Most people equate downloadable audio files and portable MP3 players with music. Unfortunately, this entirely misses what I consider to be a much more socially and politically powerful phenomenon, the recording and podcasting of conference sessions and conference calls. If you haven't discovered sites like ITConversations.com yet, then it is time you do.

While it has been both convenient and fun for me to have my music in MP3 format and to listen to it with my portable MP3 player, the effect that this has had on my quality-of-life pales in comparison to the impact that listening to ITConversations has had.

It's essentially like encrypted Hotmail. From their site...

"Hushmail is a Web-based e-mail service that lets you send and receive email in total security. Hushmail messages, and their attachments, are encrypted using Open PGP standard algorithms. These algorithms, combined with Hushmail's unique key management system, offer users unrivalled levels of security. Hushmail's security is end-to-end; messages are encrypted before leaving the sender's computer and remain encrypted until after they arrive on the recipient's machine, where the contents are automatically decrypted.
Hushmail's encryption works automatically, transparently and seamlessly, requiring no specialized computer skills or knowledge.

From their site....

CryptoMail.org devotes its energy to promote the freedom of private communications. By developing and distributing an end-to-end secure Email system under the GNU General Public License, we hope to inspire the most talented programmers around the world to help create a secure environment for people to exchange information over the Internet.

Objectives

The main objective of CryptoMail.org is to provide a community where programmers who share our vision, give the most accessible, reliable, and secure communications tools to people. We will focus on developing, distributing, maintaining and serving the most secure end-to-end Email system for the Internet community. We want everyone to access secure Email services, thus we develop an Email system that allows people to use or host the system on almost any computer and platform. We provide this secure Email system by ensuring two key security features:

Security at the Transport Level

All communications between the user and the server are done by a way of an encrypted session. This discourages eavesdroppers at the network layer.

End-to-End Message Security

Exchange of messages within our Email system employs a message layer encryption using a hybrid symmetric and public/private key scheme. This effectively prevents anyone from reading the contents of the message except the intended recipient.

Content Management Systems (CMSs) help create identity, community and collaboration, and Rich Site Summary (RSS) automates and fosters communication within and between these identities and communities. If CMS-based websites are like silos of knowledge on specialised issues, RSS is like the wind that blows between them, cross-polinating all the ideas, people and communities along the way. Aaaaaahh... sounds del.icio.us to me.

Anybody wanting to have "presence" online today should be looking into how they too can both use and provide RSS feeds such as del.icio.us does. Integrating web-based RSS generation services into personal or organisational websites is a simple and yet extremely powerful and combination which should be integrated into any all online communication strategies.

I had never seen or heard about PubSub before. I first saw it over at
bryght.com where they have integrated it with Drupal.

Integrating PubSub, MyYahoo or any other automated RSS generation service into CMS aggregators such as Drupal is a powerful combination.

The degree to which it has become possible for individuals to automate the process of extracting precise bits of information from the overwhelming and growing mass of data flowing across the planet is really amazing .

In fact, I found Bryght by using Google to look for sites linking to my site. Apparently, some of my blogs had been aggregated by PubSub (probably using the term "Drupal"), included in the Bryght's PubSub page and cached by Google.