Print Publication Says Podcasting Is a Horseless Carriage

I like to thank Steve at Micro Persuasion for pointing out MacWorld’s sensational “Is the Clock ticking on podcasting” rant. As usual, the Jennifer Berger only listened to radio ported to podcasting (KCRW, Inside Mac Radio). These are good listens, but they are not where podcasting’s future lives. They are not even an example of what’s interesting in podcasting today – for a sample of that, just skim PodcastMN.com or audio.weblogs.com.

Podcasting existing broadcast radio programs is today a convenience for radio listeners (listeners have independence from programmers schedule) tomorrow it will be the only way for broadcasts to have any relevance. Yes, if this were the future, podcasting is dead in the water. Anyone that’s hit record knows the least engaging audio is coming from existing producers. If you will, these carriage makers only now trying to leave off the horse. Like the weblogs before them, the promise comes with creating you own and sharing it with the world.

I agree with part of Berger’s closing statement:

“The answer is in the content—it has to be valuable and of high quality—and possibly even in a different format we can’t foresee now. I also think that someone or something, the iTunes Music Store or otherwise, will need to help listeners pick their podcasts.”

We do need help on what to pay attention to, this has always been a problem. Whether with movies, tv shows, websites, or people in general. We’ve always used the same solution – each other. I don’t see that changing at all.

I object to her uses of the words “valuable” and “high quality”. In this long tail world, both are far too subjective to be requirements.

Exchanging Petroleum’s Problems for Ethanol’s

I’m all for a regional-specific energy solution. Petroleum makes sense in places – like Texas – where petroleum exists. Less so in Nebraska where it’s easier to grow crops than dig for oil.

Despite being more renewable than petroleum, ethanol has it’s own problems. It’s a little cheaper per gallon than gasoline (bigger subsidies?), but mpg drops.. And now reports are coming out that ethanol factories are some of the biggest polluters in the midwest (Des Moines Register, Norwegianity).

Combine this with high fructose corn syrup making us fat and the corn lobby (yes, you ADM) has some serious questions to answer.

Uncovering Secrets, Uncovering Ourselves

Today’s Star Tribune has an article on the dangerous and frequently illegal act of urban exploring (also look for Melody Gilbert‘s documentary on the subject Into the Darkness). Outside of trespassing and putting yourself in harm’s way, authorities don’t like it because regular people are gaining knowledge of their city’s infrastructure.

On a related note, governments are pissed at Google Maps for giving regular people access to satellite photos.

Seems to me both of these are opportunities rather than risks. Opportunities to off-load surveillance and risk assessment to everyone. Rather than overworked, underpaid government employees. The Wisdom of Crowds showed us a group of independent people looking at something are smarter than a centralized committee. I’m betting on the independent group to be smarter at judging risk than a single bureaucratic authority.

We talked about privacy at a MNteractive meetup a while back. I still think having cameras everywhere is fine, as long as everyone has access to them. Google Maps is one step towards this. With that in mind, I encourage Target and the Minneapolis Police Department to provide web-based access to the surveillance cameras running down Nicollet Mall.

Because people are generally good, the benefits of better understanding our world, city, and downtown far out-weigh the risks of any nefarious activity. Like in a wiki, the more independent people invested in the success of something (a city, a website) the more self-correcting it will become.

Google Buys Then Kills Urchin

If you’ve been tracking the ‘Most Popular Episodes by Downloads/Day’ way down on the far left column of the website, you’ve probably noticed it hasn’t been updated in a while.

I know I have.

The great guys at TextDrive moved servers and as such needed to revise their licensing on the Urchin – the server log analysis tool Google bought a while back.

Prior to the server move, I’d grab the mp3 download numbers via Urchin and update the ‘Most Popular’ list.
After the move. Nothing. The people at Urchin won’t return TextDrive’s phone calls.

TextDrive hosts 5000 domains, 1 of them is this site. None of them have any idea how their sites are performing because Urchin is “re-evaluating” their pricing model. In the mean time, all their existing customers are left in the dark. Not cool Google. not cool.

For more, check out the Where’s Urchin? thread on the TextDrive Forum

First Crack 62. Online Communities 1.0 with Chuck Hermes

Back in the 90s Chuck Hermes and Michael Koppelman (from the lolife podcast) built the Bitstream Underground BBS. This is Chuck’s presentation on the history of Bitstream Underground from MIMA’s Online Communities Salon held on September 14, 2005.

Listen to Online Communities v1.o with Chuck Hermes [16 min]

Reflections on Bush’s New Orleans Speech

I do agree with Bush the one of the few organizations capable of handling a logistical nightmare of a natural disaster the size of Katrina is the Army. The other one is Wal-Mart. Next time don’t turn them away.

Three notes to President Bush;

  1. Good job on not giggling during your speech. I’m sure it took a week of practice. Also, you did a good job holding back that ignorant, mocking, smirk.
  2. Unfortunately, you’ve run out of political capital around 9/11 or WMD. Stop talking about them. Unless you can convince us Al Queda is connected to Katrina.
  3. Another hurricane like Katrina won’t hit New Orleans again, there won’t be another terrorist attack like 9/11. Don’t spend too much time looking backwards to prevent it from happening again. Look forward and plan systems that will prevent all disasters. Not just the politically sexy ones.

I’m torn, should the people responsible for making a mess be responsible for cleaning it up? Maybe. I believe you did your best, and your best caused this mess. So, I think someone else should be responsible for the clean up and rebuild. You’ve got a bunch of other stuff to wrap up anyway (Iraq for example).

One final thought, everytime Bush says ‘citizens’ he should say ‘we’. ‘We’ is more representative of the impact the New Orleans has as will have on all of us. I know Bush doesn’t want to impose any discomfort on ‘us’. His keep-America-at-arms-length attitude makes me think leading a nation makes him uncomfortable. But, that’s his job. Maybe if he thought of it as clearing really big brush from a really big ranch.

Laptop Killing TV and Stereo

I had a post on my personal blog about wanting my favorite movies and TV shows available as digital downloads, rather than DVDs. Looks like I’m not the only one considering my laptop the all-in-one media and communications center. PSFK points to an article on British youth not owning televisions. I picked up a Tivoli iPAL this weekend to replace the bulky 5 CD stereo system we haven’t turned on in months (because there’s no line-in jack for the iPod).

How to Blog for Higher Search Engine Ranking

Blogging, aside from being one of the easiest ways to publish online, is also one of the easiest ways to increase search engine rankings.

Search engine spiders like Google’s GoogleBot expect websites to change and be updated frequently. Blogs are (or should be), so the spiders come by more frequently. Once the spiders are at you’re weblog, they look for keywords in 4 places:

  1. Window title (in the window, above the address bar)
  2. URL (in the address bar)
  3. Article title
  4. In the article itself

WordPress, the weblog system I prefer, sets the window title and URL from the article title. Then, it’s just a matter of writing a title representative of the article and writing an article worth reading.

Listing your category archives and recent articles as links in the sidebar automatically increases the keyword count on the page – automatically increasing your google juice.

Multiple Languages, Same Message – A Reason for a Comment-Cast

When I was developing WP-iPodCatter, it seemed straight-forward enough to tie WordPress’ enclosure detection with the Comments RSS feed to create a comment podcast, or comment-cast.

I didn’t have a personal need for this feature (so it’s not as fully developed as the others) but I thought it’d be neat and it was easy to do.
Plus, the thought of a podcast with distributed hosting, on topic, created by fans of another podcast seemed like an interesting way to bring the threaded comments to audio.

Then, listening to Mike’s latest Sex and Podcasting, Katrina – multi-language podcasts, I realized that’s not the interesting bit.

Here’s the scenario, I publish a podcast. You take it, translate it, record it into a language you know well, and republish it as a comment to the original.

Subscribing to the comment feed will automatically deliver the translated files as fast as they’re published.

Could be helpful. Could cause more and bloodier wars.