Matt May is a Web accessibility specialist, and has written on the interaction of people and technology since 1995. He keeps his own weblog at bestkungfu.com, and produces a podcast called Staccato, which features Creative Commons-licensed music.
Alex Williamsblogs, consults and produces unconference style events, where people immerse in DIY media. These are fun occasions, designed for people who want to get together with authors, artists, technologists and leading thinkers to converse, eat, listen to music, write, shoot photos and post podcasts and videoblogs. Alex also works with companies to establish DIY approaches, where writing, photography, voice and video come together to create new conversations and communities. Alex is currently fascinated with digital photography. His girlfriend calls him a Flickrholic. Send Alex a nice message: alexhwilliams at gmail.com.
Nicole Simon loves blogging and podcasting, dashed with an European view. As consultant she helps to facilitate such tools for business purposes or personal publishing empires. She can be found at cruel to be kind and on her private blog Useful Sounds.
Roland Tanglao is a well known podcasting enthusiast and a passionate advocate of blogs, RSS, and social software as a means of online expression for people, organizations and businesses. He is a prominent participant in the blogosphere and online communities and one of the founders of Bryght and as Bryght's Chief Blogging Officer reads hundreds of blogs daily. He graduated from the University of Waterloo, worked at Nortel Networks where he ran its first internal corporate blog, has has been blogging since 1999, and was the first business blogging consultant in Canada.
Just Released the 2008 Tribalization of Business study - an in-depth look at how 140+ organizations are managing and measuring online communities
The planet of podcast paraphernalia is not apt to be particularly profitable. (No, I really didn't mean to be that alliterative, but thanks for thinking about me.) We're not apt to see big hardware companies pouring millions into R&D, for example, to get us that perfect portable rig, because the market doesn't exist, at least for the time being. But at the same time, I'm seeing signs that perhaps things are moving in our direction, and some people are marketing right at DIY podcast producers.
For one thing, the maker of the de-facto flagship products are showing that adding podcast functionality was not just a throwaway feature. Apple, who from what I see has made quite a few improvements to the iTunes podcasting interface, has also been tweaking the firmware now found in the newest iPod (known variously as "5G", "video iPod", and "white"). On the recording side, the iPod's artificial limitation of 8kHz, 8-bit audio has been raised to a healthy CD-quality stereo (though a microphone that actually enables such recording apparently has yet to exist). And Todd Ogasawara notes the addition of new-podcast indicators in the 5G iPod interface, as well as on the iPod nano. Sounds like they listened to the customer -- or perhaps became podcast listeners themselves, and experienced their own frustrations. Either way, good work.
More interestingly, one of my preferred pushers of electronic crack specifically targeting the casual podcaster. Musician's Friend, online partner to the dangerously-halfway-between-work-and-home Guitar Center, now has a podcasters section, featuring a range of p-popping, knob-twiddling goodness, repackaged just for you.
We're not quite to the point where Best Buy has a podcasting software section, of course, but I have to believe that at least a few marketing departments have the wheels turning, and we could be seeing a shift from podcasting-as-hack to podcasting-as-feature. Just imagine, not far from now, a selection of software for which something like valid RSS or MP3 compression isn't just a selling point, but so common that it's not worth mentioning.
Matt May at Corante reports that “podcasting paraphernalia” (a word spell-checkers were born to flag) are starting to aggregate in interesting ways. I mean dangerous ways, of course, in my own case, seeing as how Guitar Center/Musician&#... [Read More]
Alex Williams
Matt May
Nicole Simon
Roland Tanglao
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Tracked on November 3, 2005 10:36 AM