For today's podcast I decided to interview myself about upcoming new gig. It's a short episode, under six minutes, and here's the transcript:

My guest for this week's podcast is John Wilkin. He's the director of the University of Michigan Library's technology department, and coordinator of the library's joint digitization project with Google. It's been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM's earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all us.

Joining me for today's podcast is Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Securent. His new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for a couple of years and just announced itself today, is focused on the thorny problem of fine-grained access control. In this conversation we discuss the role of XACML, the Extensible Access Control Markup Language, we talk about how to wrap or intercept legacy security policies in order to hoist them out of application logic and place them in the network where they belong, and we explore the relationship between fine-grained security which focuses on individual resources, and coarse-grained security which deals with users and roles.

Jim Russell is a geographer, social theorist, and would-be social entrepeneur who blogs at Burgh Diaspora. In today's podcast we discuss his analysis of ways to organize Pittsburgh's diaspora -- the informal network of ex-Pittsburghers scattered around the world. Why might that matter? Jim's thesis, which I find fascinating, is that the "distance trust" embodied in that kind of network can have important social and economic effects not only for Pittsburgh, but for local and regional populations everywhere in this era of pervasive mobility and telecommunications.

John Schneider, the CTO of AgileDelta and the driving force behind E4X, is now evangelizing Efficient XML, an alternate binary syntax for XML. In today's podcast we discuss the motivations for this proposed W3C standard, its theoretical foundations, and its uses.

Cricket Liu joins me for today's podcast. He's known for his popular books on DNS infrastructure, and as VP of Architecture at Infoblox has recently led an effort to identify and correct DNS security vulnerabilities.

Mark Ericson, director of SOA product strategy for BlueNote Networks, joins me for this week's podcast on the subject of VoIP/SOA convergence. When Mark talks about communications-enabling business processes, he doesn't just mean processes talking to one another, but also processes communicating with people -- and coordinating the communication among people. We've dreamed about unified communications forever, and for the most part we're still dreaming, but we'll get there one of these days. When we do, we'll wonder how we ever got along without the service-oriented integration of voice and data that BlueNote envisions.

Joining me for today's podcast is the programmer-turned-writer Ellen Ullman. I recently reread her 1995 book, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents, and found it as compelling today as it was then.

The guest innovator for today's podcast is Tim Fahlberg. During his 11-year stint as a math teacher, Tim pioneered the use of what he calls whiteboard movies or mathcasts, and what I call screencasts. Today he's a consultant and reseller of educational technologies who's passionately committed to reinventing education. His main website is CoolSchoolTools.com. On his Wiki, Mathcasts.org, you can find hundreds of mathcasts. Tim has done a bunch of these himself, and there are also a bunch made by other people including these Australian schoolkids.

Today's podcast with Cyril Houri, founder and CEO of Mexens Technologies, advances a story I began telling in early 2005 about annotating the planet. The problem was, and still is, that there aren't very many people with GPS devices. Cyril's system, Navizon, aims to bootstrap us out of that situation. The idea is to incent people carrying the fairly small number of GPS-equipped mobile devices (PocketPCs, cellphones) to map the locations of both WiFi access points and cell towers. Then people using vast numbers of devices on WiFi or cellular networks can use location-aware applications without having to own GPS gear.

The multi-talented Phil Windley joins me for today's podcast, which was prompted by my recent experience with an expired passport, lost birth certificate, and misplaced social security card. As an author, university professor, InfoWorld contributor, and of course former state CIO, Phil has an excellent understanding of identity regimes in the real world, in the virtual world, and at the intersection of the two.

Roy Fielding, the primary architect of HTTP and a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, joins me for today's podcast. We talked about the past, present, and future of web architectural style, and about how REST principles carry over to the work Roy has done as chief scientist with Day Software on the Java content-management standards JSR 170 and JSR 283.

Peter Suber, the leading chronicler of the open access movement, joins me for this week's podcast. Since the dawn of the blog era, it's been obvious to me that the modes of knowledge exchange we bloggers take for granted are also a natural fit for scientific and academic publishing. That idea has matured more slowly than some of us had hoped. But as you know if you follow Peter's blog, Open Access News, it has now taken root and is growing at a healthy rate.

Charlie Hoffman, the director of industry solutions for UBmatrix, is acknowledged as "the father of XBRL" -- the eXtensible Business Reporting Language to which I had a bit of an xallergic reaction when I first encountered it a couple of years ago. But when Brian DeLacey, a researcher turned XBRL entrepeneur, suggested that I interview Charlie I jumped at the chance. In this week's podcast the three of us discuss the history of XBRL, its relationship to XML, its goals, its successes, and its challenges.

Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of the enterprise wiki company Socialtext, joins me for this week's podcast. It was a well-timed interview because today and this weekend the Wikimaniacs are gathered in Cambridge, MA, for Wikimania 2006.

Paul Patrick is the architect of BEA's AquaLogic suite. In today's podcast we reflect on what's happened in the year since BEA declared its intention to become the Switzerland of SOA. Topics include objects versus services, why SOA != web services, how XQuery enables smart intermediaries, the nature of security in a world of distributed data, and BEA's intentions with respect to .NET, PHP, REST, and POX. Despite that mouthful of acronyms, the conversation should be accessible to IT-oriented businessfolk as well as to business-oriented technologists.

When I first heard Bob Glushko speak at a conference I knew we were kindred spirits. Our shared interests include information architecture, XML, web services, and the hybrid discipline of document engineering that he and Tim McGrath define in their eponymously-titled new book.

Mike Hudack, one of the founders of the video sharing service blip.tv, was my guest for this week's podcast. Mike had seen my essay on walled gardens. We discussed blip.tv's current efforts and future to ensure that videos, as well as metadata about videos, flow freely on vthe web. Blip.tv is working with Dabble, FireAnt, Technorati, and other in a collaboration called Video Vertigo (hint: the password is (intentionally) in the authentication dialog box) to federate video-specific metadata, such as viewership stats, as well as general metadata such as tags.

Lou Rosenfeld is my guest for this week's podcast. Fellow superpatron Edward Vielmetti put me in touch with Lou, with whom I share an affection not only for Ann Arbor, Michigan, but also for a cluster of topics including information architecture, search analytics, print and online publishing, designing for usability, tagging, and microformats. We had a great conversation!

Open government is the subject of this week's podcast with Dan Thomas, who directs Washington DC's DCStat program, and Suzanne Peck, chief technology officer for the city. I first met Dan at our SOA forum in November. Recently he contacted me about an exciting new initiative that soft-launched last week: live data feeds that will enable any interested citizen to track the performance of agencies that deliver city services.

Mike Frost, CEO of Site Controls, joins me for this Friday's installment of my Interviews with Innovators series. A couple of years ago I wrote an essay called The energy web about a set of ideas that matter more with each passing month. I'll say more about this in my InfoWorld column next week, but as you'll hear in this interview, I'm really excited by the focused entrepeneurial approach that Mike's company is taking. "We can't wait for the government to build the railroads in this case," he says, and I violently agree.

For today's installment of my Friday podcast series I got together with CJ Rayhill. She's the CIO at O'Reilly and Associates and, with Allen Noren, has been leading the SafariU project. It's a service that provides college course materials online and also as customized books printed on demand.

Today's installment of my Friday podcast series, which I'm now calling Interviews with Innovators (RSS feed here), began life as a screencast in which Peter Rodgers, founder and CEO of 1060 Research, was demonstrating the 1060 NetKernel. It's an unusual creature -- a REST-oriented, microkernel-based app server that I first noticed back in 2004.

For this week's Friday podcast I got together with Frank Martinez, founder of Blue Titan and now, as a result of a recent acquisition, executive VP of SOA Software.

For today's Friday podcast I got together with Andy Singleton. I've known Andy for a long time. Back in 2003 I brought him in to help with a feature story on the globalization of software development -- in particular, for his thoughts on the dynamic assembly of global teams that can wield open source componentry.

The new preview of LINQ went live yesterday. For this week's Friday podcast I got together with Anders Hejlsberg to talk about the project in general, and what's in the new preview.

Today's podcast, the fifth in my Friday podcast series, is a conversation with Nathan McFarland and Benjamin Hill. I met Nathan at ETech, where he demonstrated CastingWords, a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to distribute and coordinate work. Benjamin's project, Mycroft, packages up puzzle-like tasks in ways that people can interact with on web pages. You can find a write-up on Mycroft in this CommerceNet technical report.

In my fourth Friday podcast we hear from Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software. I wrote about OpenLink's universal database and app server, Virtuoso, back in 2002 and 2003. Earlier this month Virtuoso became the first mature SQL/XML hybrid to make the transition to open source. The latest incarnation of the product also adds SPARQL (a semantic web query language) to its repertoire.

Today's podcast is an interview with Chris Gemignani. We've crossed paths a couple of times, and I've been greatly impressed by his combination of skills. He's an extreme Excel hacker, has a Tuftean sensibility about data visualization, and uses his screencasts to open a window onto ways of thinking about, and doing, analysis of business data.

Today's podcast is a conversation with Steve Burbeck on the topic of multicellular computing. I first met Steve at Tim O'Reilly's 2001 summit conference on peer-to-peer technologies. Steve was at IBM then, and was working on UDDI among other things. (He's an author of the UDDI spec.) His background prior to IBM includes consulting and product management in the realm of object-oriented development tools -- especially Smalltalk. Before that he ran data processing and statistics at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, acquiring the understanding of biological systems that he now hopes to apply to networked computer systems.