Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
Apologies for the short notice on this one but I only got notice this morning that the interview I am doing with Steve for the Podleaders podcast is taking place this afternoon so you will need to be quick getting your questions in!
Steve Olechowski is the co-founder and COO of FeedBurner - FeedBurner provides an online feed management suite for anyone publishing rss feeds, as well as services for anyone who wants to advertise in their rss feed.
I was interviewed this afternoon by Matt Cooper of Today FM’s The Last Word in a follow-up piece to the Irish Blog Awards.
Matt raised the recent proposal in France to make it legal to crack DRM - this was reported by Reuters yesterday:
France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker’s popular iPod player.
Under a draft law expected to be voted in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format.
It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management — the codes that protect music, films and other content — if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.
“It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up … You have to be able to download content and play it on any device,” Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.
What I should have said in the interview is that Apple may be forced to close the iTunes Store if this law is passed. My understanding is that Apple are required by their agreements with the recording industry to put DRM on the music. Of course if they did have to close their store, I imagine the sales of music for allofmp3.com in France would soar!
I muddled through the interview but if any of you want to hear what I sound like when the interview mike is pointed the other direction (it isn’t pretty!) - I’ll be on sometime between 6pm and 6:30pm I was told.
I will be interviewing Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central this coming weekend for an interview on Podleaders.com. If you have any questions you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave them in the comments.
I will be interviewing John Battelle for PodLeaders.com on Monday.
John is author of The Search - the book on the evolution of today’s search engines, John is one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and the founder and former Chair of Standard Media International (”The Standard”), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Currently John is the founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing.
If you have any questions you’d like me to ask him - feel free to leave them in the comments and I will put them to him.
UPDATE:
This interview has been postponed until Tuesday 28th - so you can still get your questions in if you haven’t already.
Martin Varsavsky is the founder and CEO of FON (as well as being the founder of highly successful companies such as Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com). FON is a community of people who share WiFi. If you sign up with FON you share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and you get free access to other FON points wherever they exist.
FON announced last night that it has just raised €18 million from Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. This puts FON in a very enviable position - they have partnerships with some of the biggest names in the business, they have money and they have a cool mission (WiFi Internet Access Everywhere).
I will be interviewing Martin Varsavsky this afternoon for a podcast on PodLeaders.com - if you have any questions you’d like me to put to him, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
UPDATE:
I have now conducted the interview and I published it over on PodLeaders. Unfortunately, having been promised a 30 minute interview by email, Martin cut off the interview after 4 minutes; so needless to say, I didn’t get to ask nearly as many questions as I would have liked. Apologies to those of you who took the trouble to leave questions.
I will be interviewing Thomas Vander Wal on Friday for a podcast on PodLeaders.com. According to Wikipedia:
Thomas Vander Wal is an information architect known for coining the term “folksonomy”. His work has been with the Web and with information design and structure.
If you have any questions you’d like me to put to Thomas, feel free to leave them in the comments of this post.
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