The other night at dinner, the kids were telling us what they wanted Santa to bring them…. That way he can make me any toys I want.”So I’m not quite sure how to take this, but I’m pretty sure my son is happy supporting some sort of slavery or indentured servitude.

Yay.Well, today, about 2 weeks after the onset, I noticed my right cheek twitching, which it has done on occasion basically since this all started…. A small step, but HUGE in that it’s a step in the right direction.Maybe this thing won’t last too long after all…

As you probably know, we just launched the BackBeat Media Podcast Network. I wanted to explain exactly what we’re doing and where we’ve come from, and as I thought about it, it made a lot more sense to do as a podcast than anything else, so it here it is (7.4MB and 10 minutes long)! […]

Yep, that’s right, we — that would be Greg Snyder, my business partner at BackBeat Media, and I — have taken the business model that has sustained us and a hefty handful of websites for the last 6 years and applied it to Podcasting…. It’s just that now we do it with Podcasts which, for today, happens to be a big buzzword.And while the buzzword cachet will definitely fade as all buzzwords do, we certainly believe that podcasting (or whatever word you want to use for time-shifted portable media) will never go away.

In a nutshell, you login to Pandora, tell it about some music you like, and then it’ll start streaming songs to you that it thinks you might like, as well. You can rate each one, helping to guide Pandora through its future suggestions (for both you AND others), making it smarter as you go.Yet another chink in the armor of mainstream radio.

Those were the words of Larry Florman (a.k.a. Brother Love) on the shuttle to the airport Sunday morning after the Podcast and Portable Media Expo had come to an end, and he was right. Being someone who goes to trade shows in a lot of established industries, I’m very much used to there being a hierarchy and pecking order, if you will (and have experienced being both near the top and at the bottom of said order!), to the point where I just expect it.

this thing is bigger than all of us. We all need to take a big step back and accept that the pie is going to get sliced up, the direction is going to be decided by everyone involved, and some things may happen that piss some of us off…. Hell, The Mac Observer shows up, too, and we throw our own kick-ass party, but that doesn’t mean we don’t invite the folks from Macworld to it.

That’s a very dispassionate way of saying that he and I started that business together nearly 6 years ago and Greg has been pouring his blood and sweat into it ever since. Now you, lucky blog-reader, have the opportunity to see first-hand what I’ve been seeing for years: Greg’s got some great ideas, expresses himself in an amazingly focused yet thoughtful way, and is well worth your time to read (heck, I’d read his blog over mine!).

We over at BackBeat Media have been doing the “smart web ads thing” since the day we hung our first shingle…. Red Herring is simply looking to get some momentum for themselves going by preaching to a growing choir, and you can’t blame ’em for that.

Now think about this: If you buy your songs from the brick-and-mortar record store, or if you buy them from the iTMS, or if you copy them from your “friends” on your favorite darknet or public peer-to-peer network of choice, Apple’s still going to sell you an iPod to play them…. By getting into bed with the record labels and offering a way for people to download songs legally, Apple has given the labels very little ground to stand on as Apple trudges forward selling every song-pirate their favorite MP3 player.