Tag: podcasting

Let’s take a trip down memory lane… Please turn the volume up to 11.

In May of 2000, I noticed that Wired had a news story as an MP3, it’s from their infrequently updated Wired News Radio section.

In June of 2000 we mention Greasy Skillet:

Speaking of which, if you haven’t checked out Greasy Skillet yet, do so now… The ‘audio log’ thing is similar to an idea I had a while back, but of course, never executed…

Hurm, that “never executed” bit, should be my motto…

A month later in July 2000 I mention my new audio gear:

Listen Up! I picked up a desktop audio recorder over the weekend (aka, a tape recorder) so I’m back on the audio track. When I find interesting, but long, articles, I just have computer read them out loud while connected to the recorder, then listen to the tapes in the car. I’ve also started (trying) to find good audio stuff to listen to.

And one more from 2000, an AIFF file welcoming visitors. There might be more, but that was all I felt like digging through.

Now, I’m not trying to jump on the (small) bandwagon of folks who are saying that podcasting is nothing new, that it’s just like radio, or it’s just audio on the web, or whatever… I’m here specifically to say that while all this was good and useful, and I was recording audio to portable devices back in the late 1990s, this is different, and even though I had a loose collection of perl scripts for the past year that downloaded weekly web radio shows via cron jobs, this is different. Yes, podcasting, as it’s been named, is different. It’s due in large part to the community, of which I see Adam Curry as the center. Sure, others had similar ideas, or the same ideas, maybe even much earlier, but Adam managed to sort of pull a community together, and that’s what made the difference.

I remember the world of weblogs back in 1997/1998 (of course we didn’t have the word ‘weblogs’ as that came later) and it was full of energy and ideas, and I think that’s where podcasting is now. It’s gotten it’s “official name” much faster, and it’s detractors faster as well I suppose.

Damn, if this stuff isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is…

I know Adam has said he’s been trying to tie the bootstrap of podcasting for the last 5 years, and I’m pleased to see the knot being formed, but I’d like to take you back a bit, to the year 1997…

Streaming media was there, and so were we! Well, we were on dialup, and there were no really affordable “portable audio players” at the time that could connect to your computer and transfer files. It was all foreign in concept. What we did have was a handheld recorder, the same one we’d been using since the 1980’s mind you. So, we would play some streaming file and capture it via the tape recorder, and listen to it later. We had timeshifted audio, that was portable. Yeehaw…

I know, I could have fed the output into a stereo and done it right, but we’re hackers of the quick-n-dirty variety sometimes… We didn’t do this a lot, but we did do it.

Fast forward into 1998. (I think 1998, my memory is fuzzy…) My commute changed from being 15 minutes per day to close to 2 hours per day. I needed some audio. I needed… more cowbell! At the time you could still read slashdot and find value in the comments. I ended up writing code to convert text files to more phonetically correct words (like changing “Mac OS X” to “Mac Oh Ess Ten”) and then would have my Mac read those text files while my recorder recorded it all to audio tape. I did this almost daily, as long as I remembered to start the script before I went to sleep. Oh, I didn’t just listen to slashdot, but that’s one of the memorable ones.

Around the end of 1999 Geeks In Space appeared, and good gosh, doesn’t it look like what people are doing today, minus the automated delivery via RSS?

Ok, let’s move ahead to 2003, when I finally decide I can get an MP3 player for cheap, as I’m sick of making audio tapes of Your Mac Life and other internet radio-type shows. By now I’m getting sick of hitting web pages and downloading files, so I whip up some perl to grab the new files each week. Usually the shows did a weekly broadcast, so it was just a cron job and date calculation to get the file. It worked, and for a geek, it was alright.

Meanwhile the RSS 2.0 enclosure thing happens, and we start to see things change. Things get easier. Things are brewing. Sure, I have to email Doug Kaye and ask him to fix his feed, and ask the LugRadio guys to create a feed (which either broke, or they stopped updating) but it was working.

Along comes Adam with his iPodder thingy and manages to get others involved until we have this new thing called “podcasting” to deal with…

And it’s good…

Oh, just one more thing, Doc has been noticing the number of results for “podcasting” that Google gives, and how it’s growing. That’s a good thing, but I think what will really be cool is the day when Google stops putting: Did you mean: broadcasting on the page. ;)

Since I spend almost all of my time shucking it for the man, aka working for a living, I have little time to implement all of my ideas, so I give them away for others to use, learn about, profit from, etc… Here we go again!

{fray} is all about storytelling. People write their stories, and they sometimes have events where they get together and speak/read their stories, obviously the site should offer an RSS feed with enclosures so you can hear the authors reading their stories in their own words…

We all love Woz, and why? Well, I know he had something to do with some fruit company, but we really love Woz because of his old “Dial-A-Joke” service. Bring it back with an RSS feed featuring a new joke everyday!

As for sponsorship, obviously the makers of hard drives will want to sponsor your podcast, I mean, you’ll be filling up those hard drives in no time! We can also look to the manufacturers of audio gear, speaker systems, Slim Devices, as well as software producers who make those great audio apps!

Sponsorship eh? I mean, if I ever go to Prince Edward Island then you know I’ll stop by the Formosa Tea House. The Formosa Tea house should sponsor the Live at the Formosa Tea House show, just look at the Google juice! Try searching for Formosa Tea House…

Speaking of those Silver Orange and Reinvented guys, they were discussing asterisk (phone dork!) an open-source PBX system, and how they use it… Since it can save your voice mail as an MP3, it should be dead simple to create an RSS feed with enclosures of all of your voice mail… So, what do to with that? Well, set up a phone number, and allow people to phone in, and say something, then feed that out to the net via RSS. Whammo! You do your audioblog, set up a phone number, people call in and leave comments, and you then provide those comments via an RSS feed…. I think I got that right, makes my head spin a bit…

Ok, so you set up your asterisk system to do comments in audio for your audioblog, with the feed to get the comments, and this all costs money right? Well, you could force the people who call in to listen to an ad before they leave a comment, but should you? Maybe you should just add in some advertisements (in audio) to the feed itself, or at the end of people’s comments… I don’t know, I’m a geek not a salesman…

Hmmm, that’s all I got right now… I just wish I had the resources to implement some of these ideas!