2005/07/24 News for Nerds Video Pod Casting

Robert X. Cringely is someone the younger generation may not know, but he's been around since the Epoch, has written a really interesting history of early personal computing and currently has a column at pbs.org.

Starting September 6th, Robert X. will be offering NerdTV, a downloadable video blog that "features long-form interviews with notable nerds". Not only that, but it will be under a Creative Commons license, which is a little surprising for a TV show. Part of the reason may be that this sort of thing is still a bit expensive to distribute, especially if it became popular. He may be hoping that freeing it up will help distribute the load, and it may.

It's also interesting that this will use an open source applet for playback. Robert X. obviously has his head screwed on tightly and recognizes the importance of that. This is a show for the geek crowd, so you sure as heck don't want to force them into Windows apps to view the show.

But will it be popular? These will be one hour shows - kind of tough to carve that much time out of our typical work days even if it's only a weekly show. That seems to push it into our so-called leisure time. My wife sure as heck isn't going to watch this with me, so this might turn out to be something I'd view rarely, if at all. And then there's the younger generation factor: from what I read at Slashdot, a lot of the younger folk have either never heard of Robert X. or think he's a bit.. outdated and prone to miss the mark more often than hit it. So while I applaud the concept, I wonder about the execution. Happy to be wrong, of course.

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