Listened David Winer from guykawasaki.com
I’m Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode’s remarkable guest is David Winer. Dave is a programmer, entrepreneur, writer, and to some, a gadfly. The word ‘gadfly,’ by the way, means “An annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.” That’s Dave, all right.

Listened: David Winer – Guy Kawasaki

Really good chat. Covering the birth of blogs, rss, podcasting and outliners.

Talking about the idea that apple networking, if better, could have made the web unnecessary:

David Winer: We had to give up the GUI. We went from having all this great user interface standards to the web, which had no user interface standards.

When I started using computers, a mac 475 and system 7 point something I really found the standardised UI a huge benefit.

Guy Kawasaki: …. but it seems like Apple and Spotify and Amazon, they’re now trying to gate-keep podcasting.

I’ve been podcasting since 2005 and really worry that the medium is being commercialised. Dave Winer was more pragmatic.

Interesting too to compare Dave’s podcasting routine with Guy Kawasaki’s extensive editing:

David Winer: I open up my iPhone, I turn on the Voice Memo app, talk for a while, I email that to myself, I upload it to a server, I put it on my blog. Goodbye.

The wee bit of audio was grabbed by Castro.

Read Harrods Salmon at £245 a kilo
Wild salmon was on sale last week at the Harrods luxury  store in London for £245 a kilo, making the cost of the average salmon to be over £700, or around £60 for a single portion. Chips would prob…

The conditions that make this so are really depressing. I remember family holidays as a child in the 60s. We would buy a wild salmon for the freezer on the way home. This from netters on Galloway estuaries because the price was so good. I also recall seeing the nets in operation at the mouth of the Spey huge numbers of fish being caught.

Barassie Beech yesterday. Bright & Breezy. Butterflies, common blue, grayling, ringlets, meadow browns & small heath.

Marvellous bright flora, harebells galore. Ringed Plover and chicks, it is amazing that these can hatch given the number of dogs, crows & gulls around.

Liked Cory Doctorow: Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability (Locus Online)
It’s been 150 years since a lack of coordination among new Australian states created the “middle-gauge muddle”: a nation whose railroad tracks are laid at different widths depending on which part of the country you’re in. In 150 years, no one has figured out how to make a rail car that can change its wheelbase midway through its journey and after hundreds of attempts, Australia is giving up on interoperable rolling stock. Instead, they’re tear­ing up thousands of kilometers’ worth of rail and putting down new ones.

Enjoyable read. One of the things I love about blogging is rss which provides all sorts of interoperability. Micro.blog is a marvellous example.

Listened Episode 46: Lessons from Scotland by The Impact Podcast from anchor.fm
The OECD has published its long-awaited report into Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). With Curriculum for Wales sharing many similarities with CfE, Jane and Finola discuss whether Wales can avoid some of the issues raised by the OECD.

Given I am pretty unlikely to read the whole of the OECD report on CfE I found this podcast very interesting. It also encouraged me to read at least the executive summary in the holidays. The hosts discuss CfE from a Welsh perspective of following in the footsteps of CfE and avoiding the pitfalls.

Both the report and the podcast hosts made the point about lack of time being a main barrier to staff involvement in curriculum development.

One of the areas discussed was the difficulty in communication the vision of CfE or Curriculum for Wales. This leads me to think a good way, given teachers are time poor, would be a series of podcasts which can be consumed while commuting or dish washing (if anyone washes dishes by hand any more). I certainly found this podcast easier to digest than I would reading the whole report.

Sidenote, the podcast is on spotify/anchor. I spent a bit of time playing with anchor as it developed but lost touch as it pivoted one time too many.