RasterWeb!

I recently told someone that I don’t listen to the radio anymore… Which is not completely correct…

The Mel & Floyd show on WORT in Madison is probably the only radio content I actually try to listen to. By chance I heard it while driving home on a Friday a few years back during summer hours, and now each summer I try to listen, but come on! Podcasting! How can I be expected to remember to listen to a radio show?

So I was happy happy when I found an episode of Mel & Floyd on madison.indymedia.org, but alas! No feed! I contacted the uploader, and asked about RSS 2.0 and enclosures and podcasting, but they weren’t quite sure about being able to give me what I was asking for, so I whipped up this RSS 2.0 Feed with enclosures for Mel & Floyd, which will do for now, and hopefully this is a feature they can offer in the future…

Sometimes progress moves so slowly…

Have you seen FireANT? It’s a video aggregator. It’s like iPodder, but for video instead of audio… For videoblogs instead of podcasts…

The FireANT folks just put out a great screencast showing how it works. Well, showing how the Windows version currently works. The Mac version is not quite the same, but I’m sure it will be soon! (Isn’t that right?) I know they’ve got a lot of new ideas and features in store, so keep an eye on it.

And remember kids, ANT‘s Not Television…

People are wondering if Apple will fall under the Osborne Effect with it’s Intel announcement… I don’t know. I doubt it though… I think Steve is smart enough to know what he’s doing, and maybe Apple’s line will be tweaked to account for this. (Cheaper hardware? Less high-end hardware?) I think as a Mac user talking to a potential Mac buyer, the first thing you should tell them is that Apple will put out a machine that is faster, cheaper and better in the future. Possibly a few minutes after your shiny new Mac arrives. It’s a guarantee. Oh, that and don’t order right before Macworld Expo or the WWDC. I mean, sheesh! That’s just common sense!

I don’t know. (None of us do…) As I said in Apple + Intel = Yawn I’m not too worried about it. As I mentioned, I think a processor upgrade is a good idea for me. (Well, for my Mac anyway, actually I could use a processor upgrade as well…) In fact, this could be big for the processor upgrade manufacturers. There might be a lot of people looking to stretch their Mac another year or two instead of buying a new one now. (Sorry PowerBook/iBook users, processor upgrades are typically only for desktop machines.) The other good news for me is that people may sell their ‘obsolete’ hardware at cheap prices. Yay for me and the old used Macs.

I also thought this was amusing. People used to say if you were a gamer you’d run Windows, not a Mac. Macs used PowerPC chips while Windows used Intel chips. Nowadays all the game consoles are or will be using PowerPC chips, and the Mac will be using Intel chips. What does it all mean? Nothing really, I just found it amusing. It’s almost like the Mac is still trying to live up the “The Mac is not a toy” motto.

Oh, and one more thing… I find it curious that Apple may be manufacturing it’s very nice hardware, with Intel chips, that can run Windows, at just about the time Microsoft will be releasing Longhorn, forcing people to buy new computers capable of running it. Is Steve Jobs looking to out-Microsoft Microsoft by producing kick-ass Windows machines? (Somebody get Scoble on the case!)

Last year when podcasting was taking off, people would complain about it and say “but you can’t comment with audio” and I think we’ve all learned that’s a load of crap. The same goes with videoblogs, commenting is entirely possible, and the people who think it isn’t either don’t have any imagination, or have nothing worthwhile to say.

If you really think about it, the main complaint comes when people try to compare audio or video to the straight text/photo world of blogging, but haven’t people been commenting on the internet about offline things since the days of usenet? Discussing television shows, movies, sports, keynote speeches, and other thinkg that don’t have a permalink attached to them?

Most common in podcasting is the “comment line” where a podcaster gets a (free) voicemail number and gives out the number during the podcast so you can call in and leave comments. It’s also common to accept feedback as an mp3 file. Dawn and Drew do this perfectly, and end each podcast with comments from the listeners. Of course there’s always the post on the website where the podcast came from to leave comments, though listeners might never even go to the web site once subscribed to the feed and automatically getting the new episodes each time.

So far in the videoblogging world I’ve mostly seen the “post on the website where the videoblog came from to leave comments” method, though people also seem to record their own responses and post them and then point to them. It’s interesting to see how things are developing in these two similar/yet slightly different worlds… I wonder if any videobloggers have free voicemail numbers and accept audio comments. I think this would be a good idea, and it could be incorporated into video quite well…

Oh yeah, as mentioned previously I’ve been exploring video and finally put tinkernet.org to good use. At least I hope it’s good use. Time will tell…

Back in mid-December 2004 in iPod eVerywhere? I wrote about a kid, and Xmas, and an MP3 player… but I never followed up on it!

He did end up getting a cheap Flash-based MP3 player for Xmas, and I recently heard that he is now the owner of an iPod shuffle. (Less than 6 months since Xmas.)

Yes folks, those iPods are everywhere. Everyone has an iPod now. Even people I know. Except me. I do not own an iPod. So there!