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Some days you just stumble on something you have been looking for for ages, but haven’t known what it is called or how to look for it. Today was one of those days for me.

Although I have some microphone preamps, they are all built in to other equipment, and not really suitable for portable use. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting some sort of small, battery-powered preamp and maybe taping it to a microphone along with a small flash recorder for ad-hoc interviews and such.

But so far I’ve not had much luck finding a small enough and decently-shaped enough pre-amp, and have been mildly worried by the thought of cables flopping about and giving a generally unprofessional look.

And then, following an unrelated link, I found the MayCom “MicTube". A battery-powered mic pre-amp in the form of a (somewhat lengthened) XLR plug. It fits straight into the cable socket in most dynamic or battery-condenser microphones and has a simple 3.5mm line-level plug on the end of a short lead,so it will plug straight in to any line input (such as my MP3 player/recorder).

Now I have just got to save up to buy it. At £125 it costs more than the MP3 player did. Sigh.

Read more at: Solid State Sound - Maycom MicTube

I’ve been a bit quiet here recently, but I just had to blog this.

Just minutes ago I was idly watching “newsround", the good old voice of news for young people from the BBC, and up came a report about a Scottish school embracing podcasting as a teaching tool. They tried hard to say “MP3 player” rather than “iPod” in that traditional no-product-placement-here BBC manner, but this was spoiled a little by only showing lots of iPods in the pictures.

Sure enough there was also mention of the report on the BBC website.

Read more at CBBC Newsround | Press Pack Reports | Your Reports | We learn by podcasting

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the problems of “barriers to entry". In particular the huge and tangled mass of practical and psychological reasons that we can all find not to do something. It’s a source of continual embarassment to me that I have mumbled out over 200 blog entries about podcasting, without ever actually posting a single podcast myself. I could (of course) ramble on about this and present a whole range of plausible reasons why I haven’t done it. But the bottom line is those darn “barriers to entry". I’ll leave it as an exercise for anyone reading this to come up with a list of things that can get in the way of actually doing it (feel free to add a list of suggestions to comments here).

The strangest thing of all is that I seem to find it easier to record audio and send it to other podcasters (for example Dan and Ryan’s “outchurched”, and the (sadly, apparently moribund) Plain Clothes Poetry), or even to post video on my companion site Make Your Own Video.

So I’m laying down a challenge for myself, and making it public here. By the end of May 2005 I will have posted more than one podcast. If I haven’t - you can shout at me :)

Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone with a podcast that gets too popular too fast. One of my favourites, “Slashdot Review” blew the bandwidth allocation from its hosting provider and was summarily shut down. Andy is apparently in thre process of trying to get his old content back to move to a new server. I hope it works, but everyone should beware. Becoming popular has its price !

Read more at slashdotreview.com

An interesting article which compares synchronous and asynchronous internet usage to getting water. Do you “go to the well", or do you rely on the tap? Do you take your media home in a MP3-player bucket, or sit by a gushing stream?

Read more at: Feeling Kinda Asynchronous

Over the last few days, this site has recieved a huge amount of comment and trackback spam. I still very much welcome genuine comments and trackbacks, but please be aware that you may not see your words or link immediately, as I am adding extra layers of protection.

Grr..

Admittedly, it’s obviously aimed at video, but “videfest” still sounds like a good thing to tag- on podcasting. And if you have been thinking about adding pictures (moving or otherwise) to the sounds, it’s a natural:

VIDFEST is for the creators and producers of digital content. It’s a chance to meet with peers from all over the world, see their work, develop new partnerships, and engage your mind by listening and talking to people like you who explore and push the boundaries of creativity in digital media.

Read more at Vancouver International Video Festival (VIDFEST) 2005 | Bryght

I’ve been having some fun downloading and watching a whole bunch of video blogs (a.k.a vlogs, a.k.a video podcasts, a.k.a videocasts, a.k.a “vogs") over the last few days. Some are wierd, some are personal, some are arty, some are funny. All in all, well worth doing - a lot like podcasts, really.

There are a few strange things about the “vlog” culture, though.

Most significant to me is the way that the videoblogging world seems so separate to the podcasting world. To my naive understanding they have much more in common than they have differences, and yet, I only stumbled on a cluster of vlog feeds pretty much by accident, despite studying podcasting for several months.

Another strange thing is the apparent reverence for the “ant” catcher/player tool - among many vloggers it seems that “ant” is the only way to find and watch vlogs. Unfortunately, ant is Mac-only, cutting off the majority of computer users. Use of this tool seems so entrenched that (even though there is a set of feeds included with ant) they don’t bother listing any interesting feeds on the ant site for us poor Mac-less.

I can only guess that some of these strangenesses are due to the lack of a charismatic centre figure to hang it on. No vlogging “celebs” yet, not even a crusty old ex MTV dude.

Anyone who’s interested in podcasting and media in general will probably have enountered a lot of trumpeting about “the long tail". This is the idea that although there are potentially rich pickings in the servicing the “most popular” of something, in reality there can actually be a larger potential market in “the rest". There’s plenty of web material available if you want to read more, for example this blog, this wikipedia entry, or this wired article.

This all sounds wonderful. The idea of empowering customer choice by making the whole “back catalog” available is an enticing prospect.

BUT, similar forces to those that pushed everything from superstores to TV stations into concentrating on the single largest identifiable group are at work in podcasting and other alternative media. Even though most pundits seem to prefer to ignore them.

Consider these recent blog entries:

From Digital Strips : The Web Comics Podcast with Zampzon & Daku:

we’re running a little tight on server space so we are going to have to trim down the show archives a bit. I will limit the archived shows to 8 episodes at a time. Now is your last chance to grab our earlier ones.

From Dave’s Chalkboard:

I didn’t download the podcasts as the episodes were being aired the first time because I didn’t want to listen to them so soon. Now that I want to listen to them, they are not available.

Supporting the long tail with anything other than hot air costs. It costs in storage space. It costs in index complexity. It places an ever-increasing burden on the freedom to change site designs and structures.

The most insidious part of all this, though is the way that RSS has become almost entirely a “what’s new” mechanism. Finding a few “most recent” podcasts, or blogs, or whatever is easy. Finding anything else is ridiculously hard. As an example, I recently discovered RocketBoom. I liked the few I received from the feed and wanted to download some older issues. But they are not in the feed. Instead I had to trawl through a complex and somewhat irritating set of “archive” web pages, each of which tried to force me to play the show in-page rather than offering a simple download link. In the end I wrote a small script in ruby which guessed at archived filenames and sat in the background trying the next one then sleeping for a while. Still didn’t get a complete set though.

As more and more podcasts, videoblogs, digital photos, independent music and other large media files hit the limits of storage, I predict we are going to see a huge shakeout of old stuff. In turn, the culture will subtly change, and people will take to pre-emptively grabbing stuff “just in case” rather than relying on it being on the net if they need it. Unfortunately this will just move the burden from storage to bandwidth, increasing costs for everyone.

So. if you can, please please commit to keeping all your old material available. And provide RSS lists of the old stuff, so it can be grabbed by regular RSS media-catcher software.

Another intriguing idea. A speech-recognizing search engine that “listens” to podcasts and indexes the words. The site is full of bullish claims, but I think I’ll wait until I see it in action before jumping on the bandwagon.

Podscope is the Internet’s first spoken-word search engine for audio and video podcasts.

Theoretically, parsing words from something like a podcast should be a better deal than real-time speech-recognition. The software can take as long as it likes (within reason) trying different approaches to get a reasonable result. What worries me, though is the diverse nature of podcasters and podcast content.

All real-time speech-recognition systems that I’m aware of require some sort of “training", to get a grip on how the speaker uses even well-known words. Attempting to process an unknown podcast which may be in any language, in any accent, may be a mixture of voices, may have background music or chunks of non-spoken content seems a tall order.

My guess is that they will initially just “cherry pick” words that they are pretty sure about, and simply not index the rest. The trouble is that this is often the opposite of what’s needed when providing a searchable index. When searching you quickly learn that searching for rarer, more-specific words provides a better result; but these are just the kind of words that an automatic parser will lack the context to recognize.

Maybe they’ll get smart and support a wiki-style mass-participation system to allow anyone to correct words and feed back into teaching the system about hot ideas and specific podcasting styles.

Read more at: podscope - We’re listening. You’re searching

I’ve seen this all over the blogs, but I had to mention it. A bunch of ex-names from BBC radio are making shows available in a paid podcast format. The deal seems to be that they put together a “radio"show lasting an hour or so, play some music (but only 60% of each track), do the DJ talk thing, and generally massage the nostalgia of people who used to listen to radio back when it seemed to matter.

You pay roughly the same as an iTunes song, but get an hour of part-songs and relatively mindless blithering. Seems inoffensive enough, but I can’t say that I’ll be rushing to buy any.

Read more at Podshows.com

“tgermer” at NorthWest Noise points out how ludicrous it is to criticise podcasts because there are too many. I agree; it’s like saying that there are too many books in libraries and bookshops, so we should close them all and just have “Readers Digest"…

Many people continue to see podcasting as a negative because they are unable to “consume” or “parse” large amounts of information.

Read more at: Northwest Noise: Manage This!

I’m sure this kind of press release will keep on popping up. More “traditional broadcasters” are trying to muscle-in on podcasting.

It began as a quirkly phenomenom among individuals who wanted to create their own radio shows for on-demand delivery to users of iPods and mp3 players.

But, Podcasting has quickly caught the eye of traditional broadcasters who want “in” on what appears to be a great way to reach new listeners or at least old listeners who somewhere along the way became disenfranchised. Now another company has jumped into the Podcasting fray.

It’s a panic response, but fundamentally unjustified. The podcast market is not like “traditional broadcast". Traditional radio and TV stations make their money on the margins of economies of scale. Setting up studios, cables, transmitters, licences and all that stuff takes big up-front cash. But once in place, adding extra listeners is effectively free. So traditional broadcast companies have developed systems to capitalise on audience figures.

Podcasting turns that on its head. Creating and publishing a podcast is effectively free. But each additional listener adds an extra bandwidth burden. Put simply, podcasts with smaller audiences cost less. Adding extra “generic” listeners is an expense with little or no income associated with it.

Small-audience and ultra-precisely targetted, small-studio podcasts could be an advertisers dream, getting incredible returns per customer. Why pay a bundle to “broadcast” a message to 100,000 listeners who don’t give a fig, when you can “narrowcast” to 15 or 20 who have already expressed an interest for next to no cost?.

My prediction? traditional media will keep a “presence” in podcasting and other point-to-point distribution, but mainly to maintain credibility and keep up listener figures for existing broadcast delivery.

Read more at Radio Quickly Stealing Podcasting From the Original Podcasters

Darren Barefoot stood up to try and point out why he thinks podcasting is over-hyped. His article makes some interesting points, but the real meat of the page is in the comments, where a remarkably civilized discussion roams around the merits and drawbacks of podcasting.

For me, though, the original article can almost be reduced to the following quote:

Personally, I have no commute, and I find that I can’t listen to talking while I’m writing. So, that really limits the available hours for listening to podcasts.

I understand exactly where he is coming from. Listening to a podcast while doing any kind of “brain work” is ineffective and faintly ridiculous. It wasn’t until I got a portable player and started listening during otherwise “dead time” (commuting, chores, eye-time away from the computer monitor …) that I finally got the “high” from the “podcasting dope".

Many people already listen to recorded music at such times. If it works for you, fine. Podcasting is no big deal when you are already time-shifting and location-shifting your music.

Personally, I don’t much enjoy listening to recorded music, and I have never been able to find talk radio I’m interested in, when and where I’ve actually been available to listen. Podcasting neatly fills that gap.

I don’t usually listen to podcasts at my computer any more. That’s reserved for RocketBoom :)

Read more at: Why I’m Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope | Darren Barefoot

The Washinton post has a short aticle about getting into podcasting. Unlike lots of others it’s not just from the listener’s point of view, but actually encourages readers to make their own, complete with hardware and software recommendations:

BUILD YOUR OWN (CYBER) RADIO STATION. What’s a pundit without a mouthpiece? You’ll need one to get heard

The article hits a lot of the right buttons, but skips over the importance of RSS, leaving podcasting as just recording a rant and putting it on the web.

Read more at Create Your Own Podcasts (washingtonpost.com)

Astute readers may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything for the last few days. I’ve been away at a conference without net access. Which means, of course, that I have returned to a mountain of email and RSS to sift through.

At least I got to listen to some of the podcasts that I had downloaded, even though a load more have come in in the meanwhile.

After tons of work, my third e-book is ready! This one is called The Audio: Interviewing, Field Audio, Voicetracking, and More and it is chock-full of tips for people who want to prepare any kind of radio or podcasting piece.

Read more at Third E-Book Ready: “All About the Audio: Interviewing, Field Audio, Voicetracking, and More”

Another general podcasting article, this time from ABC13 in Houston. As such artcles go it’s fairly meaty, but it still makes me smile the way that Adam Curry’s history as a hairy MTV VJ is always mentioned in these kind of articles as if it’s important information that everyone wants to know. Personally, I’ve never seen the guy or his show, and wouldn’t know him from … err … Adam.

Move over blogging, at the moment, podcasting is one of the hottest ‘it’ things on the web and it could stay that way for a while. Taking off last year, podcasting has taken the idea of the typed blog and dumped the text in favor of audio. Now anyone with a computer (or a phone in Holliman’s case) can reach out to the world and become an Internet broadcaster. So far, Holliman has around 1,000 listeners with some as far away as Germany and Sweden.

Read more at: ABC13.com: Houston podcasters becoming Internet celebrities but note that it tried to open a “popup".

I’m still searching for decent ID3-tag manipulation software for MP3 recordings. There are hundrends to choose from, but almost all of them seem designed to tinker with a very small range of values. Typically just artist, genre, album, and year. The ID3 format is capable of so much more, particularly things such as a “play count” to track which podcasts you have listened to, or large text like song lyrics or podcast “show notes” and “transcript".

I’ve recently downloaded ID3-TagIT - THE ID3-Tag-Editor for MP3. This is freeware (they suggest a paypal donation), and runs on Windows. The authors seem to try hard to open up almost all the ID3v2 tags. My only criticism is that some of the tags are still “second class citizens", For example, although I can configure a selection of tags to list next to each file in the MP3 browser, I can’t choose from the full set that can be edited - so no “play count” shown next to the file name :(

I still need to spend more time with this application to find everything its capable of, but if you want a powerful tag editor that understands the widest range of tags I’ve found so far, give it a spin.

Podcast & Portable Media Expo showcases the present and future of portable content with demonstration exhibits and conference sessions devoted to creating, editing, delivering, viewing and profiting from unique audio and video media.

I don’t suppose I’ll make it over to California, but it looks like it might be fun if you are in the area. Exhibit hall is free, or $149 for the conference itself.

Read more at Podcast & Portable Media Expo

The Podcast Hotel, explains Corante’s Alex Williams, will turn a hotel in Portland, Oregon, into a podcast and videoblog studio. It’s a place where people come to learn and share how these content creation tools can be used in any way they want, be it for their personal use, their business or their community.

Surely these sort of events should be going on in community colleges and local universities, too. Several years ago I attended a short evening class about making video at my local college. I learned a huge amount. Sadly, they don’t seem to offer that sort of course any more.

Hmm … Maybe they’d pay me to teach such a course …

Read more at unmediated: The Podcast Hotel

In amongst a blog article full of meanderings on things such as airline peanuts and teaching English, I found this little nugget:

Which brings me to my next point. Since when did “So"become the official way to begin a response? I’m a big fan of the podcasts on itconversations.com which records interviews and conferences with geeks and lets you listen to what they have to say without smelling their breath. But these people can absolutely not answer a question without starting it with with “So …” or “So … it turns out that” And it’s not only geeks; graduate students are also infected. It’s such a sick disease. Don’t you people understand how belittling it sounds? You don’t have to tell me “So … it turns out, little man, that the world is actually round” - just tell me it’s a freaking sphere. I think this should be official podcast (and grad school) etiquette: no starting responses with “So".

So … we should all maybe think about how we reply. Has “so” become the new “err” or “umm” ?

Read more at El Oso, El Moreno, and El Abogado � Blog Archive � Half A Life

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine writes about the possibilities of using closed-caption data associated with a video feed as a source of searchable information. In particular, the time-synchronized nature of the caption information would allow linking to specific sections of a media file, from a text search.

Chicago Captioning Corp. added closed captioning to the video.

They did that in an effort to serve the 10 percent of Americans who are hard of hearing. And that’s great.

But I see another important use that is of value to 100 percent of Internet users:

By attaching a script to the video, we get metadata associated with it. That makes the video searchable via Google et al. That means that the content of the video can be analyzed. That means we can link to specific content.

This sounds great, but closed captions are only available for video, right?

Well, no. MP3 audio files have had “lyrics” support for a long time, and a surprising number of players will play “karaoke” audio files. And “karaoke” is nothing but time-synchronized text associated with an audio file, exactly like closed-caption data in video.

While I’ll agree that supporting closed-caption metadata should be a priority for video-blogging software, it’s currently a reality that there are far fewer videoblogs being produced than audio-only podcasts. Supporting “lyrics” (a.k.a “show notes") and “karaoke” (a.k.a “transcript") metdata in podcast creation, distribution and player tools would be a much more significant step.

It seems to me that there is even an “organic” way to achieve this. If podcast creation tools routinely supported display of “teleprompt"-style notes while recording, it would encourage people to enter their notes that way rather than fumbling with paper or a wordprocessor. Once the text is in the creation application, and scrolling in time with the input, it’s a snap to output synchronized and unsynchronized metadata to the recorded file. No tedious manual synchronization or after-the-fact transcription needed.

It’s my most popular rant at the moment. Audio creation, distribution and player applications are really missing out on the richness of opportunities in metadata. So much that people using these systems don’t even realize that things could be so much better.

To quote jeff Jarvis again:

Metadata, man, metadata.

Read more at BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis

David F. Warlick, who describes himself as a “Technology Consultant and Author", has gathered a useful and fairly comprehensive page of information and links about podcasting. He has a particular emphasis on educational podcasting, but the links are still generally interesting.

There is a growing amount of information available on the Internet about podcasting and a grown number of podcast programs. Below are some links to podcasting resources on the Net

Read more at Podcasting – DFW

Some people reckon that podcasting is complicated. Lloyd Davis thinks otherwise …

Read more at: Perfect Path: Podcasting…complicated???? Do me a favour!

Hmm. Looks like the Sony PSP is lining up to become an “iPod for video". Software is already appearing to support podcast-like auto-download …

“people in Japan are creating weird little clips already encoded in the PSP format” to distribute through BitTorrent, says Cherian. “They want other people to download and watch (the videos), and they want to get comments and feedback. I think it’s going to be pretty popular.”

Read more at: Cinema Minima: Personal Digital Cinema: news service for movie-makers

This really made me laugh out loud. A really sharp poke at the soft underbelly of podcasting, and a strangely cool idea at the same time.

Plog! the papercasting weblog

Chris Seibold at “applematters” has an interesting analysis of the state of podcasting, and possible future trends.

When Hadley Stern opined that podcasting would be dead within a year the notion gave me serious pause. After all I am involved in a podcast in a very small way and, since I lack any natural ability, I put a lot of work into each segment. I’d hate to think all my efforts would be for naught within a year. Clearly some research was needed. Was Hadley right? Is podcasting nothing more than a short-lived fad? To make the decision I listened to a weekend worth of podcasts. My conclusion: podcasts aren’t going away any time soon but I sure wish most of them would.

One thing I think Chris may be missing is that podcasting, just like blogs and web sites, does not exist in a resource-constrained environment. There are no frequency slots to bid for, no huge up-front infrastructure costs for transmitters, and so on. The barrier to entry is low, so people will continue to make podcasts.

The key concept in podcasting is that it is narrow and specific. I can keep looking and listening and finding stuff that’s closer and closer to what I want. I’d rather listen to podcasts that are perfect for me - I don’t care if they are “popular” or “big". On the other hand, for advertising-driven content, where audience figures matter, content providers are pretty much forced to produce output that’s least inoffensive to the largest identifiable demographic. That makes it bland. That makes it same-old. That makes it like most radio and TV programming. This stuff will serve the fine purpose of drawing listeners in to podcasting, but many of them will move on, once they realise there’s more out there.

Sure, there will be “big names". But unlike radio, TV, or movies, they won’t find it easy to “crowd out” the smaller players. I don’t listen to Adam Curry, I don’t read slashdot or boing boing, I don’t queue up to see the “summer blockbuster", or buy chart music. There are a lot like me - what we have in common is that we are not the same.

Read more at applematters

Harold J Johnson over at Audioblogs.info has got the scent of money:

Ladies and Gentlemen, there’s money to be made in podcasting. That’s right–money, honies–and it’s already being made by some real podcasters.

Read more at audioblogs.info: Podcasters Getting Paid in a Big Way

One complaint – nay, suggestion – for Lehrer: Don’t JUST put up podcasts; also put up MP3s so we can download any show without necessarily subscribing to a podcast feed. Please.

Read more at Podcasts grow like dandelions

Makes me think that the whole “RSS enclosures” setup would have been better replaced by something simple like one or more <a href=’..’ rel=’enclosure’>…</a> tags in the body text of a blog. That way all podcasts would automatically appear as individually downloadable links. And search engines would know what to do with the links.

Wikimedia Commons looks like another free-media resource I didn’t know about.

The Wikimedia Commons is a project that provides a central repository for free images, music, sound, video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project. Unlike images uploaded on other projects, images on Commons can be embedded on pages of all Wikimedia projects.
The Commons was launched on September 7,2004.Currentlyitcontains 8108 collections.

Read more at Wikimedia Commons

I love these strange ideas that push the limits. “Whole Wheat Radio” has set up a phone line linked direct to a live audio feed. The idea is that anyone can call and leave a message which will be “broadcast". No censorship, no rules. Feels like an audio version of all those (pretty lame) “guest book” scripts you can add to a web site. Maybe it will have more “zing” (and less spam) with audio?

Just a reminder that the “Wheatgram” telephone is available and does work. What is it? It’s an answering machine plugged directly into the webcast stream. When you call and leave a message, that message goes out on-the-air after the current song that’s playing is done. The message is also archived and will play randomly at various times too.

Why mention it yet again? Because it’s your chance to be creative with audio and reach an interested audience without having to set up a podcast or a webcast or know anything technical except how to talk over a telephone. The phone has taken over 1,000 calls but it still hasn’t come close to reaching its potential.

I’m interested in what happens when you give out a phone number that is attached directly to audience ears. Are people able to differentiate between what is ‘appropriate’ (i.e. creative) and what isn’t (i.e. advertising)? Given a forum with a particular slant (our listening audience) how long will it take before the public abuses a priviledge to the point that I have to start screening the phone ins? Can it be self-policeing?

Read more at Whole Wheat Radio Blog, Talkeetna - Alaska

copy-art.net is a repository of “free for non-commercial use” media. There may be something in there of interest to podcasters.

On copy-art.net you are free to download, copy, use, change, display and distribute all works.

You can also upload the works that you modify or post comments and feedback.

For photos and movies use the gallery uploads (supported file types: jpg, gif, png, avi, mpg, mpeg, wmv, mov, swf)

For music files, mp3s, waf, pdf, aiff, docs… use the uploader.

You don’t have to login or register to use the website to upload your work and post your news.

Please remember to credit the original author and note that commercial use of the works is not allowed.

Read more at copy-art.net===copyright free -

I just read about a new buzzword term “spotcast". Currently it seems to be defined as a podcast of one minute or less. This sounds like a cool challenge to me. I’ve seen some incredible video stuff done with such harsh time constraints.

To me the important aspect of working on ultra-short pieces is that you are free to focus on getting tiny details perfect, without becoming overwhelmed by the size of the whole program.

So why not try a “spotcast"?

Read more at SPOTCAST: SXSW | EchoRadio

Following from my irritation with loading an OPML feed list into nimiq yesterday, I’ve come to a more general conclusion. Podcast software should simply never make noises.

This may sound a bit harsh - after all, audio output is an accepted part of many applications. Windows warbles when it starts up; my FTP application spits out boings, chirps, and beeps to remind me when transfers have finished, or logins fail, and many applications issue a summary “plonk” if anything goes wrong. But I reckon that a whole lot of people never hear these noises. Why? because they run their PCs with sound turned off. I know I do.

But here’s the kicker. Podcasting finally offers a reason to turn those speakers back on or plug in those headphones. Then what do you find? it’s almost impossible to get through a single podcast without irritating bleeps and twangs from some piece of software. And many of these bits of software are even aimed at podcast listeners!

In my mind, there is no justification for the casual use of sound alerts in any software that is at all concerned with audio. And that includes podcatchers, audio sequencers, MP3 and ID3 browsers and editors, and anything else used in podcasting. After all, anyone using the software is almost guaranteed to want to listen to audio using the same machine at some point.

Authors of software take note. If your software is useful for anything to do with audio (and that includes podcasting), it should run silent.

I guess this was a bit of a rant. Needed to be said, though.

After looking at techpodcasts yesterday, I found another take on the idea of a podcast community today. Unlike techpodcasts, which is based on common content, this one is based on geography.

As far as I can tell, podcast con UK is trying to grow a community of podcasters located in the United Kingdom, and even plans to organize a physical meetup convention later in the year. If you are located in the UK, I suggest you take a look.

B.K. DeLong writes

one of the major things that’s been annoying me is the complete lack of proper ID3 name tag metadata in the MP3s that make up these podcasts

Amen. The sooner the podcasting community sees the value in sensible metadata, the sooner podcasts can become “first class citizens” of the internet, like web pages and emails.

Read more BrainStream: Note to Podcasters: Where’s your ID3-f00 ?, add sensible, meaningful ID3v2 metadata to your own podcasts, and petition your creation, distribution, searching, downloading, and playing software makers to properly support a wide range of tags.

And please don’t leave out my personal favourite: the PCNT “have I listened to this yet?” tag.

I’ll say up front that I don’t like advertising in my media (and here).

Dave Writes:

So instead, create commercial information, in any form you like and make it available. This is very different from sneaking it in, or being annoying. Make it available. Then you have a responsibility to be: Informative. Respectful. Entertaining. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Given the choice I would eliminate advertising completely from “real-time” media (such as audio and video). It’s simply too obtrusive, however “relevant” someone else may think it. This “active” advertising steals my time and offers little or nothing in return. On the other hand, I’m a big fan of providing useful, informative information on the web and in print. In both of those cases I can choose content of interest to me, and ignore (or never see) the rest.

I can’t really see any point in traditional “blanket” advertising any more. The spam-like attitude of tell everyone, and any interested ones will get the message too is what has driven development of a huge variety of ways to eliminate ads. Pop-up filters, ad-eliminating tivos, copyright-busting bittorrents and podcasts of programs with the ads removed. The proportion of such ads that are of interest to me is vanishingly small. So my life is made much better by eliminating all ads completely, even though I miss some that I might actually find interesting or useful. Ultimitely this benefits nobody but the perveyors of ad-removal potions.

Here on the internet, we have much better solutions. Google, PubSub, the blogosphere, even the likes of Amazon and eBay, all allow me, the potential buyer, to drive the process. Simply putting real, detailled, current, searchable information on a web site can attract buyers from across the world. Setting up a web site costs a fraction of an ad campaign, and (provided the site isn’t filled with irrelevant sales crap) will get an astonishingly high proportion of interested, willing, buyers among the visitors. Add a blog, or similar site updates, with a RSS feed, and the information about latest releases and offers will percolate around, passed on from one interested customer or topic-specific aggregator to another. No traditional ad campaign can give this kind of ultra-precise targetting. All at negligible cost.

And yet, so many vendor web sites lack basic information about products, services, price, and availability. They would apparently rather spend thousands (or millions!) with an ad company than take a few hours to put detailled product descriptions and prices on the front page of a web site.

My key distinction in all this is between selling as typefied by traditional in-your-face advertising, and buying, which is what customers want to do.

It was probably just a quirk of my linguistic abilities, but this was all sparked in me, many years ago, during a visit to the Netherlands. I noticed a building marked with a sign “te koop” (roughly “to buy"), and was struck how that contrasted with the equivalent English “for sale". More and more I have come to the conclusion that I simply don’t want to be “sold” to. How different would the world be if “to buy” rather than “to sell” were the driver for commerce.

Read more at Dave’s Advertising-in-the-age-of-podcasts Manifesto

The title says it all, really. Passes both the “deliver via RSS” and “you don’t need an iPod” tests. It also discusses uses for podcasts beyond the obvious “mix tapes” and open-mike rambling.

Read more at What is Podcasting?

Adam Curry mentioned PodGuides.net.

What’s a PodGuide?.
A PodGuide is a very simple thing. It’s the combination of a map (PDF) of a certain place and a series of audio tracks (mp3) which you can download for your iPod. Think of an audio tour in a museum, but not limited to just that. You could have a PodGuide about the 10 coolest pubs in London for example, or a PodGuide which shows you the most known historic buildings in Bruges. But it might just as well be about the most strangest front doors in Kleit (no you don’t know Kleit).

This is an idea that brought back fond memories to me of a whole bunch of water-cooler and coffee-pot business ideas I used to talk about. This was mostly during a particularly lengthy and tedious software development contract back in 2001/2002.

One of my many “cunning plans” was a community web site where people submit recorded “tour guides” of their local area and get some sort of small performance-based “royalty” payment to provide an incentive. Potential visitors download and rate the tours. Back then MP3 players were less than ubiquitous, and bandwidth was more expensive, so one of the possible income streams was to sell/rent customized tours of larger areas pre-loaded on to a player. Other potential money-earners included selling “ad space” for things like “why not take a break and rest your feet at Mary’s Café". or “don’t miss the museum of wierd stuff, down the alley on your left".

Like so many ideas, we never did anything about it. Still seems like a good idea, though.

Checking my referrers I found that podthings.com, a shiny new (first post March 12, 2005) podcast-focussed news-and-thoughts blog, has blogrolled me. Many thanks, I’m happy to reciprocate.

On that blog I also noticed a link to another new podcast blog, podcastwizard.com (first post February 28, 2005).

Welcome to the fray!

If you are a regular visitor you have probably noticed that I’ve not posted anything for the last few days. I’ve been having all sorts of strange network and system problems, and posting to this blog never seemed to reach the top of the “Todo” list. Somehow, backing up my PC in case it’s all about to go “pear shaped", seemed a better choice. :)

Things seem to have settled down a bit, now, though. So I’ll try and add a bit more content today.

Sorry.

If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll know that I love writing about and linking to other podcasting sites. Linking is what makes the web so powerful. So you’d think I’d be keen to link to a site with the tag line “Podcasting Tools - Daily Podcasting News and Information".

Unfortunately, I’ve got a bit of a bad taste in my mouth at the moment, because it looks like the author of the “Podcasting Tools” site has a different view on the matter. I was browsing around and found a blog post that consists solely of most of my recent article on podcast hosting. Admittedly, if you look very carefully, there is a small “more information” link which points back to my original article, but the text offers no suggestion that the writing is not the original work of “Podcasting Tools".

I generally have a pretty easy-going view of reuse of my content - I have chosen to put it up under a ‘Creative Commons’ licence, so it’s explicitly made available for reuse, but one of the things that licence does imply is that if you reuse any of my work, you should acknowledge that it is mine and not claim copyright yourself. The site author must be aware of this, as he/she even has a section about Creative Commons licencing on a how to podcast page.

Creative Commons - Creative Commons offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists. Creative Commons has built upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” copyright. They are a nonprofit. All of their tools are free.

I’d like to think that common courtesy and web usage would lean in the same direction.

I can’t find a name for the site author so far, although the pages are marked with a sweeping “Copyright NotePage Inc, 2005″. There is a contact email address of webmaster@podcasting-tools.com. I’ll be getting in touch with some gentle suggestions, and if anyone else would care to back me up, it would be much appreciated.

So, by all means take a look at Podcasting Tools, but beware that the site content may not be what it seems.

“Forbes” has a fairly straight-forward article on podcasting. It passes the “mention RSS” test, but falls a bit short on the “you don’t need an iPod” test.

The author, Arik Hesseldahl, appears to be hung up on the idea of satellite radio as some major “threat to conventional radio", though, and seems to be in danger of confusing its effects with those of podcasting.

The nature of radio is changing in part because of the popularity of the satellite services XM Satellite Radio (nasdaq: XMSR - news - people ) and Sirius Satellite Radio (nasdaq: SIRI - news - people ). Digital radio is coming to conventional radio soon, but its going to take some time to catch on with consumers who will have to buy special digital-friendly receivers.

As I have said before I don’t really think that satellite radio is as significant as it may seem. Sure there’a a lot of channels, and they claim an absence of commercials, but fundamentally it’s still broadcast, with all the problems of demographics and scheduling that entails.

Read the article at Forbes.com: Podcasting The Night Away

A simple but very useful list of podcasts from public radio. Worth checking out - I certainly found some interesting ones I wasn’t aware of.

PublicRadioFan.com - Podcast directory

James Farmer, very much a “put your money where your mouth is” education blogger, presents a scathing criticism of big-budget lecture recording/streaming systems, and recommends (you’ve guessed it) podcasting:

- A lecture delivered to a theatre is utterly and totally different to the kind of thing you’d broadcast as just audio (if it’s any good it’ll be interactive & unbroadcastable!)

- It has become painfully obvious that even the most diligent of learners is not going to sit for 60 mins or more at his or her PC listening and focussing on what you produce

Read more at: incorporated subversion: Why you have wasted all that money you’ve spent on streaming lectures

It must be a good job, then, that my local college hasn’t spent any money on anything like that :)

I was just looking through my referrers and found an unexpected one which turned out to be a great site based on a simple idea: PodcastExpert.com - Where the Podcasting community is the expert

In their own words:

PodcastExpert.com is a community-driven site for resources on creating, producing, and receiving Podcasts.

We strive to have the most relevant links about equipment, software, and audio production techniques that will assist you in making your Podcasts easier to produce, sound better, and attract more listeners.

Also, we seek to shorten the learning curve for those just getting into Podcasting by giving them straightforward information about how to receive Podcasts, and possibly start their own show.

From software to hardware, mics to mixers, RSS aggregators to audio editors, PodcastExpert.com has something for everyone!

They already have a bunch of good links, on various topics, including one to my recent essay on podcast hosting. Well worth checking out.

If you have been reading this blog you will know that I have been slowly getting more and more incensed by the lack of support for some kind of simple “played” flag for podcasts. In my mind the most significant criterion for deciding which podcasts to listen to (or load onto a player) is whether I have already listened to it or not. It seems common sense. Other kinds of applications support this basic concept - I can’t think of an email program that doesn’t make the distinction between read and unread mail of primary importance.

So, spurred on by the video I mentioned in my previous post, I took a look at two free MP3 tag editors: Media Monkey and MP3 Tag Tools.

Media Monkey came recommended. When I started it up it was very reminsicent of iTunes in look and feel. Unlike some other MP3 tag managers it also includes a player and some sort of synchronization facility for transferring files to a portable player. Initial impressions were good, it allowed me to correct things like dodgy Genre tags both individually and in bulk, and has a pretty flexible browsing system so it’s easy to find tracks of interest. Looking across the information about each track I even found a “played” column! “Cool", I thought to myself. “I’ll just go and mark all the ones I’ve already listened to as played…”

Umm. No. I can’t understand the logic. Just about all the other fields are directly editable, but the “played” field is read-only. And it gets worse. Although Media Monkey will set the “played” counter if I play a track using its built-in player, it never stores that information in the file itself. The software even has a table in the help to explain:

Note the “Times Played” tag, and the way it claims that it can not be stored as a tag in any of the formats. Now take a look at the “frames” defined in the ID3 V2 standard, in particular about 2/3 of the way down the page, where it states:

Play counter
With this frame you can count how many times a file has been played.

I’ll probably keep Media Monkey around for manipulation of other tags, but I won’t be using its “played” tracking. I also won’t be using its player. The player component has the immensely irritating habit of disappearing from the screen whenever the track list window loses focus, which means that my most common way of working (set up a podcast or playlist, then minimise all but the progress indicator and control buttons) is simply impossible. I tried it, and when the phone rang It took me about 10 seconds to find the pause button.

A very pretty, professional-looking application, which misses the point a bit.

Mp3 Tag Tools, on the other hand, has the look of a more bare-bones tool. No multiple, “skinned” look and feel, no pretensions to be iTunes. So far so good. Unfortunately its tag support is also bare-bones, though:

Of the nearly 80 “standard” ID3v2 tags, and the ever-present option for creating custom tags, MP3 Tag Tools supports just 7. And none of them is the play count.

Of the two applications, Media Monkey is the most capable, but it lacks flexibility where it counts for me. And I find all that strangely-implemented “integrated solution” stuff to be a bit overpowering. So I’m still looking.

If anyone reading this knows of an application that can set and reset the ID3v2 PCNT tag on one or more files, please let me know.

The more I look around, the more important proper use of ID3 tags in podcasts appears. It seems that others agree. I found a 41MB movie demonstrating good use of some ID3 tags. It’s a good run through (despite a few very minor techincal misunderstandings), although doing it as video seems a bit wasteful when one of the flash screen-capture programs would probably have resulted in a much smaller file.

Download the movie from the internet archive at Program Details for The Importance of ID3 Tags in Podcasting

Doug Kaye tells it like it is:

A few minutes ago I was sitting here in the studio, taking a break, and listening to “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me” on NPR. I had the FM tuner playing through the studio monitors when the phone rang. My immediate reaction was to look for the Pause button. TiVo and podcasting: I’m converted.