventually I realized that anyone that would sue me is someone whose music I don’t give a shit about. It was a good time all around, but eventually I ran out of steam and left. I said my goodbyes and hugged everyone and back to the hotel.

On the way, I got into a conversation about Greensboro nightlife with some random guy and pointed him to various options. Bad luck for him that I was his tour guide, hope he found something fun. I saw a spot right in front of the hotel so I went to move my rental car closer. The band unloading at the pub I was parked in front of had me almost blocked in, but they and the taxi driver behind me guided me out. Now parked right by the front door, all set up for loading up the car and heading out, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the spiritually satisfied but physically exhausted.

To be concluded

EGC Clambake for October 10, 2005

Note to Rocketboom fans – If you can possibly download the bittorrent, please do. There’s a whole lot of you, and all the bandwidth you save helps. When you download a legal torrent, you stick it to the man!

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for October 10, 2005.

This is the special Converge South episode! I talk a little about my very positive experience there; I play a song by Alana Davis; I tell the story of the barbecue at the Hoggard household; I play a song by Bruce Piephoff; I play the interview with Amanda Congdon and Mario Librandi of Rocketboom; I play a song by the Murray Street Band; I welcome a new sponsor and fade out like an exhausted guy might.

This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at iPod Observer and Reel Reviews! Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package.

This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0.

Links mentioned in this episode:

PlayPlay

Converge South, Day 2, morning

I’ve decided to break this up into several chunks because the post was getting so long that I fear people would skip over it and miss good stuff.

First up was the “Policing the Media” session with Duncan Black, ie Atrios. While there was nothing wrong with the session, which was quite good and on a subject I’m usually all over, I had a hard time getting into this one. Chalk it up to being sleepy and still having an unfavorable blood/water/Rolling Rock mix.

Next came the “Videoblogging” presentation with Rocketboom’s own Amanda Congdon and Mario Librandi . This was my favorite of the weekend. The inside stuff on Rocketboom was fascinating, especially how nothing is universally loved and the pieces that prompt strong reaction from some often provoke bafflement from others. As Ed notes, many people seemed to be put off at the notion of the relatively high threshold to get into videoblogging, in equipment costs and software costs and time to do it. Around then I got to throw out my piece about the CVS camera cable hack, which prompted more reaction the rest of the weekend than my nickle and dime podcast. As a convenience link to all y’all that I handed my card and told to come here, the video is here and the documentation on making the cable is here. The point I wish I had emphasized better is that you hack the cable, not the camera. If you do it once, any of these cameras will work with it (unless/until they change the firmware to make it stop working.)

For once, I may have helped rather than hurt a session by speaking up, because by pointing out that one can do this cheap the conversation then became about what you could do rather than if you could do it. Lots of people I talked to cited this as a standout session. Amanda was completely unfamiliar with this format and walked in expecting to do a more standard show-and-tell lecture type presentation but immediately adapted to the unconference thing and did a stellar job at it. My only criticism – make Mario talk more! One day he will no longer be able to avoid the spotlight so he might as well get used to it under friendly circumstances, no? One odd quirk – some people seem disappointed at the realization that the whole Rocketboom thing has a staff of several people and that it isn’t just batted out by Amanda filming herself with a tripod. That shouldn’t dissuade anyone. Do what you can with your resources and push the medium. Kids, do try this at home!

Last link on this subject, I swear: here is the infamous lizard video I mentioned and at least one person derided sight unseen as uninteresting. Is it really uninteresting? I report lizards, you decide!

More on next rock.

EGC Clambake for October 10, 2005

Note to Rocketboom fans – If you can possibly download the bittorrent, please do. There’s a whole lot of you, and all the bandwidth you save helps. When you download a legal torrent, you stick it to the man!

Here is the Bittorrent link and direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for October 10, 2005.

This is the special Converge South episode! I talk a little about my very positive experience there; I play a song by Alana Davis; I tell the story of the barbecue at the Hoggard household; I play a song by Bruce Piephoff; I play the interview with Amanda Congdon and Mario Librandi of Rocketboom; I play a song by the Murray Street Band; I welcome a new sponsor and fade out like an exhausted guy might.

This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at iPod Observer and Reel Reviews! Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package.

This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0.

Links mentioned in this episode:

PlayPlay

Seeing and Hearing

Here’s some stuff lately that has interested me, bothered me or amused me in citizen media.

Today’s episode of Rocketboom mostly reruns this thing some guys in Berlin did where they stuck a projector outside a train and showed movies on the subway walls. Although the project is kind of cool, I think the actual execution was grotesquely irresponsible. A train pulls up, this guy sticks a metal case to the outside of a car and then it takes off. I would like to think that had I seen him do this, I’d have at least called 911, tried to keep the train from leaving and/or knocked the mother fucker down and held him for the cops. I can’t believe the crowds of people who just watched him do it. I’m all for dadaist street art, but now is not the time to be affixing suspicious looking gear to commuter trains. These guys could have caused the transit system to get shut down or possibly taken a bullet to the head, depending on whether they ran into sufficiently twitchy cops. The stupidity and creation of pointless risk made me too angry to enjoy the art of it.

I watched the first episode of Robert X. Cringely’s new video thingie, Nerd TV. The interview was with Andy Hertzfeld and was pretty interesting. Is it just me, or does Andy look like he could easily be Bruce Sterling’s brother? It’s licensed under Creative Commons, so I suppose if you wanted to take all these shows and edit them into your own non-commercial documentary you could. Pick one topic and just take out the interviews on that point, for example, and create a 30 minute show out of the whole season. That could be quite interesting. It should be pointed out that Cringely now lives about 90 miles south of me in Charleston SC and that they really really need an enclosure feed for the video. They’ve got them for podcasts of the audio, but not for the video. Why not? Am I going to have to scrape my own?

I’ll mention three shows from IT Conversations, two I loved and one I hated. The two I loved:

One was Jason Fried of 37signals giving a talk about the lessons learned building Basecamp. I agree with a lot of the philosophy about doing things cheap, avoiding the pressures of VC money, iterating often, etc. It sounds like all the good stuff of agile development without the woowoo bits of extreme programming that make me itchy.

The other was Doc Searls who talked to Sig Solares, the guy who kept his data center in New Orleans going through the hurricane and flood. It was fascinating on a technical level and horrifying on a human one.

The one I hated was the Larry Magid interview with George Gilder. I’ve heard multiple podcasts with Gilder recently and he strikes me as one of those pundits that people pay attention to but I’m not exactly sure why. Even though I overlap with his opinions on many points (citizen media being a big one), I find listening to him highly annoying. Mostly, his depth of criticism seems to consist of making up goofily insulting nicknames for the things he doesn’t agree with, like “fool cells.” Thank you, Deep Thought. His shallow dismissals for spurious reasons some technologies makes me nervous when I hear him high on technologies I am also high on. It makes me think that maybe I’m actually wrong, if I’m on the same side as him on that point. I heard him on the Gillmor Gang a few weeks ago and had a similar reaction to that.

Both Benjamen Walker and Bazooka Joe had interviews with Dr. Ben Marble, the infamous “Mr. Cheney, go fuck yourself” guy, on Theory of Everything and Small World (no permalink for that episode that I can find) respectively. Usually I fill with disdain at people who do everything to milk a buck out of their 15 seconds of fame, but the guy just lost everything as hurricane Katrina flattened his home and recording studio in Gulfport MS so I guess I’ll give the poor bastard a break.

IP TV

I have farted around with Fire ANT a little lately, mostly watching videos from Rocketboom and Eric Rice. As I played with it, I thought to myself “Self, you know what would be cool? If there was a way to do this from within MythTV such that downloaded shows just entered the recorded list along with all the stuff taped from TV.” I did a Google search for such a thing when I first thought about it, but didn’t see anything promising.

Today I did the search again, but went down many pages. Turns out there is such a thing, it just doesn’t have a lot of Google juice. The project is named Torrentocracy, and it does look pretty cool. What this says to me is that I need to get a Hauppage TV card, dumpster dive me an old PC and finally set up a Myth box. I’m happy with my cable company supplied DVR which is, like, less than the cost of the subscription to TiVo and has two digital cable tuners in it. Still, MythTV seems to be so cool as to require playing with it anyway.

PS – Every single time I blog a link to the FireANT project, I look at their URL and think “Anti Snot TV? WTF? Oh yeah, Ant Is Not TV.”