Talking Portraits Show

Do not attempt to adjust your mp3 player. For the next 45 minutes the control of your mp3 player is in the creative hands of Matt Jones - electronic music artist whom I've come to know over the last couple of months. Music on this Podcast is from his album Sunset Birth and from his podcasts at www.bluestonejones.org.

Hi, this is Tom Parish in the Talking Portraits studio in Austin, Texas.   I'm going to spare you the long intro and just let you get into a bit of Matt's music before we roll into the interview. My idea is to have you learn about Matt the musician and get an inside look at how he creates electronic music.  eknow more about him as a person and his experiences in writing music during the birth of his first child, how that impacted his career, and his life as a creative young man in Montana.  So ... here we go.   Put your headphones on now ...

We're going to have a conversation with Matt Snodgrass, Dave Kawalec and Chris MacDonald about a new initiative called OpenMetrics.org. Matt and Dave are from Porter Novelli and host the "The Dave and Matt Show." Chris is from Libsyn and is the co-founder of the Association of Music Podcasters and the owner of Indiefeed Podcasts.

The domain name, openmetrics.org, says what it is: An organization whose purpose is to define standards in an open manner with collective input from numerous groups, mainly podcasters and advertisers.

Here's the deal - whether you're a podcaster, podcast distributor, advertiser, audience-identity advocast, or PR firm, etc., you have an interest in finding a consistent way to create metrics for this new media,  podcasting.  If we can solve this problem, there will be more trust and more opportunity for advertising dollars. I'm for that.

The problem is - everyone's metrics are different and, well, it's complicated.  Traditional web metrics are more about unique visitors or visits per day and, if you're lucky, some way of measuring downloads. Of course, the next problem is "What constitutes a download?" What about RSS feeds that are constantly hitting your website and skewing the numbers way up?  But that's just one issue. What about metrics of the kinds of people that listen to your show? What's the reach? What countries? How long do visitors really listen?

You get the idea. Even if you're new to podcasting or if you've been around a while, it's a vexing problem. This is a large set of unresolved issues that make it difficult for podcasters to present solid, consistent numbers, and difficult for advertisers to know how to trust the numbers for shows originated by different podcasters.

This has been an issue I've wrestled with for my own shows and my clients' shows, so during a conversation with Chris MacDonald of Libysn I found out about a small group of people interested in making this problem go away.  This group is growing quickly, and you can learn more about it at http://www.openmetrics.org. 

What is openmetrics.org, and how can we work together to solve these problems? Let's speak with these guys now - Matt, Dave and Chris.

Intro and Outro music is from Matt Jones's Sunset Birth album from
http://www.bluestonejones.org/

Recently an Internet security newsletter article caught my attention. It's by David Utter, who is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews. He listed the Top 10 security risks for 2007 that were published by the McAfee.com folks from their Avert Labs data.

I thought I'd ask Deb Radcliff to comment on this because she is an award-winning investigative writer and speaker on information security.  She's spent the last 13 years writing about what can go wrong with software and firmware applications. What is it with software and hardware manufacturers on security? Seems they have created a never-ending cycle here. Ever wonder why devices aren't more secure before they are shipped?

Deb recently joined forces with Mark Kadrich and Rodney Thayer to start a closed-loop security process testing company, the SecurityConsortium.net, in San Jose, Calif.  They will conduct stress tests on new applications and publish their findings.  Rodney heads up testing, where he'll put applications under real-world pressures and report how they act.

Rodney sat on many historic IETF standards working groups, including IPsec, PGP and x.509 digital certificates. He is a member of several security testing and research groups, including Network World's Test Alliance, and the Schmoo Group ( www.schmoo.com).

Deb invited Rodney to this podcast to chime in on how testing of new applications in real network conditions is critical to protecting enterprises proactively, as compared to today's typical reactive measures that rely on knowing or accurately predicting where the vulnerabilities are and what an attacker's going to do.

ok .. so let's get rolling on this list of the Top 10 security threats for 2007