There’s a big release of the WordPress Blogging software today - 2.3. A summary of new features can be found on the WordPress Codex.

It seems that it will break some plugins, including Extended Live Archives which is a very cool way of displaying your past posts. It seems odd to me that WordPress doesn’t make it easy for you to pull out a list of posts from individual categories.

It introduces tagging, and I’m waiting to see whether this makes a great difference to life online, or not very much at all. It’s been around for a while with various plugins.

I’l just select an example of one new feature, which should help SEO.
WWW or no-WWW? Based on your Blog Address, WordPress automatically redirects the other to your blog address.

Partial post URLs should find and redirect to the full URL.

Also, if you change the Post Slug, the old URL will redirect to the new one.

I’m a big fan of Google Documents, which has just added presentations. It seems to me that Google docs are ideal not only for sharing projects with others, but for keeping all your work in one place that can easily be found, even when you change computers. The Google Blog is right when it says that more than anyother type of document, presentations are meant to be shared.

This rather breathless Google video explains the rational of keeping your documents online.

A while ago I asked the world if anyone could suggest a good sound editor for the mac. I received quite a few helpful comments, but only recently did I get round to trying out Sound Studio 3. I wish I had tried it before. It’s the sound editor for me.

Like all the best applications, it has a nice clean interface but keeps lots of features tucked away under the menu. There are a load of high quality compressors and expanders, and access to all the ones that are on the Mac too. But I really like it just for the simple editing that is very similar to Sony’s Sound Forge (for Windows).

You can simply drop in markers at the beginning and end of the section you want to cut, click inbetween the markers to block it, and then snip. This is the only way I know of sound editing where you don’t constantly loose the beginning and end of what you want to cut.

It comes with some extra goodies, the most useful of which for me is the stitcher. If your audio is spread out over several files, you can drag them into an window and it just stitches them together end to end.

It supports just about every type of audio you might need, including Wave, AIFF, and MP3 (but you must install lame for MP3s making).

And for podcasters, you can add the id 3 tags directly from Sound Studio - another time saver. Fab !

Slightly more on-topic, but still McCann related (for whom my sympathy grows ever day), I do wish that when newspapers and news agencies like the Guardian refer to a blog - in this case Gerry McCann’s - they could give us the link.

Allow me to stray a little off topic, as I am apt to do : I’m troubled by the the number one suspect in the case of missing Madeleine - her mother Mrs. McCann.

It’s reported that Maddie’s DNA was found in a car that the McCanns hired 25 days after their little girl went missing. It’s implied that it got there because the dastardly duo had dug up the body and were taking it somewhere else to hide again.

Ok, I’m no scientist - but I do think it’s all too easy to be blinded by technology which has the aura of being infallible. Experts have caused many miscarriage of justice, particularly where children are involved. Cold science seems to the antidote to the emotions we all feel in such cases. But often it’s very misleading.

The Plod, Portugese or otherwise, will have you believe that the odds are millions against a chance DNA match. But no doubt while they had Mrs. McCann under the harsh angle poise light of interrogation for 11 hours, telling her that they knew she done it, so she had better fess up, they forgot to mention that the odds of a match from a sibling are rather high. In fact, they are one in four. As the McCanns have two other children, that makes a 50% chance of there being an exact DNA match for Maddie in their hire car.

The British Plod have taken an awfully long time to supply their Portuguese friends with this flimsy evidence, but you can get a paternity test done in five days for $260., or over night if you are prepared to stump up $860. The website of the service helpfully explains that everyone has two sets of chromosomes. You inherit one from your father and one from your mother. So there’s a 50% chance that you will inherit the same set from your dad as your brother or sister receives. There’s a further 50% chance that you will inherit the same set from your mother as they do - ergo a 1 in 4 chance of an exact match.

Don’t they have DNA labs in Portugal? Of course they do. I’m pretty sure the British police were called in to convince the British media that the McCanns are guilty, and to get our lovely tabloids off the backs of the Portuguese police. Even if they don’t get Mrs. McCann to confess, they will have achieved a PR coup, and the cloud of suspicion will aways hang over the parents, thanks to the scientific “proof”. There will be no need to continue the investigation with its embarrassing lack of progress.

I’m not saying their police are anymore useless than ours - after all, ours go round shooting innocent people on the tube, and the head cop doesn’t even know about it for days. But I do think they have been worse than useless in this case, and it would perhaps be better if they just gave up trying to solve it.

I always knew that Birmingham was a nice place, but I was a bit dubious about spending an entire weekend there. I suppose it was just natural laziness. As it happens, I’m really glad that I did attend the first Podcamp UK It was superbly organized, in a very low key way, by John Buckley and others, and the venue was great.

There were to many good things to recount them all (and I’ve written the teachers who were there elsewhere). However, I think that two unconference sessions that worked very well were conducted by Alex Bellinger of Smallbizpod and Chris Vallance of Radio 5’s pods and blogs. They said relatively little and got the rest of the room to contribute as much as possible.

Alex’s session on ways to make money out of podcasting produced a variety of ideas - selling additional materials for an educational podcast, licensing content to third parties to be re-branded and re-used elsewhere, merchandise, and of course sponsorship. It seems to me that right now the UK podcasts with sponsors all cover business one way or another, even if their audiences aren’t necessary that vast.

Podcasters here are selling sponsorship and the basis of how targeted and influential their niche audience is - rather than on numbers of downloads. This is surely valid, but I think it’s going to take a while before a wider group of advertisers is convinced enough to stump up cash.

Chris’s session was really an audio workshop - he very modestly said that he’s learned a lot from podcaster and tries to implement what he’s picked up in Radio 5 broadcasts - a kind of natural, authentic, but maybe a bit rough round the edges feel. But above all, he was stressing a sensitivity to natural sounds.

It’s true, as Chris said, that a professional radio person can feel the weight of the corporation bearing down saying “conform”. But I also think it’s true that there are innovative radio producers and innovative podcasters. It takes all sorts.

When I was a producer the World Service, my presenter Roger White and I used to do a weekly business program with the stodgy name “Global Business”.  The name gives an idea of how the managers who set it up envisaged it turning out - long boring interviews with CEOs of Multinationals, Economists, and  Management Consultants.    We just ignored the hint.

We did all sorts of stuff which I think podcasters do now - including a panel of listeners from all over the world who took part by phone, packages mixed pretty much on location, me fluffing my words in my slots, and Roger taking the piss out of me.  We had a sig tune which at the time was considered very out of fashion. The tone was very informal. I also used all the freelance reporters that other programmes considered to be amateurish, but who I thought were creative, individual, and had real talent.

The powers-that-be didn’t quite know what to do with it - it broke all the rules but they couldn’t deny that it was entertaining. So they just cut and cut its budget, until eventually the department surrendered it to rival part of the BBC - and it became the sister programme of Radio 4’s In Business, which is of course very, very slick - and I would say formulaic. In Business has a much greater reputation than Global Business did - but I honestly believe that our programme was a lot more authentic.

Well I’ve digressed from podcamp, but sometimes you just have to let your thoughts wonder. That’s what a blog is for.

Just time to say that I really enjoyed talking to Neville Hobson, who is a true gentleman of the internet, and a great podcaster. I take my hat off to all the innovative things that he does with Shel on For Immediate Release. I did confirm that Neville’s a smoker, and I’m convinced that the dreaded weed does help cultivate a great broadcasting voice. Mind you, after all the free beers at the bar (thanks to the sponsors), my voice on Sunday morning had a certain gravel that it usually lacks.