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Secondcast, a weekly podcast focused on Seond Life, published their second audio-interview with Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), CEO and founder of Linden Labs (the april-interview can be found here and here).

philip obviously comments on the currently heavy-discussed changes in user-registration (since about a month, signing up with Second Life doesn’t require a creditcard anymore). many “oldschool” inhabitants criticize the new, lax policy for opening doors to fake accounts and what they call “griefers” - meaning users attacking others (verbally or through scripts) or even bringing down whole regions by exploiting bugs in Second Life. Philips valid argument for the new policy is of course “openness” - Linden Labs ultimately plans to position their platform as a next-generation WWW, restricting access by requiring a creditcard therefor had to stop at some point in time (though Linden maybe should have waited until the system is more resistant against all kinds of user-attacks). personally I haven’t had many bad experiences during the past weeks (and since I just finished my article on Second Life for thegap, I was online quite a lot). what I like even more: the new policy led to a massive shift in user-demographics. while a few months ago 3 out of 4 users were living in the US, it’s only 50% now.

of course there is another motivation for Linden Labs in lowering the barriere-of-entry for new users: currently about 314.000 internet-users in the world have started their “Second Lifes”. compared with about 6.5mio users playing World-of-Warcraft, that’s not a lot. agreed, comparing the game WoW with the platform “Second Life” isn’t appropriate, still, both are labeled ‘MMOG’ and perceived as competitors. btw if you’re interested in the usage-numbers of various MMOGs, I highly recommend MMOGChart

the interview - as past ones - gives insight into how Linden Labs is operated and what Philip’s vision of Second Life’s future might look like. looks like Second Life is here to stay…

only launched publicly a few hours ago, the new podshow+ portal is already evoking podcaster’s grief for sleazy practises like hijacking RSS-feeds of content-creators not affiliated with podshow. ‘hijacking’ means that podshow mirrors the original feed on their domain, leading new subscribers to these proxies. this alone seems problematic if podcasters try to aquire advertising based on subscription-numbers. as Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central mentions, podshow even replaces the original feed’s copyright-note (!) with the string ‘na’ (of course this is maybe an accidental bug). since Adam Curry (founder & CEO) addressed similar issues with podshow competitors in the past, I can just hope that they’ll fix this immediately.

update: Dave Winer and Paul Colligan on the same issue.

for those of you hosting a podcast on the iTunes Music Store: Apple just announced a major overhaul of the iTunes podcast-categories. the updated specs can be found here. while the old categories will be supported ‘for the next few months’, I recommend everyone to check their feeds:

Most of the old categories and subcategories are now automatically mapped to corresponding ones within the new system. For example, if your podcast was listed under “Arts & Entertainment > Photography”, it will now appear under “Arts > Visual Arts.” However, 3 categories have been removed and do not have a similar replacement: “International”, “Talk Radio”, and “Public Radio”. Those categories overlapped with others in the old system, making some podcasts difficult to find. If one of these categories is listed as the first subject in your podcast feed, that category information will be ignored and the second category will be used to determine eligibility and placement in that feature page.

if you’re in San Francisco, you’ll probably have a hard time deciding which conference to attend today: if SuperNova wasn’t enough, BloggerCon IV is starting on june 23rd. BloggerCon is an “un”-conference organized by Dave Winer, the sometimes-debatable A-list- & longtime-blogger who came to fame by inventing and evangelizing RSS and podcasting.

there are several options to tune into BloggerCon:

• IRC channel at irc.freenode.net/bloggercon
• live audio-feed at http://smartstr.wm.llnwd.net/smartstr_liveces (windows media)
• live video-feed at http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/bloggercon.mov (quicktime)
• mp3-recordings are available after the sessions
• …and of course numerous (live-)bloggers

ps: in case you wonder, “unconference” is a geek-term describing a meeting where content is driven by all its participants instead of just a single person.
pps: don’t forget Gnomedex, another tech-conference starting june 29th

…to the ongoing criticism on his advertisment-strategy in his latest post on zdnet. while I appreciate the reaction and generally positive tone, I don’t share his believe in the sole power of repetition. at least it’s not working that way, if the repeated ad-block is 6min long. and boring. imho you have to either change the length (repeating a short 30-60sec clip seems ok to me), or alternate the content. [idea from the top of my head: I'ld probably like listening to 5min long ad-"episodes" featuring case-studies of different customers - as long it's authentic and not overly scripted... how about that?]
the key to powerful advertisment is generating positive associations with the advertising entity. if the ad-”experience” is negative, repetion will only generate negative associations.

sidenote: some commenters are really way over the top, far from being constructive.

preface: I’m a dedicated listener to steve’s podcasts, the gillmor gang and the gillmor daily. the guests (or ‘gang-members’) are some of the brightest minds in information-technology and new-media-economy. people like dana gardner,  mike arrington, doc searls etc. are well worth spending 2 hours a week listening. not to forget steve, whose thinkig-ahead is as extreme as his nonchalance (of course, that’s a big part of why I’m tuned in ).

however, since his decision to split each episode into 2,3 or even 4 parts, consumption of these shows (which are part of the podshow-portfolio) got a bit annoying. the underlying reason for the splitting is the necessity to match the 30min-slots on Sirius satellite-radio. on Sirius, every single gillmor show is broadcasted in parts over several days (I’m assuming this, couldn’t find definitive info on that), in which I don’t see much sense at all [these are comprehensive talks, listening to the 2nd part without having heard the 1st part the day before is pretty useless]. since I’m getting steve’s shows via RSS onto my iPod, I shouldn’t have to moan about these issues, right? unfortunately, the distribution-mode of the podcasts was adjusted to the Sirius-requirements, leaving podcatchers around the world with splitted files for each episode. these are delivered one file a day - at least if things go ok, which they tend not to: f.e. part 1 of the last gang was released on june 10th, part 2 still isn’t available.

what’s even worse: each 30min episode starts with a massive 6:30min advertising block by earthlink and godaddy, the same one which is heard on many other podshow-imprints. classic TV- or radio-advertisment can’t be any more boring than listening to the same lengthy spots over and over again. one doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out, that regular listeners will soon start to skip the ads in the first place.
in my opinion steve owes his shows, his great content, to re-think his distribution-system. the current one alienates loyal listeners (just check the comments on the show blogs) and marginalizes the advertising-possibilities promised by podcasting (and podshow in particular). I’ll stay tuned in (as I said, the content is superior, and therefor I thank all the gang-members!), but I really hope some things will change to the better…

a-list blogger (currently rank 26 at technorati) and evangelist robert scoble earlier today confirmed that he is leaving microsoft. scoble is joining podtech.net, a silicon valley-based podcasting- & videoblogging start-up. amazing how this spawned a gazillion blog-posts today! here are scobles thoughts on the issue, interesting read:

post #1 Correcting the record about microsoft
post #2 The joy on her face

update - netcraft reports:

It’s not often that a hiring announcement knocks a web site offline. But the blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is leaving to take a position at a video blogging start-up. The news has triggered a burst of traffic to Scoble’s new employer, PodTech, whose web site is struggling to handle all that link love. The Podtech.net web site was unavailable for several for part of Sunday and offline again this morning.

vitamin.com has a lengthy feature on how-to record skype-calls. skype has become the major tool used by podcasters to do remote interviews, despite there is no built-in way to record both sides of the phone call (what podcasters call a “double-ender”). in his article, Josh Owens (Steel Pixel) explains the use of third-party software (Audio Hijack Pro for mac- and Hot Recorder for windows-users) to accomplish the recording and also gives suggestions on what microphone to use.

the earthlink/podshow “make advertising better”-challenge is finally online. participiants are encouraged to produce audio-clips in the categories ‘jingle’, ’spot’ and ‘endorsement’ until july 4th. every week, one clip in each category wins 250 US$, the overall winning clip is entitled to 2.000 US$. ladies and gentlemen, plug in your microphones!

in may 11th’s edition of the dailysourecode (DSC), adam curry (podshow.com) announced the extension of the currently ongoing advertisement deal between podshow and internet-service-provider earthlink, inviting listeners to self-create the next earthlink ad-spot. on his podcast, adam played an ex-ante promo sporting slogans like…

“are u sick of advertising that sounds like, aeh, advertising?”

“do you ever wonder, who writes those jingles that make your head explode?”

it should be pointed out that this information is not officially approved by earthlink yet, however, all details should emerge at http://adchallenge.podshow.com within the near future.

one more quote from the promo:

“get real cash payment!”