So Carl Franklin is making me want to buy a new head unit for my CRV that will play WMA and MP3s. Why?
http://weblogs.asp.net/CFranklin/archive/2005/03/04/385665.aspx
Abso-freaking-lutely brillant. We need this!
But there's something interesting in Carl's message:
If I'm doing a daily podcast it will be very difficult to teach classes, speak at user groups, and do anything other than a code camp (weekend) once in a while... but, there will come a day when I will teach much less frequently. For that reason, I am recording my classes and I will sell them on DVD. Some of the material I will give away as well.
On a simple level, I understand the reasoning. Its a simple matter of time-economization for Carl. But there's distressing part too: why is Carl choosing to spend his time and efforts on begin a media leader rather than a classroom instructor? Sure, it would simply be he likes doing the media thing more, or maybe its a better economic model for him. But if the later is the case, what does that mean for those folks who do the instructor-lead thing? Are they getting closer to being obsolete as technology changes instructional delivery and Carl sees that happing? He could be setting an example for the rest of us to follow.
Either way, its going to be a fun thing to watch happen.
Michael Rys has returned from the XML Technical Plenary where he participated in a panel about the future of XML. It sounds like it was a rather lively discussion! One point that Michael talks about that really rings a bell for me was three simple words -- “Success breeds responsibility.”
Michael framed that in the context of technologies like Binary XML. I think he rightly points that this are potentially fracture points for XML's most useful aspects -- anonymous ubquity. While I really do like the concept compacting payloads in the ways that a binary encoding can, its equally as important to for those folks working on such a standard to keep in mind that there's a fine balance between a “one size fits many” and “one size fits some” standard. Hopefully they will come with something that's both easy to universally implement and allows for domain-specific application application flexibility. Then its a win-win.
But the concept of success breeds responsibility goes beyond just XML or even technology in general. Theres a personal lesson in it for me, and its one I hope to get to blog about later this week.