My reporter pals John Cook and Todd Bishop had me over to KIRO-FM's studios for their weekly broadcast and podcast show GeekWire Radio. We talked about Apple's new phones and strategy, and about what makes The Magazine tick.
I'm planning to have a combined New Disruptors and The Magazine meetup in Portland, Oregon, on Wednesday, September 18th, just before the XOXO festival and conference starts. I'm inviting all the Portland-area contributors to The Magazine and all my previous guests on the show who live there, too.
I'd like to make an event out of it if there's enough interest: interview some folks on stage, record a podcast from it, answer question, and find out more about the folks who listen to the podcast and read The Magazine. If you think you'd come, indicate your interest at this Facebook Event, or comment on below — or drop me a line at show@newdisrupt.org. Getting a very rough idea will let me know if it'll be a mingle-with-a-cash-bar or an event with a schedule.
In the style of the podcast 99% Invisible's narrative.
I was in Taos. It was 2001. We were in an adobe-style house. It had been restored to within an inch of its life. The floors were sand-set stones. The walls, stucco. The roof line had the ends of what seemed to be logs sticking out. I don't know if there were logs supporting the roof. That's the style. That's what it looks like, but the inside could have been fake. There's no way to tell.
The house had uncomfortable seating and not enough. We rented it from an acquaintance. With just five of us, we couldn't all sit down at the same time in any room or even in adjacent rooms. At night, in the room my wife and I shared, a fax machine's tones bled through the wall. The acquaintance hadn't told us she'd rented an owner's apartment to
On the latest episode of The Incomparable podcast, we talk about the five Hugo Award nominated novels from 2012. It's a mixed bag, and nothing that stands out as a novel that we'll be reading 5, 20, or 50 years from now. You can't have a Dune or a 2001 or American Gods every year. But there are great books being written, and these five don't seem like the best five of 2012.
Every contest is based on popularity, but I fear the Hugo process is way too biased towards the partisans of given authors, especially the most popular ones. You have to pay to get a ballot (which also includes free electronic copies of all the stories and novels and other material). Some people read broadly and vote on personal preferences. Others pony up $65 in order to vote for their favorites without having formed opinions of the others.
On August 1st, my podcast The New Disruptors will move from the Mule Radio Network over to my new company Aperiodical, which owns The Magazine. I built a modest Web site at newdisrupt.org that I'd always meant in my (yeah, right) spare time to post more items of interest to those who listen to the podcast. I'll be doing more of that in the future along with hosting the podcast files and show notes (and archives). A new design and all the back episodes will be up there when the switchover happens. (You should be able to keep your podcast feed pointed to Mule and we'll arrange a redirect to the new feed.)
Because everyone wants to have drama around podcasts moving around or ending, I'll just briefly defuse that: Mule Radio in the form of Mike Monteiro, Jim Ray, Caleb Sexton, David McCreath, Angela Kilduff, and Benjamin Nguyen
I have sometimes joked that I never know precisely what I will be doing from one year to the next. As a freelancer, I am dependent on both the goodwill of editors and the persistence of business models outside of my control. This means that my primary sets of income one year could have shifted somewhat the next and be entirely gone the year after that. It means I have to be fleet and agile.
In June 2012, I was a very busy lad indeed, as I often am. I was writing a lot: for TidBITS, Macworld, the Economist, Ars Technica, Boing Boing, and others. I had a constant stream of features and short work that was passing through my hands, and wrote a book later in the summer about Messages for Mac OS X.
In the middle of that, I decided to crowdfund a book on — well, crowdfunding. How