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.
We don't need no transmitters, but perhaps Transistr's? The popular crossplattform podcastcher iPodderX has found a new name: Transistr:
Well, our dealings with trademark attorneys have taken far longer than expected, and we apologize for the delay. However, we're happy to announce that, yes, we finally have a new name!
After searching through the 3,000 or so entries we received, the new name is: Transistr
When you hear the words "podcast charts" - would the second thought coming to your mind be "from the BBC"? No?
It should, because the BBC website published their numbers for on demand content for December and named the press release "Best of Moyles tops BBC podcast chart".
The experiment was started last year and the BBC plans to continue and study this new phenomena:
Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactive, said: "It's fantastic to see how the demand for radio downloads has grown since we first offered them in 2004. These figures underline the enduring relevance of radio in the digital world."
Twenty programmes were made available in BBC Radio's download and podcast trial last May.
At the end of the 2005 it was announced that the trial would be extended into this year and would include more programmes, in order to gain a better understanding of listeners' preferences.
While for the moment the BBC programs are "just" redistributed as podcast, I am sure we will see the day when Radio itself will serve as "just second" distribution channel!
Allow your users to keep the content at a place they want: One lesson of the last year has been that users want to have their content / their pictures / their podcast not locked in. Websites and applications who understand this have done better than other who tried to lock in the users.
Widgets for your blog is one favorite example - you can use a Frappr map on your page or as of now also a flash player from Odeo on your site. But they go a step further and allow me to use anything I find on Odeo:
If you find something on Odeo that you’d like to share with others on your web site or blog, you can include a Flash player. Just click the HTML link on any audio page and copy the code. Then paste the code in your site or blog editor and publish like normal. The player will show up on that page.
Sounds fantastic, right? Well, not so much.
The fact that I am publishing my podcast also on the Odeo page in my channel is something I am restrictively using for distributing. It would also be okay if I would be able to easily access my own channel with such a player - but not anything I find on Odeo.
Redistributing content I don't have the licensing to is will get me into problems - and it leaves the question whether for example Odeo can be held responsible for encouraging copyright infringements?
Th Unofficial Apple Weblog shows how to change your podcast feed in iTunes. The TUAW post also has a handy document you may want to peruse. It's the technical specification document for podcasting and iTunes. As they write at TUAW, the docment is a wealth of information.
Audible Wordcast Service is now available together with a major relaunch of their website. Take a look, compare the basic and pro service, and don't miss out on the clever statement about "podcasting is just hot air".
John Federico, Sr. Director of Business Development Podcasting, was so kind to offer an interview on Wordcast back in December. Assuming his offer still stands - any questions you would like to ask him?
Podcasting is on the radar for marketing execs but their sites are set more than a year out for investing more dollars into the medium.
That's the conclusion of a Marketing Sherpa, ad:tech study which polled 644 marketers who spend 44% of their total ad and marketing budgets on the Web. The study looked at the 2005 best and worst practices in internet marketing and a look at the year ahead.
Eighteen percent of respondents said they will definitely spend money on an in-house podcasts with 31 percent stating that doing an in-house podcast is more than a year out.
Fourteen percent said they will sponsor a podcast in 2006, while 32 percent said sponsorship is definitely more than a year out.
These numbers make you wonder about the success of podcasters trying to make commercial plays. How will the the market shake out in the year ahead for the podcasting pioneers if revenues from advertisers are limited? And, who will get the dollars available? I expect that the mainstream media players will continue to be the big winners. They are already attracting major advertisers for their podcasts and can offer packages that include podcasting sponsorships as an added value.
Here's what they say you can see with your video iPod:
In this week's 7 Days programme: see the man with bionic arms... an animal version of Big Brother... the stuntman who goes up, up, and away... an Elvis celebration and a soapbox spectacular.
Podcastsing is taking a next natural step in its development by tying into enterprise applications, hand-in-hand with blogging, its close relative and partner.
Blogs are the first to make this jump as ties to enterpirse and CRM applications are made by setting permissions to a corporate blog with access privileges to specific categories. Within these captegories, podcasts are uploaded, linked from the blog.
I have a few corporate clients who, like most anyone, just want to know the best way to use a blog or a podcast. One of these clients has a sales force that is on the road three to four days a week. One thing I recommend people in companies such as these are audits to define where may be the best fit for a blog or podcast strategy. For this holding company of heavy industrial equipment makers, their sales force needs better access to information related to new products that have higher margins. As the sales force is on the road most of the time, blogs may be less beneficial than a daily podcast that they can listen to as they are driving and trying to prepare for their next stop on their sales journey.
Podcasts can be tied in with blogs that deliver custom information from enterprise applications. And this is where a smart phome, integrated with a feed reader that can download mp3s seems like a natural evolution in how podcastng emerges as not only a wonderful consumer application but also one that provides real advantage for a mobile workforce.
Australia'a Greens leader Bob Brown is podcasting from his mobile phone. He finds it easy to go directly to people simply by pulling over in his car, getting out his mobile phone, recording a comment about an issue and then posting it directly to the web. He now has five shows since he started the effort in early December.
Seems like politcians could podcast pretty easily and a lot more frequently if they used their mobile devices just to let us know what they are thinking about. I'd like to know who is the most prolific political podcaster. Who is really making use of podcasting to be more authentic and real? Are politicians capable of creating podcasts that are real and authentic? My bet is that the list of podcasts from politicians that fit this mold is pretty short. But if you know of a podcast from a politician that really seems authentic, please let me know. I'd like to hear what they have to say.
Allocine's podcast feed packages up movie trailers in iPod-friendly formats for its audience in the UK and Ireland. But Americans can now get them too. Gasp! Alert the MPAA! (Hat tip: MacMinute)
If somebody can get me a review copy of iLife 06 (I refuse to buy it from the Apple Store and it won't be available in Vancouver for a few weeks it looks like (I called all 3 Apple dealers today and it's not yet available!), I would review GarageBand's podcast studio sooner rather than later. Review copy or not, I will review GarageBand when I get it!
Matt May and I are speaking about podcasting at Idea Day tonight in Seattle. The event is at ThinkSpot. Social hour begins at 7 p.m. Matt and I present at 8.
Matt May and I are speaking about podcasting at Idea Day tonight in Seattle. The event is at ThinkSpot. Social hour begins at 7 p.m. Matt and I present at 8.
Is podcasing for consumer electronics companies a way to get buzz or is it a feature set important to innovation? I just ran across a Sony announcement on TechSmec about the Vaio Home Entertainment PC, designed to use the TV as display.
They state:
The Sony VAIO VGN-XL100 is supplied with Microsoft Windows XP Media Centre Edition for simplified access to media features as well as full PC functionality. In addition, it comes with VAIO Information Flow, a specially designed graphical interface for use at a distance from the screen. This makes interaction with the VGN-XL100 a very simple matter, and provides instant access to popular services including RSS feeds, a newsreader, podcasting, picture slideshows and the music player.
With video podcasting taking off, I'd expect we'll see similar announcements in the weeks ahead, especially with MacWorld on its way. What will be the impact on podcasting as more consumer electronics companies use podcasting to try and differentiate their products and services?
Darren Barefoot wrote a piece called "Why I’m Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope" back in March which attracted a lot of comments both agreeing and disagreeing.
"An Update on the Podcasting Dope" reflects those and changes in the last nine months in Podcasting / the common perception from his point of view.
Watching all those reports from CES coming in through the several blogs I read I noticed a lot of new products which could be interesting for podcasters.
Could because most of the times those players are only described in what new features for playing and colors they have - not so much about the features for recording.
Maybe I am reading the wrong blogs - but if podcasters do not blog about new gear for podcasters, who else will? So please, point me to new gear with good recording features for the ever growing number of podcasters!
My Top 19 predictions for 2006. Mark off a few points if you will for my belated attempts but I had to follow an incredibly thought out, accurate, data intensive methodology that took me weeks to process and an hour to write down. Here ya go:
1. New podcast networks will flower like tulips in the spring. Most will just make it through one bloom.
2. I'll go fishing on the Sandy River. Podcasts, especially in music, will be the hot ticket as more people realize that you can listen to a show any time, any where you wish. That includes on the river... which helps if you are fishing below an underpass.
3. Spring will come and the video blogger boom will rumble like thunder.
4. Current.tv will fail as the network looks the other way, deciding not to embrace video blogging.
5. Hijack! Increased instances of feed jacking will shine more light on the practice of redirecting RSS feeds to third party hosts.
6. I'll move for something like the 25th time in the past five years. This time I'll write about it on a paper napkin.
7. Adam Curry will continue to listen to his father's advice and try not to pave the goat path. Eric Rice will move again in Second Life. He'll podcast from the reality world. Chris Pirillo will interview the one red paper clip guy who ends up trading his fleet of Scions for a 20,000 square foot mansion just outside of a well known war zone. Dave Winer will make another few $.
8. I'll be cursed by at least one person for my last prediction, furious yet again they were not invited to the party, mentioned in wikipedia or asked to play a character in a podcast.
9. I'll continue to thrash myself for paying up the big bucks but wireless at Starbucks will be crucial for me to keep connected. I'll continually seek out a penniless connection, hoping that by December, North America will become a free wifi utopia.
10. More people will discover OPML as they finally get that it can serve as a galaxy for millions of feeds. All you need is a magic bike to get there.
11. Web 2.0 will be known as aw2. That means alex williams squared. It's the square root of my life since discovering RSS almost three years ago, about the time lichen started growing on the web after the dot com boom's volcanic eruption in 2000. ;-)
12. Fee, fly, flow becomes a new expression. It comes from a hip hop song about RSS.
13. The FBI will discover a Cosa Nostra podcast and use it as evidence in a reality television show.
14. George Bush will lose his iPod and the NSA will try to stop the media from telling the story.
15. Conferences will continue to draw micro camps that will serve as sorts of satellite networks. A few smart producers will get it and network these camps for an extended event that balances the commercialness of traditional trade shows.
16. The podcast hardware business will grow and become a catalyst for fresh innovation in consumer electronics.
17. Better software tools for podcasting on mobile phones will help at least one company get a healthy round of venture funding.
18. Podcasts of World Cup Soccer games will garner some of the best audiences ever for a recorded sporting event.
19. I'll play indoor soccer at least once a week for Los Jugaderos. Focus is on the game. Someone else will have to do the play-by-play.
Yahoo! Podcasts now supports vidcasts as well as podcasts! Click to watch the video of your favorite shows – it’s as easy as listening directly from your web browser.
To many people, audio and video podcast are seperate things and the Yahoo site describes podcasts as just audio ("listen ... a podcast is an audio recording).
But it seems as if it is only a matter of time when services like this directory allow both kinds to co exist in their directory and let the user choose if he wants to search just for video or audio. Now that iTunes and Yahoo offer (web) based access to both types - will Odeo follow as well?
ZENcast Organizer, specially designed by Creative Technology, seamlessly integrates podcasts and video blogs with the Creative ZEN player or a PC. Available today as a public beta version for free download for the award winning ZEN VISION and the latest ZEN VISION:M users. The ZENcast Organizer will enable users to enjoy easy downloads of all channels from www.zencast.com.
The user interfaces looks a lot like iTunes and the website has only a very basic feature set - but still a bit more to offer than iTunes.
The design seems very simple and non stylish compared to the look of the hardware products. But obviously the company sees the need to compete with iTunes through having easy accessible (free) audio and video content to fill the players with.
Looking at the basic features of the website and seeing how long they will have to go from here I was wondering, why the company did not try to work with one of the existing directories out there. But instead took the road to offer yet another directory and make podcasters again go through the process of educating the new directory of their needs and wants.
Steve Jobs has a standing engagement with every diehard Mac geek in existence for the second week of January each year. It's one of a handful of dates in which he unveils Apple's new products and strategies. In the past few months, much of the attention has been focused on two areas: the gameplan for Intel-based Macs, and the iPod. The impact of the latter to readers of this blog is hardly worth explaining. But the new Macs may have a lot more to do with podcasting than you think.
The iTunes Music Store continues to tease us with a glimmer of what could be. To Apple's credit, iTunes has singlehandedly jawboned media companies into producing downloadable versions of their products. At the moment, iTMS boasts video content from Disney (ABC/ESPN) and Universal (NBC/USA/SciFi), including shows that are no longer on the air. What they haven't done is provide a subscription model for those shows. If Apple could promise me a season of, say, Arrested Development, delivered straight to my 5G iPod, I'd put my money down in advance. (Well, except for the part where my TiVo already fulfills that same promise.)
In fact, if iTunes had all of the shows I watch regularly, and offered a reasonable subscription price for them, I think the only thing that would hold me back from breaking it off with the cable company would be live news and events. I've already used my iPod with my home TV (not to mention the projector at work) to catch up on my shows -- as well as my vid/vod/videocasts -- whenever the mood strikes. It's a natural fit, when you really think about it:
iPods are cool.
TiVo is cool.
Therefore, an iPod that's as good as a TiVo is wicked cool.
I'll couch a 2006 prediction in here: Apple is going to try like hell to prove to the public that a video-capable iPod is not a gimmick. That means interface improvements, larger drives, higher-quality video, and my guess is a video-capable iPod nano this year. But above all else will be an emphasis on everything working with and/or through the iPod and iTunes.
Which brings us to the new Macs. The rumored Mac mini is a home theater PC: an arena Microsoft has tried in vain for years to conquer. The Front Row app that came with the last batch of iMacs was a warmup for an intuitive TV-based media interface, and the Intel chipset offers instant-on functionality, a must-have for home theater components. There's even the suggestion that the new Mac will have an iPod dock built-in.
All indications are that Apple wants to use the iPod as a Trojan horse with which to take over the home media market. (Hmm. Trojans. That reminds me: if you're in the US and didn't see that USC-Texas game, you can and must buy the highlights on iTunes.) While Bill Gates is crossing his fingers over Xbox 360 and Windows Vista, Jobs may already be moving into his endgame.
I had been figuring it would be somewhere into the next decade at the earliest before the broadcast date of a show became simply a transmission date -- the point at which the embargo on a given episode expires, and it is made available to the public. I think that if Apple keeps moving down this path, it might happen as early as next year.
The avenues that would open to the viewer are amazing to ponder, though I'm sure that network execs get white-knuckled at the very thought of that kind of change. For the first time perhaps since the advent of television, entrenched organizations at every step of the media production chain are at risk of being shaken to their core thanks to a wave of new technology.
It's no exaggeration to state that some corporations are entering 2006 wondering whether they'll still be around in 2010. And from where I sit, for the companies I'm thinking about, it's about goddamn time. Many media companies, particularly content owners, have played defense for far too long. If they didn't see the Internet and portable media coming, economic theory says they deserve what they're gonna get. To boil it down to a few words, Schumpeter's principle of creative destruction is going to make your TV kick ass.
I don't know, is it me, or is the RSS icon looking like a more universal symbol? With Microsoft announcing last month that they are adopting the Firefox radar like symbol for RSS, I wonder what it will mean to people who have no clue about RSS? The little dot, is that a person telling the world about a feed? Are the radio waves a symbol for subscribing, meaning that you want that feed flowing your way?
The efforts by folks like Matt Brett over at Feed Icons will define how the RSS feed will look in the years ahead. Matt is spearheading an effort to standardize the identity for syndicated works. I like what he is doing. As part of the effort, he is asking people to download the icon so they may create one of their own in their favorite color. Matt's plans are to create a user submission gallery in 2006.
The orange xml button works for me. But I see the need to make it more of an international icon. And now I can see the icon for RSS in a rainbow of colors. Seems fitting, doesn't it?
There are a lot of conferences we cannot attend, due to different reasons. So podcasting those sessions, be it video and or audio, is a great idea to spread the ideas and spirit of an event. You still will need to attend to make those contacts, but sometimes there is no way you can attend, even if you would try.
Like for example the World Economic Forum in Davos. But it seems as if they want to make sure that everybody can be part of this, at least getting a very direct coverage of their annual event:
Broadcasting, Podcasting, Webcasting and Blogging at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2006 in Davos:The World Economic Forum announced ambitious plans today to share the proceedings of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2006 in Davos with as wide a public as possible. Held under the theme of The Creative Imperative, the Meeting will again be broadcast, webcast and, for the first time this year, many sessions will also be "podcast". Additionally, all participants will be asked to take part in the Forum’s blog.
[..]
"Davos is a small place, and the Conference Centre is even smaller. By broadcasting, webcasting, podcasting and encouraging blogging by all participants, we hope to share the spirit of Davos with as many people as possible. As every year, every single session will be open to more than 200 journalists from around the world," said Mark Adams, Director, Head of Communications.
Until now, I only followed this forum through normal press coverage, but now I might be interested in listening into some of those.
You can read the Forum blog; at the moment they only speak of "downloading from a website" and use the word podcast in quotes, but I am hoping for a real podcast from the sessions.
Alex Williams
Matt May
Nicole Simon
Roland Tanglao
I don't know, is it me, or is the RSS icon looking like a more universal symbol? With Microsoft 