This piece from today’s Guardian:

If you’re up to date, podcasting – an automated way of making audio files (such as radio shows) available to download – should be old hat. The latest spin-off from this technology, said Ellen Lee in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, is Godcasting.

According to Lee, Godcasts – “religious and spiritually themed podcasts” – have become “the most popular use of the new online technology since it debuted less than a year ago”. They “range from a daily dose of Scripture to a weekly dose of the Bible translated into Klingon”, continued Lee, who explained that “the vast majority are Christian-based, but they also include New Age, Jewish and Buddhist podcasts.”

is along rather similar lines to this entry on the BBC News site, last Wednesday:

Thousands of people have downloaded a Suffolk vicar’s sermons after he posted them on the internet last month.

The Rev Leonard Payne, Vicar of St Nicholas’ Church in Wrentham, said the response had been overwhelming after he posted them on the Apple iTune store.

“We were stunned. Within a short period of time, over 2,000 people had downloaded one of them,” he said.

At one point demand for the sermons was so great they had to change servers, Mr Payne said.

The church in the small rural parish first developed its own website where the sermons could be accessed.

It was set up so people who could not attend church could download and listen to sermons at home.

Am upgrading to version 1.5.1.3 of WordPress at the moment, so sorry if anyone encounters any bother…

Interesting interview with Adams Curry just posted on Naked Conversations:

Interview: Adam Curry

A Good Day to Die is Kernick‘s fourth book, and it brings back the anti-hero of the first, disgraced ex-copper Dennis Milne.

(Clicking the book cover takes you to Amazon – the commission helps fund Palimpsest)

Kernick’s books are a real strange mix, and I haven’t come across anything quite like them before. On one level, they are pretty standard thrillers, written with plot and pace in mind and conciously without any kind of literary embellishments.

But there are two things which set these apart from other books in the genre. Firstly, a rich vein of black humour runs throughout the book, and the numerous sarcastic asides do raise a smile on the face of the reader; which is all the more surprising given the second standout feature of Kernick’s work which is the sheer grimness of the subject matter. It really is heard to imagine a light-hearted romp involving murderous paedophile gangs, but that really is what this book is (kind of). So you have this real contradiction between style and content, but somehow it just works. I breezed through it in the space of a few hours reading time, I would say, and it’s a clear improvement on the earlier books and a good, no-nonsense read.