Niklas' blog

Starbucks are moving into Scandinavia quite soon, as a Swedish company has been handed the mission to shape Starbucks’ places for every country in Scandinavia, according to Metro (Swedish free mag given away on subways; cannot provide you an URL to the source but take my word, they’re moving in). As this is happening, I’d be happy if Delocator.net, a site that provides alternatives to Starbucks, gets working for Scandinavia in time. From Boing Boing:

‘The Delocator’ is a site that helps you find independent alternatives to Starbucks in your neighborhood. So why isn’t it called the ‘Starbucks Delocator’? Because the San Francisco Art Institute was too scared that Starbucks would come through with the corporate smack-down. Of course this renaming means the site won’t show up in google when people search for ‘Starbucks’, and what’s the point if people can’t discover it? Carrie McLaren is out to change that: she’s launched a google campaign to get people to link to it by its real name, the Starbucks Delocator. Take that chilling effects. Now, get your link on!

Aunty Spam recently deployed a thorough post on how podcasting works, from the ground up. So learn how to, if you like the idea of automatically downloading fresh audio (e.g. radio broadcasts, music, audio books), read this article. A little bit about the basics of podcasting, from Aunty:

A new kid on the Internet block is the Podcast. It has gotten a lot of attention lately, but the majority of people have no idea what a Podcast, or podcasting, is. Many assume that it must have something to do with iPods (only partly true), and so must have something to do with the Order of the Apple (not true at all).

In reality, Podcasting has evolved to be a fancy name for creating an audio file, usually in MP3 format, and making that available as a content “broadcast” (hence the “cast” in Podcast), to subscribers on the Internet. Once you download the file, you listen to it on an MP3 playing device, such as (but not limited to) an iPod (hence the “Pod” in Podcast).

If you are at all familiar with blogs, and particulary with the concept of an RSS feed for a blog, think about a blog entry which is a recorded speech, rather than written text. And rather than your regular RSS reader retrieving the blog entry, a special RSS MP3 retreiver retrieves the audio “posts” for you.

There, if you understood that, you undertand Podcasts.