Promises, Promises

Legislative leaders have established a self-imposed deadline of midnight Wednesday for brokering a budget deal, which means I could be back at work by Thursday. In the meantime, I’ve been taking advantage of the spectacular weather to do some exploring of the neighborhood. Today, I discovered that I can take the Stone Arch Bridge through the St. Anthony Main neighborhood to Nicolett Island. After living downtown for three years, you’d think I would have figured this out sooner. I forgot how lovely the view of downtown and the mill ruins is from Nicolett Island. I’ll probably sound provincial for saying this, but Minneapolis really is a beautiful city and it especially shines in the summer. I need to take some initiative with my digital camera and show you exactly what I mean.
I’m digging the podcasting features in the new version of iTunes. But think about this. Podcasting went from obscure to corporate in, what, maybe six months? That’s an incredibly fast maturation for a new medium. It took blogs at least two or three years to creep into the mass media vernacular. But it still feels like more hype than substance. The total number of listeners of all podcasts is still a tiny percentage of Internet users and it remains to be seen whether the audiences will grow for this kind of content. Still, it’s impressive that podcasting has achieved such prominence in such a short time.