Podcastplayer.org news

Another really interesting way to try and make money from podcasting. Not selling podcasts, not even selling podcasting tools, but selling customization of podcasting tools.

If you want to stump up the cash you can go online and create a “customized” version of the iPodder “lemon” client preloaded with a selection of feeds and otherwise tailored to your requirements. In itself this would not seem worth much - after all, you can do that yourself once you have installed it. The trick is that the fee is just for creating the custom version. You can then make an installer for this new personal collection and reader available for download on your web site. That begins to feel like it might be worth paying for …

Read more at Podcasting News: iPodder Updated; New Version Lets You Create a Custom Podcast Client.

As you may know, I like listening to podcast audio novels. I think they are a great idea, and a fun thing to load up a player with for a long journey (or tedious meeting, or whatever). So I was interested to spot in the ipodder.org new podcasts announcement blog an announcement of the serialization of “Claybourne", described as “A sci-fi / supernatural thriller / soap opera podcast drama".

I popped the feed into the ipodder client, only to find that it only contains episodes 16-25.

If I may be so bold, that’s a plainly stupid idea. While there is some justification for only listing the most recent entries in something like a link or news blog, or the kind of “thought for the day” podcast that a lot of people seem to produce, I can’t imagine anyone would want to start listening to a story from anywhere other than the beginning. Duh.

So, just in case anyone else is syndicating an audio book and heading for this problem, make sure your RSS feed is locked down to include all the episodes, right from the start, not just the last 10.

If I can find the first 15 episodes I might listen to the story, otherwise it’s just wasted space and bandwidth. Please wise up guys.

Read more (well, read some, anyway) at ThePodcastNetwork :: Claybourne

Apparently “Former Vice President” Al Gore and “entrepreneur” Joel Hyatt are manning the PR pumps for their new internet/TV venture “current":

Current will invite audiences to move beyond their roles as viewers to become active collaborators, encouraging them to help shape the network’s content and fulfill its mission – to serve as a TV platform where the voices of young adults can be heard.

“We want to transform the television medium itself, giving a national platform to those who are hungry to help create the TV they want to watch,” said Al Gore.

This sure sounds a lot like plain old public-access TV to me. Expect a lot of “Wayne’s World", if anybody can be bothered.

It also sounds a lot like some of the “put podcasts on the radio” ranting I’ve complained about in the past.

From the media creator’s point of view: When people have the freedom to create and publish whatever they want, and have it available to anyone in the world with an internet connection, why bother with the last step of giving it to a TV company (where they’ll probably gut it to meet broadcast decency requirements, or pad it with commercials).

From the viewer/listener’s point of view: Why be a slave to someone else’s playlist choice when you can pick and choose your own perfect blend?

Read more at Daily Wireless - Video Blog TV Channel

There are more and more people trying to work out how to make money out of podcasting. A new entrant is Click Caster:

ClickCaster takes the complexity out of creating a podcast. It turns your computer into a small yet powerful recording studio, radio station and publishing company all in one simple and easy to use package.

It does with with a program and a service that allows you to very simply and easily create a recording/podcast on your computer, license it with a copyright, publish it on the internet so people can easily find it and subscribe to and promote it by listing it in the CastLister public podcasting directory.

They (plan to) offer a scaled service starting at $34.95/year for hosting and basic web software. The bit that makes ClickCaster interesting is the way that they offer higher priced options that include multitrack recording software, sound library, and even a mixer and microphones. This could make them a “one-stop-shop” for a new podcaster.

Apparently a free “beta” of this service starts some time this month (April 2005).

There’s a lot to be said in favour of the Ruby programming language. I use it for a range of system programming and scripting tasks, particularly where a more “heavyweight” language such as Java or C++ would be too much.

So it’s nice to see that someone is working on a podcatcher written in Ruby.

Armangil’s podcatcher is a podcast client for the command line. This bug-fix release includes the following changes:
(1) added support for Ctrl-C to terminate execution,
(2) [James Carter patch] fixed the “OPML truncation” issue where a bad RSS feed was considered the last of the list,
(3) added robust handling of some illegal command line arguments.

RubyForge: Armangil’s podcatcher 0.2.1 released

There are plenty of bloggging applications out there. You can tell the actively developed ones because they are adding (and documenting) simple support for RSS enclosures (the core distribution technology behind podcasting). Here’s a blog entry with a video of how to attach an enclosure using the fairly popular “blojsom” blogging tool.

And guess what, the author even attached the video as an enclosure :)

bedeviled mojo slop

Last week I picked up a new PlayStation Portable (PSP) in the hopes that I could use FeedDemon to download podcasts and other audio files to it. Turns out it’s possible, but it wasn’t as straightforward as I would’ve liked

Read more at: Nick Bradbury: Download audio to your PlayStation Portable (PSP) with FeedDemon

Another player has enteres the field of “free” media hosting. This is certainly worth a look if you are overflowing your bandwidth at another provider, but (as I mentioned in my summary of podcast hosting options) you need to be careful that you understand and agree with the “small print” on any “too good to be true” service.

This one seems to be ad-supported, so make sure that you are comfortable with the idea of a third party adding their own choice of ad content to your feed.

The bottom line is still that if you want full control, you have to pay for it.

We provide free bandwidth for your video, podcast, software download, or any other file you want to post. We will support downloads of any quantity and are adding infrastructure to support very large volumes of downloads. Please keep in mind that this is our Beta version, and that we really need your comments (and bug reports).

Read more at: Welcome to The Free Bandwidth Project (Beta)

Although it’s not directly positioned as a podcasting system, “Olivelink” shares a lot of the same chracteristics. It’s a system for sharing large media files (usually video) either between individuals or small groups, or to anyone who wants.

Olivelink. It’s a person-to-person video broadcast service

Read more at Interview with the Olivelink folks | PVRblog

I don’t use Manila for any of my blogs, preferring WordPress and Pebble. If you do use Manila, you might want to take a look at an article about how to create a podcast:

Podcasting with Manila is easy. This page is a simple how-to, to get you started Podcasting with Manila.

Manila: How to Create a Podcast with Manila

Mike Oliveri at lockergnome has written about his experiences with jPodder, the portable Java podcatcher:

I poked around a little and decided to start with jPodder. Written in Java, jPodder is itself cross-platform and has a simple GUI. Java’s already included in Slackware, so I downloaded jPodder, unzipped it, and ran the installer: java -jar install.jar.

Read more at: jPodder First Impressions (Review)

Amid all the commercialism and advertising frenzy surrounding podcasts at the moment, it looks like some people are still considering the idea that stuff should be free for the benefit of everyone.

Ourmedia.org officially launched.

I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve put aside my freelance writing for the past half year to work almost exclusively on Ourmedia – on a strictly voluntary, unpaid basis. Why? Because I deeply believe that citizens media efforts such as this are the wave of the future.

Read more at New Media Musings: Ourmedia is here!!

I’ve still not sorted out areview of Sparks! myself, but in the meanwhile, here’s one from Lloyd Davis.

Perfect Path: Sparks!, Odeo, Podshow - the phoney war continues

Looks like the popular RSS reader “feedDemon” has been updated to better support podcasting. There are even a couple of videos which show how to use the new features.

I’ll take a more detailled look soon, but from a brief glance at the videos they don’t seem to be breaking any new ground, just coat-tailling on ideas from existing podcatchers. I guess if you already use feedDemon, this might make things a little simpler.

In version 1.5 (released in February 2005), FeedDemon adds support for podcasting with a built-in utility named FeedStation. The powerful podcasting tool enables you to download audio files and automatically sync them to your media players (applications and devices):

Read more, and watch the video clips at: Podcasting Download and Scheduling with FeedDemon 1.5

There’s not a lot about it on the web site, just a few notes about the release and a download, but “Sparks!” from Blogmatrix claims to be an integrated download/listen/create/upload tool for podcasters. I’ll download it, have a go, and report back in a few days.

In the meanwhile, read more at BlogMatrix.com Sparks!

Hmm. Wierd, minimal site with no real explanition of what it is, or how it works. Apparently, though, it’s a podcast-specific search engine. I tried a few keywords, and it found some interesting stuff. I may work for you, too.

Try it out at PodRazor :: Find what you want to hear.. I won’t say my usual “read more", because there is so little to read!

I was listening to Slashdot review and was once again reminded of ths potential for bittorrent downloading of podcasts. I took another look at iPodder 2.0, but there is no mention of bittorrent in the help or FAQ, and when I tried, it just seemed to download the .torrent files. Sigh. So, a bit of looking further and I found Nimiq (version 1.3.1), which bills itself as “enclosure ripper extraordinaire".

I must say that I found it pretty uncomfortable compared with iPodder 2.0 and Doppler. The first problem was importing my feeds from iPodder. Flush with my excitement about finally being able to export them, I attempted to load them into Nimiq. On the plus side, it understood the format. On the minus side, it insisted on putting up a little “import feed … yes/no” dialog box for every feed in the OPML. Worse, it just put up the feed URL, not the show title, so I had to try and remember which show comes from which URL. Worst of all, it made the computer “error beep” every time it put up the dialog, which was frickin’ annoying when I was trying to listen to a podcast while doing this. Grrr.

Let me make this clear. If I ask some software to import a feed collection, I want it to import the whole collection, with no annoying noises, and no “do you really want to import this feed". If I decide that I don’t want some of the feeds, I can either hand-edit the OPML before input (it’s just XML text, after all), or delete the feeds using the regular UI after import. I’ve only got about 50 feeds in my OPMLat the moment, but I’m adding them all the time, and doing anything on a per-feed basis without allowing multiple selections is a usability nightmare.

Once I’d got through the import process and calmed down a little, I looked at the feed list. In particular, I wanted to try out fetching Slashdot Review using bittorrent. While I was looking through the feeds and the configurations, I suddenly noticed that it had started downloading from a bunch of feeds. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, except that it seemed to be downloading from all the feeds, even the ones that I had already “topped up” using iPodder. Yikes! I had pointed it at my regular download directory, in the naive assumption that it wouldn’t download files that were there already. Apparently not.

I quickly stopped the downloads. But then I found that there seems to be no way to “cancel” a download, even if it is stopped.

On the plus side, downloading seems to be pretty fast, and nicely threaded, and it can add fresh downloads to a WMP or iTunes playlist, but the other usability issues place it behind iPodder 2.0 and Doppler for me.

YMMV, of course.

Here’s a more interesting idea than most of the “hey let’s set up a directory of podcasts” that seem to be springing up around the web. Let’s face it guys, those are just reinventing the likes of yahoo or dmoz - incomplete, and superseded by search.

Techpodcasts, on the other hand, seems to be attempting a tighter community of “affiliates” (which , as far as I can tell, seem to be more like “contributors” or “columnists” than affiliates in the usual web “click through me and I get a kickback” sense). The idea is that people can apply to become affiliates, and those that meet certain criteria on content, quality, and regularity get to join, and get listed.

The idea certainly seems reasonable. What worries me about techpodcasts in particular, though, is the very broad range of subject matter in the podcasts, and the apparent lack of easily browseable information about the feeds and the individual ‘casts. For example the current “affiliates” list is shown as:

Apple Logs
Digital Experience Podcast
eDave.org Security News
Geek News Central
Home Network Help
In the Trenches
Linux Log Podcast
Michael Lehman
Microsoft Log
Mondays
One Minute Tip .com
Software as She Developed
Tech Rag Tear Outs
The Brad Cast
The Chris Pirillo Show
The Feed
The MacCast
.Net Rocks
WebTalk Radio

Some of those give hints about typical content (the MacCast, Microsoft Log, .Net Rocks, Linux Log), but the rest could be anything that the site owners consider “tech” enough..

Personally, I’d like to know a bit more about a feed before I subscribe. I’m not at all interested in Mac-specific ramblings, for example, but stuff about cutting-edge OO and Agile software development would go in my podcatcher ASAP.

So, techpodcasts, for your “value add", please make finding out about the general content of feeds, and the specific content of ‘casts a painless (and maybe even pleasant) experience. Use your imagination, delight potential listeners.

Read more at www.techpodcasts.com - Home.

It looks like iPodder (probably the most popular podcatcher software) has released version 2. I’ve tried it out, and it does indeed have a bunch of major improvements:

1. + There’s much more click-though on visible details, you can easily get to and change feed properties
   - this only consist of the URL at the moment - no option to pause a feed, or apply any sort of filtering, or show accompanying blog posts/play notes, or view track metadata, or apply feed-specific scheduling, or enter user/password for an authenticated feed.

2. + The appearance is improved, with iTunes-like “stripey” lists, and (at last) a way to sort feeds
   - one of my favourite features, the big, easy, obvious, “add feed” box has been hidden, along with a move to a row of cryptic icons, with (apparently) no way of showing understandable text buttons instead.

3. + you can now click on a downloaded ‘cast to play it immediately
   - it can only play in iTunes or Windows media player. This is nonsense, I don’t tend to use either of those, preferring RealPlayer, or WinAmp, or VLC. Sure, allow me to select which type of playlist to generate, but don’t force me to use a particular player - the next version really must allow entry of an arbitrary path to a player as an “other” option.

4. + feed scanning and downloading is considerably faster and more controllable.
   - It seems to pick which ‘casts to download at random, though, I’d prefer at least some way to tell it which ones I want first, so I can listen to them while the others are still coming in.

5. + it tracks which ‘casts have been downloaded from a feed in a visible way, and allows you to select “back catalog” ‘casts for downloading along with the new stuff.
   - it doesn’t seem good at knowing the difference between tracks I have downloaded but moved out of my “incoming” area; and tracks I’ve never downloaded. Maybe that’s just because the previous version didn’t store enough data. I’ll see how I get on with this in use.

6. + best of all, I can now export/import and back up my feeds as (hopefully standard) OPML. w00t!

All in all, a definite improvement. If you use iPodder, then you should almost definately upgrade. Just remember to fully exit your old version, the installer (on Windows, at least) doesn’t seem to check, and gets in a tangle if the old one is still running.

Read more and download the latest version at iPodder, the cross-platform podcast receiver.

A lengthy and detailled rant about the current clunky, short-sighted approach of RSS enclosures and other podcast “standards". Sheds light on many of the things that make distribution of podcasts considerably less than the smooth process that it’s sometimes claimed to be.

If you are at all interested in the infrastructure at the heart of podcasting, you need to read this article:
Whole Wheat Radio Blog

Here’s another neat idea, a random feed of podcasts you might never think to subscribe to.

following the “Life is Random” meme and looking for a way to experience podcasts that one might not otherwise find, Manton Reece put together a handy little RSS feed called Podcast Shuffle.

Sounds like an interesting way to find different feeds. I’m not sure I’d want to listen to it all the time, though, and current podcatchers don’t seem to have the flexibility to allow “pausing” or “dipping and skipping” a feed - it’s all or nothing.

And I can really imagine hearing something that I really like, but not being able to find the URL or feed. Most podcasts seem to assume that if you are listening, then you must have come via the web site or feed URL. This is an increasingly dangerous assumption.

If random feed listening becomes at all popular, people are really going to have to take to putting plenty of “station id” in their ‘casts (and choose some pronounceable, memorable URLs), and putting genuinely useful information in the audio metadata.

Read more at:
Becoming: Let’s do the Podcast Shuffle and Manton Reece: Podcast Shuflle

I tried to post this a few days ago, but it seems to have never made it through. Sigh.

It seems that James Corbett and Liam Burke are trying to work out a way of using podcasting as a kind of dating service. That’s wacky enough to be worth mentioning, but the thing that really caught my eye is the idea of using GMail, with its much touted “gigabyte of storage for every user", as a way to store and distribute podcasts.

Purists will argue that submitting audio files to a GMail account can’t really be labelled ‘podcasting’ since there is no way of automatically downloading the email attachments via RRS enclosure or syncing with your MP3 player, but I still think its a valid and interesting experiment.

That may be the case now but I’m guessing it can’t be that hard to write something that “scrapes” a gmail account and generates a RSS feed with enclosures pointing at the actual emails.

Of course it would mean that even your podcasts get swallowed up into the ravenous and ever-growing Google monster.

Read more at EirePreneur: Podating? and Liam Burke’s Podhost Gmail account

Podcast hosting seems like a growth area right now. I just noticed (via Podcasting News) a new offering from podlot.com - cheap parking for your podcast.

At first glance, their prices look reasonable: starting at $4/month for 150MB storage and “unlimited” bandwidth. However, it’s really easy to fill up 150MB if you podcast at all often, and that means you’d soon be looking at tough decisions about which ‘casts to leave on the site and which to take down, or whether to pay more per month for more storage.

By the time you get to a more reasonable 1GB of storage, you’re up to $20/month. And you can get some much better deals on regular hosting for that sort of outlay.

As well as a podcast fan, I’m also a software developer, with a particular interest in the Java programming language and platform. So I was delighted to find that there is active development of podcast software in my favourite language.

jPodder is an ambitious project which hopes to be not just a podcatcher in the vein of iPodder and Doppler, but also a player and media manager, and even a podcast creation tool with MP3 and ID3 editing, RSS creation and upload facilities.

It’s not quite reached a “1.0″ release, but it’s well worth a look. Checkout jPodder Podcasting.

They have a development blog, although they seem to have recently reorganized things, so the links in the RSS (at bloglines, at least) are shot.

Judging by the comments on the site, GigaDial has been in operation since sometime in 2004, but I’d never heard of it myself.

It seems to be aiming at a kind of “bloglines for podcasts” spot - it lets users customise and aggregate podcast feeds into “stations", presumably with the intention of making ‘cast downloading easier. In a world where most people run local feedcatcher software such as iPodder or Doppler, it’s not much of an advantage. Adding one feed or five - no big deal.

It has just occurred to me that this would be really useful if typical MP3 players included simple feedcatcher software, though. Imagine being able to plug your player into any net-connected USB port and click a button to grab the next few ‘casts from your favourite feeds. In that situation, being able to remotely manage subscriptions and track which feed entries have been “read” would be a real winner. This idea is not even too far fetched, my most recent MP3 player came with a built-in email client!

Back to GigaDial - it also seems as if they have provided some sort of community feed creation facility. Some aggregated feeds seem open for other users to add feeds or files, to make something much more like a real radio station, where you never, quite, know what’s coming next. This does appear open to abuse, but there’s little sign of it on the site so far.

At the moment I’m trying a side-by-side comparison of what seem to be the two leading Windows examples of podcast fetcher (a.k.a “podfetcher” or “podcatcher") software iPodder and Doppler. I started with iPodder a while ago, when I first got “into” podcasting - after all, it’s the one that’s mentioned in lots of “how to get started” tutorials. Recently, I have been trying Doppler as an alternative, to see if it improves on any of the niggles I have with iPodder.

It’s not that I have any major complaints about iPodder. It certainly does the basic job of fetching RSS enclosures OK. The issues I have with it are mainly confined to the way it deals with feeds with more than one enclosure, and a whole bunch of things that I feel ought to be there in the user interface.

The main problem (to me) with the way iPodder fetches podcasts is the way it seems to assume that only RSS entries from “today” onward are worth downloading. Several times I have found a new feed, added it to iPodder, selected the new feed and clicked “check selected feed", only to find that it reports nothing downloaded. If I take a look at the feed, I can usually clearly see several entries with enclosures. iPodder, though, seems to consider these as “old news” and doesn’t bother to fetch them. This is especially problematic with feeds such as audio books. The RSS sensibly contains all the chapters so far, but iPodder will only start downloading from the next one.

Doppler improves on this a little. It still has the strange habit of only fetching the most recent entry (and no obvious way of overriding this behaviour), but I have found that if I repeatedly click “retrieve now” it works through the feed fetching the most recent unfetched enclosure until it has grabbed all the feed has to offer. Doppler does have the opposite of what I’m looking for, though. It has a “catch up” option which marks all entries in a feed as “downloaded".

Common sense would seem to say that subscribing to a new feed should at least offer the option of fetching the “back catalog", even if the fetcher prefers to be a good net citizen and space out the fetches rather than grabbing all the enclosures at once.

As for UI features, I keep expecting iPodder to (somehow) allow me to at the very least examine the properties of a subscribed feed (the feed URL, items fetched, items not fetched, etc.), and ideally edit them. As it stands, if I want to look up where a particular feed comes from (for example, to recommend it to a friend) I can’t ask iPodder, even though it knows the URL. I’d also like to be able to view downloaded podcasts for a feed by clicking on the feed title, so I can click on a downloaded podcast to listen to it, delete it, refetch it, or manually transfer it to a player. As it stands, I have to use the regular folder explorer to navigate to wherever I told iPodder to put the ‘casts. iPodder knows this information, but it keeps it to itself.

Doppler, again, is slightly better in this regard. It does offer the opportunity to view/edit feed properties, and double-clicking a feed allows viewing of blog posts from that feed. It’s a minor shame that clicking embedded links in posts ignores my browser settings and brings up IE rather than Firefox. Still, plenty of other apps do that too.

My personal preference for an additional feature for both iPodder and Doppler is support for the PCNT (play counter) ID3 tag. I strongly believe that any podfetcher should allow the option of setting this counter to 0 for every downloaded MP3 file, so that players can sensibly increase the count and transfer utilities can use it to indicate whether a file has been listened to or not.

It occurs to me that fetching enclosures from a RSS feed is conceptually very similar to fetching emails from a IMAP or POP mailbox. Given that similarity, I can’t help expecting the same kind of facilities as provided by any decent email client. Mark as read/listened, mark as unread/unlistened, folder browsing, customisable display of metadata and ID3 tags, sorting/filtering options, and so on. Both these applications have along way to go to reach this richness of facilities.

As you may have guessed by this point, I’m slightly more impressed by Doppler than by iPodder. If I could, I’d like to move over. The trouble is that I have a lot of feeds in iPodder, which stores its feed information in a decidedly non-standard format, and (as far as I can tell) provides nothing like OPML export. If I could get the feeds into OPML it looks like Doppler could import them.

If anyone has got this far, and knows of a way to extract feed information from iPodder in a way that would work in Doppler, please let me know. Thanks!

I’ve been looking around the web and the blogs for ideas on podcast hosting. It seems there are several basic approaches:

• Free generic service. There are still a few hosting services funded by advertising, and a few more with a different agenda (for example the internet archive). The advantage is that it’s free. Disadvantages include “small print” on advertising-supported sites forbidding direct download of non-html content (they can’t insert their ads into your mp3s), and potential licence, philosophy, or ownership restrictions in the case of other sites.

• Free specialist service. This kind of service is typefied by rizzn. The big advantages are that it’s free, and they (hopefully) understand podcasting. The big disadvantage is that it’s not clear what the business model is or what the technical specs are, so there can be worries about the scalability or longevity. This is a great choice if you are not sure about podcasting, and want to “dip a toe in the water". Bear in mind, though, that things may change - especially if your podcast (or someone else’s which uses the same service) gets really popular and starts eating bandwidth. Free services have a habit of disappearing or becoming non-free, so be sure to back up your content.
• Paid specialist service. Currently the service that’s been getting the most press is Libsyn. They offer a service based on how much you upload each month, and bandwidth is “free". Advantages include simplicity, particularly if your podcast suffers wildly varying popularity. Disadvantages include a new and untried business model, and difficulty comparing price/value with other paid services.
• Paid generic service.
  This is how most people serve their podcasts. Generic web hosting has become almost a “commodity market". Luckily, podcasting doesn’t require any out-of-the-ordinary software, as a bare minimum you just plop some mp3s and a RSS description file on a HTTP server and you’re set. It can become a little more complex if you want to host your own blog to contain notes, links, and general chat to accompany your podcast, but there are a lot of good, free, software and services to help you with this. To get the best deal on hosting you need to consider several things:
  • Bandwidth - this may be the most important thing for podcasts. Podcasts are big, and if you get a lot of listeners you can use a lot of bandwidth. Let’s imagine you produce 30MB of podcast content a week (e.g. 1 hour-long discussion, five shorter 6MB chunks, or whatever). That’s roughly 150MB per month. If you have 10 listeners, that’s 1500 MB (1.5 GB) per month. If you have 100 listeners, that’s 15 GB per month. If you have 1000 listeners, that’s 150 GB per month. Be very vary of so-called “unlimited” bandwidth. This often means only that each customer is free to use the whole “pipe” with no limits, but can just as easily result in some other greedy customer gobbling it all up, and starving your site. If you are considering such an “unlimited” service, look hard at the real figures for the amount of available bandwidth, and the number of customers using it. If you can’t get real figures, move on.
  • Storage space - you need somewhere to put all that material. 30 MB per week for a year is 1500 MB (1.5GB), two years is 3 GB, and so on.
  • Software “platform” - if you plan to run your own blog, dynamic web site, forums, polls etc… Most blog software seems to need two things: the PHP programming language, and the MySQL database software. Both these are free, and I’d advise against paying for hosting that doesn’t include them. If you prefer software that needs other “platform” software, such as Python (used for Zope and Plone, for example), or Java (used for Pebble and Friki, for example), check that these are installed before parting with your cash.
  • pre-installed (or easy-install) blog software - if you don’t like the idea of downloading, tinkering, installing and configuring databases and blog software it would be a good idea to choose a provider that has either pre-installed some popular blogging or site-management software, or provides a simplified ("one-click") interface for installing optional software such as this. My personal favorite blog software at the moment is WordPress (I use it for this blog), but there are plenty of others.
  • reliability and support - these are typically hard to quantify, but vital. Check with anyone you know who uses the service to see what they think. If you get a lot of moans, move on.

  I’ve looked around, and there are thousands of hosting companies, so you really need to make up your own mind. I know that I am happy with the companies I currently use : - DreamHost, Lunar Pages, and 1 and 1. I’m particularly impressed with the easy “one click” way that DreamHost installs WordPress. When I installed it at 1 and 1 it was fairly fiddly.

  In the spirit of discosure, please note that I am genuinely a happy customer of the above services, and will (supposedly) recieve some sort of “kickback” if you choose to buy a service from one of them. However, don’t just take my word for it, check for yourself.

  I’ve also seen a lot of ads for Start Logic who seem to be offering some good deals at the moment, but I have no experience of using them myself.

• Dedicated server.
  A few years ago this was the only way if you wanted to host and deliver large media content. Imagine racks full of big, expensive servers connected to big, expensive network links. These days it can be a viable choice, as long as [a] you know what you are doing with remote system maintenance and upgrades - keeping hackers and viruses out is not a trivial job; [b] are willing to risk paying “enterprise” prices; and [c] might deliver content that conflicts with the content policy of shared server providers. In the great majority of cases, though, a shared service will be much cheaper for a simple (in processing terms) task like serving podcasts.
• Host it yourself.
  Usually you get some web space free with your dialup or broadband account, or as part of your college enrollment, or whatever. Similarly, you can usually run a web server on your home PC and serve pages, feeds and podcasts out over a broadband connection. It can be tempting to put up a few podcasts in this “free” space and bandwidth, but please think very hard before you do this. Although it is often not very clear what the limits are, all these “free” hosting approaches have limits, and breaching them can often lead to “capping” (refusing connections once a certain amount of traffic is reached) or even complete cessation of your internet connection. Also dangerous is the potential of locking you in to a particular provider. If your site, feed, or podcast URL is tied to a specific connectivity provider, it prevents you from switching to a better deal. Placing your content on a portable domain name that you own gives you much more flexibility in the long term, and can help keep your material available for longer.

So there’s an overview of some of the choices in podcast hosting. I hope it is useful. If you have any suggestions or corrections to the above, please let me know.

Matt Hartley has written a thoughtful response to my article from a few days ago. It’s certainly cleared up some points, and I can now appreciate the idea of striving to give podcast content the widest possible audience:

By no means am I saying this should be the only method of distribution for the world’s Podcasting content. On the contrary, I feel that the more distribution avenues Podcasting ‘content’ has, the better off the creators of this content will be.

Where we differ, I suppose, is in the importance placed on “satellite radio”

I believe that we need to stop following trends with such a narrow view. See, by bringing the content to the growing world of satellite radio, we are working to encapsulate it in such a way that we will be able to distribute our message to brand new ears.

I’m not a north American resident, so (as far as I can tell) I can’t get XM or Sirius. Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough, but I can’t actually find details of the satellite “footprint” on the XM site. This means I start with a different perspective - for me there is no “growing world of satellite radio". Actually, I have a dish on my roof that pulls in 20 or 30 free channels, but I never listen to them - mainly because I never know what might be on. Every time I tried it was just the same old pop/sport/drivel that I found on ordinary radio.

I can understand that there’s a lot of fuss in the USA about satellite radio. After all, XM and Sirius have spent a lot of advertising dollars stirring up interest in every way they can to try and recoup their huge licence expenses. But let’s look at details.

From the XM site, a portable XM receiver costs about $350, and an in-car model around $130. Add to this a $12.95/month subscription and you have about $285 (for the first year). A significant barrier to entry compared to a regular FM radio for a one-off $10 at walmart. Satellite radio is an expensive luxury. I would be intrigued to find out if there is a significant proportion of XM/Sirius users who don’t already have an internet PC or mobile phone. My guess is that satellite radio comes considerably further down the wish list, so it can’t really be touted as a way of reaching Matt’s 70% of the world’s population who are unable to get media via RSS.

On the other hand, I can see a potentially huge possibility for podcasting to provide the source of a lot of zero-cost, or at least low-cost, programming for cash-strapped local radio. Would you listen to the likes of Dawn and Drew if they were on your local radio dial?

The main problems with all of this, though, rest in the nature of radio. As I mentioned before, radio is broadcast. Radio programming has evolved, based on study of ratings and demographics, to provide the most acceptible material to the largest identifiable group of listeners. Anything that deviates from that “sweet spot” will risk losing listener numbers. There is little room for alternatives and experimentation.

Internet delivery is point-to-point. Listeners get to choose individual shows, listen to them when, where, and in the order they like, and skip the ones they don’t like. The control is much more fine-grained. If choosing and listening to a radio station is like electing a president, choosing and listening to podcasts is like being the president.

As for buying into satellite radio, I’d (personally) rather spend the cost of the satellite reciever and year or two’s subscription on an in-car iPod equivalent that syncs from my podcast-fetcher over WiFi while it’s in the driveway. What I want, when I want it, and no subscription fees.

Maybe I’m just weird, though.

Among the usual run of announcements of new podcasts, new “the one central place to find podcasts” websites, and rants about how podcasting will spell the death of radio, I found the following article from Matt Hartley:

Ctrl-Alt-Del :: SIRIUS/XM and Podcasting - a long overdue match made in heaven

I can’t work out whether this is a really good idea that I just don’t understand, or whether this guy just misses the point completely. He starts fairly rationally:

Let’s face it, most broadcast stations don’t offer much selection in the talk radio realm. With this in mind, I have decided to take the bull by the horns and make SIRIUS aware that we are serious about this thing called Podcasting.

Fair enough. But then he seems to drift off. I was expecting something about informing broadcasters that podcasting is an important phenomenon, and that they ought to “get with the program” and podcast their own shows to reach a wider audience. Instead he takes a backflip and calls for broadcasters to replace (some of?) their existing programming with material from podcasts.

Those of you that would argue that this is not possible with traditional broadcast media are forgetting something very important - satelite radio. Whether it be SIRIUS or XM, each of us has an opportunity to shake the broadcast world to its very core.
. . .
if I have anything to say about it, we will see Podcasts broadcasted in the mainstream one way or the other.

I have to ask, why?

Podcasts already have a distribution medium, through which they can reach listeners all round the world. Why do they need another? As far as I can tell from my reading (and listening to the “On the Media” podcast), Sirius and XM are two (supposedly competing) pay-to-listen radio networks. Why would a listener want to pay to hear podcasts that they can already (a) get for free, (b) get any time they want, and © listen any time they want?

It’s not even as if each listener would get their own personalised choice of podcasts, either. The nature of broadcast media is that everyone gets to listen to the same thing. Podcasting is fundamentally “narrowcasting” - the passionate speaking directly to the interested.

There’s a load of good stuff on the radio already, but I never get to hear it, because it’s never on when I want to listen. I’m honestly baffled why Matt thinks that distributing podcasts by broadcast radio offers any advantages.

Hmm. releasing teasers, trying to stir up interest in the blogosphere, giving away an iPod?

Looks like another product launch is in the offing . . .

Read what little there is, at Odeo: Listen, Sync, Create

Some interesting ideas about interactively filtering and re-aggregating podcast feeds to produce a lean-and-mean feed for automatic transfer to a player.

I want a web based podcast aggregator, but with a few extra features …

I want to browse a directory (populated via opml from ipodder.org) and sample podcasts (with an inline player something like this), save podcast feeds to my personal aggregator, from which I can add individual podcasts to a personal channel (my own custom RSS 2.0 with enclosures) which is sucked into my iPod.

Read more at: Surfarama - Podrolling

This had to come, sooner or later: podcast-specific hosting. It seems a neat idea, but it’s not easy to tell from the site exactly how simple and transperent their publishing system really is.

libsyn // podcasting made easy

As a side note, there is some discusion of what their “unlimited” bandwidth might actually mean at another site.

There’s a lot of good thoughts going on in this post about how to refer to excerpts of podcasts. Options offered include QuotePlay, a little flash appet for playing fragments of audio files, and the use of customised/extendable “playlists". The state of the art in podcast referencing is obviously improving, but there’s a long way to go before it’s as easy as “blog this!".

Read the article at: [blog.forret.com]: QuotePlay and portable SMIL

Although this article doesn’t mention podcasting, it is another good example of how distributing media content using BitTorrent can make real sense. In this case it is concentrating on “time-shifting” TV programs by adding a plugin to a BitTorrent client (Azureus) to scan RSS feeds like a typical podcatcher. The twist that makes this clever is that it also includes searching (although I might prefer to call it filtering) - only RSS entries that match your supplied search patterns are downloaded. This differs from most podcatchers, which seem designed to bring down all the latest RSS enclosures, whatever they contain.

As far as I can tell, if you follow this advice, but set it to point to a prolific podcast site (for example IT Conversations) with a search filter for your particular interests, you should be able to automatically download only the ‘casts that you are interested in. Neat.

I can really see this approach taking off in the future. Currently podcast feeds are like the early days of email - when a new one arrives, it’s exciting, and you listen to it just to see what it is about. Before long, there will be so many that we’ll all need to filter them before they go to the the podcastplayer. Filtering by name (as the technique described here seems to do) is a first step, but categories and tags (a.k.a Ontologies and Folksonomies) would add much more flexibility in selecting what we really want to hear.

Read the how-to at: How-To: BroadCatching using RSS BitTorrent to automatically download TV shows - Engadget - www.engadget.com, but read the comments as well. Apparently getting this running is not all plain sailing.

I don’t use Blogger myself, but for those who do this looks like a neat tutorial on how to set up a podcast feed by combining options in Blogger and FeedBurner.

[blog.forret.com]: How to Podcast with Blogger and SmartCast

Following my article a few days ago about using bittorrent for podcast delivery, I found a site that claims to do just that: DownloadRadio.org Your Talk Radio Download Resource

There’s been a lot of buzz recently about alternatives to searching as a way to find content on the internet. Some people prefer a rigid approach, and group things into predefined categories (imagine a library catalog, where every book is assigned a Dewey Decimal code). Others take a looser approach and allow arbitrary “tags” to be attached to items, assigning them with no particular meaning, but allowing easy fetching of all items with similar tags. The first, rigid, technique is often known as a “taxonomy” approach, and the second technique is sometimes also known by the new term “folksonomy".

Both these techniques have their advantages and disadvantages, but one of the significant advantages of folksonomies is that they are relatively easy to implement in web applications. With this in mind, it’s interesting to read that podcast.net, the self-styled “podcast directory” has implemented a combined taxonomy and tagging approach to categorizing its podcasts.

From the article it’s not too clear whether each feed or each individual podcast gets the tags, or whether there’s some sort of over-ridable “inheritance” of tags from feed to podcast. It’s also not clear whether they have embraced the full power of folksonomies by allowing arbitrary listeners/reviewers to assign their own tags to feeds or ‘casts, in addition to those assigned by the creator.

I think this could eventually evolve into useful stuff, but it seems a bit hazy at the moment.

Read the article at Podcast.net…now with TAGS!

To my mind this is something that should be on every podcaster’s mind. Podcast files are big. Even the short ones are way bigger than web pages. Distributing them by regular HTTP (or FTP) downloads can put a big load on a server.if you get popular. Remember that The horde of hungry browsers that follow slashdot can bring most webservers to their knees even just requesting simple web pages. Now imagine what might happen if that kind of volume of users wanted your podcasts!

One solution to this is a protocol called “BitTorrent". SImply put it shares the download bandwidth by giving small pieces of the file to several different downloaders, and telling the rest to go to them rather than you. It’s a neat idea - the more people want the file, the more they share the load.

Unfortunately, publishing files using BitTorrent is much more complicated than it ought to be. Read the following how-to, give it a try, and agitate for a simpler way of doing it.

Bittorrent Podcasting

Not strictly podcasting (yet), but another step toward the kind of information networks we will all be using in the near future. They use the term PRSS (Personalised RSS) to describe a system where each user gets their own RSS feed of specific information. In this case the system is a library, so the personalised information is things like book reservation arrivals and impending return dates and fines.

The important thing to note is that this is not just an aggregator/splitter (like bloglines, for example) combining existing globally-accessible feeds. It’s user-specific feeds of system-generated content, made available only to relevant users.

We mainly use relatively static, global, RSS feeds today, but the potential of this simple twist is enormous. My mind is fizzing with ideas about how this could enhance user interaction in so many systems. And when we fold media enclosures into the mix we might get user-customised podcasts for things like voicemail messages, or even a kind of asynchronous phone service where any user can put up a mini-podcast tagged with destination userid(s), so it only appears in the feed for the tagged user(s).

The Shifted Librarian: Talis Actually Showing RSS from the Catalog!

There sure are a lot of people searching for a decent business model in podcasting. One bunch seem to reckon that providing a podcast “intranet” solution for business will be a money-spinner. It’s possible. Check out their ideas at loudish - Podcasting for Business.

An interesting little article looking at the growth of podcasting as viewed by feedburner. A nice chart shows accellerating growth in the number of managed feeds, and the text describes some rough numbers about listener (or at least downloader) figures.

As one commenter points out, though, download figures don’t tell much about how (or if) people actually listen to this stuff. I have a niggling feeling that there are a lot of downloaded podcasts sitting unlistened and unloved, but that’s hard to verify one way or another.

Read the article at Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: RSS Metrics, Podcasting

Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: Tutorial: How to Create Podcasts with a Smartphone

I’m always interested in ways to lower the “barrier to entry” of podcasting. For anyone who is never without their phone, this could be a good way to podcast those thoughts and sounds as they happen. The technique described is still a little bit more clumsy than a perfect solution, but it’s one step closer to an audio version of all those camera-phone tools.

I read about this site on a feed about video making but it is jammed full of great stuff for anyone involved in (or thinking about getting involved in) audio production. Techniques, hardware and software reviews, audio to download.

Transom: A Showcase & Workshop for New Public Radio

An analysis of the technology used by Russian music-download outfit allofmp3.com, as it applies to podcasting. Contains some neat thoughts about bundling automatic format conversion and generation in the next generation of podcast server tools.

Makes podcasting by FTP-ing a pre-made MP3 to a basic web server feel a bit like blogging by editing static HTML in a text editor. It’s possible, but why would anyone want to do it?

Read more at line of site: allofmp3.com - the tech - what podcasting needs

Denise Howell on QuotePlay

Here’s a blog about a neat idea - a little bit of shareware that lets you blog references to small sections of a podcast without requiring your readers to listen to the whole tedious lump. It’s called QuotePlay, and looks worth an experiment or two.

As an aside, it looks like the author of this blog puts out podcasts too.

Portals and KM: Gates @ Central Park: Post Your Own

This looks like an interesting combination of blog, wiki and podcast. Join together and contribute content from your mobile phone into a mobil epodcast experience.

Surfarama � Podrolling

Charley at Surfarama likes podcasts, but wants smarter software. He suggests a few ideas to consider

want a podcast aggregator, but with a few extra features…