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First, Dave Winer coded NY Times River (and BBC River) to give Blackberry and Treo users a better way to get headlines. (I wish I could check them out from my mobile, but it’s a WAP phone, and the sites don’t display. What can I say–I’m a poor journalist.) And now, Dave has create a blogging tool for the Blackberry.

Nuts. I’m stuck with “moblogging” through Flickr with my webcam. And that doesn’t do very well with papercasting. I guess I gotta find a way to shake down some cash from the Internet tree and get me a Crackberry.

A month ago, as I was coming off a conversation about podcasting with a friend, I decided to do a little satire of the technology and created a new RSS-based media distribution technology: padcasting. I had an almost unused .Mac site that was begging to be used for something, and a mind for mischief.

As I continued the prank, I actually put some dev time into it, fiddling with the guts of Blosxom to leverage its static rendering features to automate the page generation for the “plog”. I substituted a set of scanned graphics for the usual text date headers, and *bing*, I had a completely (well, almost)scanned paper website.

What amazed me was that some people took it seriously. I had people writing me, asking questions like “what about accessibility?” and “what about search engines?” Well, duh. Those are the same problems facing podcasting and audio blogging. That was sort of the point in the exersise, no?

But then I found that I liked the format. I started playing with it some more. The great thing was that I was still getting traffic from Google–but only from people who were actually trying to find my site, not people who accidentally stumbled onto it from some stray keyword or some stupid trackback for all-nude Texas Holdem that I hadn’t deleted yet.

And I could do low-tech visual storytelling, still use hyperlinks within the content (which you *can’t* do in podcasting), and plog while totally disconnected and sync later without having to lug around a laptop or re-key.

Then these guys in Switzerland started to riff on the concept, and dedicated their site to me, “The Father of Papercasting”.

Maybe there’s something to this. Maybe it’s just a long-running April Fool’s gag gone awry. Either way, I’m sticking with it. I’m going to shift over to Pyblosxom so I can do some more automation…maybe I’ll even build a GUI.

I’ve been building a wiki of press contacts for the Linux industry, and I need your help to flesh it out, folks. If you have information about who to contact regarding Linux distros, Linux-related software and other projects, please register on the site and give me a hand.

I’m going to be collecting the same information for other technology areas as well; security and app dev are next on my list.

The Sun’s Tricia Bishop interviewed me for this article on RSS (unfortunately, it requires free registration to read it). It’s pretty good for a general news assessment of where syndication is going (of course, I was quoted for about a quarter of its contents, so I may be a little prejudiced).

I’m tinkering with a project to pull down select RSS feeds and, when changes occur, send a summary of them as an instant message over AIM.

I started mulling over how to do this as I was strolling around San Francisco receiving AIM messages on my AT&T Wireless cellphone. There’s a service called JabRSS that provides this, but I’m looking to do something that I can wire to a desktop aggregator, or something I can do a quick config of from my desktop to push stuff to my AIM account .

I could do this in AppleScript, I suppose…but where’s the fun in that? It wouldn’t be cross-platform.

Jabber’s probably at least a good place to start…anybody have other suggestions?