For this episode, I interviewed Chris Saad of Particls, an attention management application of which I am a great fan. They’re coming out of a private beta today, and are also announcing a revenue sharing version of Particls for online publishers. You can download it here.

The official description of Particls here, but essentially it is a desktop application which works out what you are interested in, ranks incoming information in order of importance and then displays it in various different ways proportional to that importance. This approach goes a long way to solving the problems of information overload which anyone with more than a few feeds in their RSS reader will be aware of.

Some of the things Chris and I discussed included the phenomenon of attention metadata, who might want to use Particls and why, monetisation (Particls is pretty unique in Web 2.0 for having a rock-solid plan to make money that will almost certainly work well), the APML Workgroup and Sam Sethi’s concept of iPALS. It’s not too long, and don’t be put off if you haven’t heard of APML or iPALS - they’re quite simple really, and Chris explains them well.

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Music in the episode

I decided to try something new this week, and stick some music on the end of the podcast. I like Jamie Cullum, and couldn’t help thinking that the lyrics to this song could equally well apply to Web 2.0. Below are the song details, and a link to download it (legally - it is specifically licensed for bloggers and podcasters to distribute it by Cullum’s label as a means of promotion).

Download “I Want To Be A Popstar” (mp3)
from “Pointless Nostalgic”
by Jamie Cullum
Candid Productions

• Buy at iTunes Music Store
• Buy at eMusic

Today, the Gizbuzz team had the opportunity to interview Dave Hoff, the co-founder of IMified - a new service that’s taking the internet world by storm. The premise is simple; take popular web applications (Remember The Milk, Basecamp, Salesforce, etc.) and break them down so they can be used through popular instant message networks.

We spoke with Dave about all sorts of things: what IMified is, the challenges faced, the instant messaging interface, APIs, and more. It’s a great service with a lot of potential and we got an interesting look into the early stages of what may well become a very influential startup.

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As we’ve covered extensively, Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote was quite an exciting time today.

Huw and I got together for a short podcast that gives our thoughts on today’s two major announcements: the iPhone and the Apple TV.

The podcast runs 23 minutes and 34 seconds, and is a 16.2mb download.

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We’re really on fire with the Gizbuzz podcast at the moment - we’re even managing regular episodes! This will, however, be the last one before Christmas.

This one breaks away from our trend of doing interviews with people behind web applications, although you can’t get much more Web 2.0 than what the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation are doing with the Democracy Player, and associated services. Chris (editor of YouMakeMedia, another Oratos blog all about how to jump into the world of new media and do a good job) and I interviewed Nicholas Reville, executive director of the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation.

Some of the things we discussed in the interview were:

• The goals of the Democracy Player project
• Whether new and old media can co-exist. What will old media’s role be in 10 years?
• The importance of the long tail
• Running an open source project
• New media’s place in encouraging engagement in politics, and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

You have a couple of options now:

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We have a Gizbuzz Exclusive today. As you can read everywhere, Sam Sethi, the publisher of TechCrunch UK was ‘dismissed’ yesterday, and TCUK has been put on hold. Mike Arrington’s been dealing with the issue over at CrunchNotes. I managed to catch up with Sam to ask him for his side of events, which haven’t really been heard yet. Sam seems far calmer about the whole thing than anyone else!

We discuss what actually happened, what he was hoping TCUK would achieve, the UK startup scene and what his future plans are.

Sam has now managed to get back into his website (listen for details!), which is at vecosys.com.

Just a note of caution - the ‘Mike’ that Sam’s planning on working with in the future is Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK, as opposed to Arrington. I wonder why!

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This isn’t the regular Gizbuzz podcast, but the PodDev web development podcast which is also part of Oratos. It normally lives over here , but I’m putting this episode into the Gizbuzz podcast feed because I think you’ll like it! We have Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30boxes with us for the whole episode, and he has some great insight into the issues we talked about.

The fourth episode features:

• Jotspot has some support problems during the Google transition
• The Wii has a browser, and the web is in new places - what does this mean for webdev?
• Yahoo’s new content properties forgo RSS, can enterprise accept RSS as a standard?
• An interview with Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30boxes.com

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Enjoy!

This is a really good interview, even if we say so ourselves! Peter and I interviewed Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace, both formerly of Writely, and now part of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team since Writely was acquired by Google and integrated with their Spreadsheets product. We’ve previously written lots about Writely and subsequently Docs and Spreadsheets, and its a really interesting product.

In the podcast we talk about:

• who uses rich web applications, and who should be using them,
• what their future is,
• whether AJAX is sufficient as a technology for building web apps, and if there is an alternative,
• online office integration,
• the challenges of building web applications for different browsers, and whether it is getting better.

The interview will appeal to you whether you’re just starting to understand what rich web applications are or whether you’re a hardened user of RWAs. If you like this, you might also be interested in our interview with the Chief Architect of Zoho, a competitor with Google in this field, last August.

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Enjoy!

I’ve finally got round to organising another podcast, and its another great one. Peter and I interviewed Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy. They’ve recently released yourminis.com , which they are calling a ‘Personalised Dashboard’. It’s along the lines of other services such as Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google IG, but with a key difference; it’s written in Flash. This has some key advantages, which we discuss in the podcast.

We also discuss the soon to be released API, business models and much more.

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Enjoy!

PS. for a demo of the product, see the demo to Scoble on LunchMeet. Expect a full review from me in the next couple of days.

This is a first for Gizbuzz: we have a podcast. However, the real news is the content. As regular readers will know one of the big areas that Gizbuzz covers is Web 2.0, and one of the most exciting Web 2.0 companies around at the moment is Zoho, who are currently in the process of building an online productivity suite, rivalling that being built by Google and ultimately Microsoft Office.

Peter and I did an interview with the Chief Architect of Zoho, Raju Vegesna, who was kind enough to talk to us for about 45 minutes on the subject of Rich Web Applications, why we want them and where they will go in the future.

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If you still need some convincing, some of the things we covered were:

• Who would want to use Rich Web Applications, and how they are being used at the moment .
• How Zoho will gain users’ trust (remember, with rich web applications the application provider holds the data, not you. See Scoble)
• Nuts and bolts of how rich web apps will be developed in the future - is Ajax enough or will XUL or Flash be leveraged? Is a totally new standard needed?
• The future of web applications. Will we be using them instead of a desktop suite in five years time? Will they have spread outside the ‘geek world’?
• The upcoming launch of Zoho Drive in the next few weeks, a product which certainly sounds extremely disruptive and very exciting. Listen for an explanation!