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March 25, 2005
Is BlogMatrix Sparks podcasting?
Posted by Phil Yanov
BlogMatrix Sparks claims to be the first to market with an integrated podcasting/podcatching application. "BlogMatrix Sparks! 2.0 makes podcasting easy and affordable”, says founder David Janes.
The press release goes on to say that BlogMatrix Sparks!™ podcasters can:
* Record podcasts directly on their computer with a microphone and a mouse click.
* Mix music with the podcast.
* Record up to 8 tracks for a single podcast.
* Automatically store their podcasts on the BlogMatrix server for others to enjoy
A quick review of the website shows that even if all of the claims are true, they may not tell the whole story. It appears that Sparks preferentially publishes bit torrents rather than mp3s and it publishes entries to a proprietary directory that is read by their Windows software client rather than standard xml feeds.
A review of their website turned up few sample podcasts and they were even scarcer if you weren't willing to download via bit torrent. I eventually found one that allowed me to download an mp3 and took a listen. It was clearly someone's equipment test, their very first podcast. The podcast was simple, consisting of just one person talking. There was no music, no apparent need for mixing, and come to think of it, it wasn't even really a podcast. The show was internet radio as I had downloaded an mp3 file from a link, the simple directory offered bit torrents, html host pages, and mp3 files, but no RSS feeds. I scanned the site again, but didn't find anything that looked like an actual podcast. (I'll try to check back in a month or two.)
My thoughts: Sparks might be easy to use -- you'll have to load the software on a Windows machine to know for sure and quite frankly I wasn't willing. But even if you do load the software and find it easy to use, the question remains "Without mp3 as standard and without RSS feeds that can be loaded into any aggregator, is Sparks really podcasting or is it an odd configuration of cobbled together software that in the end serves to create proprietary internet radio?"
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1. David Janes on March 29, 2005 8:27 AM writes...
Hi Phil,
It would have been nice if you had ran the application (or dropped us a line) before writing this article, as it contains several misconceptions and technical mistakes about podcasting in general and Sparks! in particular which are probably misleading your readers.
BlogMatrix is totally committed to weblogging and podcasting standards and is built around an infrastructure of RSS feeds, OPML directories and BitTorrent.
RSS is threaded everywhere throughout the application. For example, on our weblog page (http://blogmatrix.users.blogmatrix.com/podcasts/) the very first link you'll see on the left hand side "Subscribe to this Podcast". The link? "http://blogmatrix.users.blogmatrix.com/podcasts/index.xml". This is an RSS 2.0 feed. Additionally, if you're using an RSS reader with autodiscovery (i.e. just about every one of them), it will automatically detect the HTML tag at the beginning of every web page.
Guilty, we didn't have an orange RSS button. Now we do.
We are using BitTorrent as our preferential delivery mechanism, as you have correctly noted. Why are we doing this? Firstly, this is supported by every major podder application out there: iPodder, jPodder, and Doppler (with an add in) and of course, our product. This is what podcasting is and this is what podcasting supports. Secondly, we don't believe that "straight" HTTP MP3 delivery is truely a scalable solution without unlimited amounts of cash. Can there be Instapundits and Boing Boings -- low cost, non-corporate sponsored solutions -- delivering just MP3s? Late last year, Microsoft had trouble delivering full text _RSS feeds_ because the demand on its bandwidth was so high. Instapundit seems to be blessed with free or nearly free hosting from the folks at HostMatters. Boing Boing has had to paper it's site over with ads to simply cover its HTML delivery costs.
BitTorrent is the infrastructure that's going to make podcasting available and affordable for everyone, not just the few. However, we realize that Torrent is not for everyone which is why supply a suplementary link on every page serving the underlying MP3 file (with a limited but very reasonable number of downloads available). However, Torrent done correctly (which we believe we have) should be invisible to the end user.
Yes, there isn't ten thousand podcasts on our site yet. We are less than six days old. However, if anyone out there is interested in giving it try and making a podcast of their own, here's some screen shots (http://www.blogmatrix.com/sparks_main/screenshots/).
If you have any questions, you have my e-mail above and our phone number is on the site.
Regards, etc...
Permalink to CommentDavid Janes
Founder, BlogMatrix
http://www.blogmatrix.com