New screencasts and podcasts from Jon Udell

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2006 was to produce more regular screencasts and podcasts. On the screencast front, I’ve launched a monthly series called The Screening Room. The first three installments are interviews about, and demonstrations of, IBM’s UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia’s) Flex 2.0, and Microsoft’s Atlas. These screencasts, which run from 20 to 25 minutes, are edited down from as much as two hours of demonstration and discussion.

The tagline is simply “important software” — a label that could attach to a range of tools, applications, and services. Note that although some of these technologies will also be reviewed in InfoWorld, my screencasts are not reviews. They’re examples of a new hybrid form — the demonstration/interview.

Back in my Byte days, it was my privilege to receive a steady stream of visitors bearing the fruits of the tech industry. I had a front-row seat at hundreds of fascinating demos and discussions. I always wondered what it would be like to capture and share those sessions. Now I know.

If you’re a viewer, think of me as a proxy. The goal is to use my knowledge and experience to steer the demonstrations in the directions you would like them to go, and to ask the kinds of questions you would be inclined to ask.

If you’re a presenter, think of me as a friendly adversary. My goal is to blow past your slide deck, drill down into use cases, and challenge you to show how your technology can help me — and the viewers for whom I’m acting as a proxy — solve real problems.

As software grows ever more complex, explaining how well it works becomes a secondary challenge. First we need to understand what it does, and why, and how that might matter to us. The Screening Room aims to supply that missing context. If you’re interested in UIMA, Flex, Atlas, or another of the technologies I’ll feature, I want to provide the best 20-minute introduction you’ll find on the Web.

Software doesn’t always lend itself to screencasting, of course, and despite my own bias, there’s more to information technology than software. So another of my 2006 resolutions was to capture, edit, and publish more of the conversations that it’s my privilege to have with many of the interesting minds in our industry. I’ve done occasional podcasts throughout the past few years, but now they’ll be a more regular feature of my blog — ideally every Friday. My RSS feed supports enclosures, so if you’re subscribed, these Friday podcasts will show up in your podcatcher.

In the first of this new series I interview Cigital CTO Gary McGraw. Although Addison-Wesley hoped we would focus on his new book, we wound up having a conversation about a broad range of software security issues.

In the second installment I interview Steve Burbeck, a former IBMer, Smalltalker, and bioinformatician. Our conversation explores his ideas about how principles of multicellular biology can help us manage the emergent complexity of distributed information systems.

I’m still a writer. You can still find me here weekly and on my blog daily. But I want to become an audio and video storyteller, too. If you get a chance, tune in and let me know how I’m doing.