Tag: podcasting

Squidoo

Post ImageI first learned of Seth Godin’s project called Squidoo a couple months ago, but the service was only in private testing. Now Squidoo has entered public beta so it’s ready for you to kick the tires. A lens is what Squidoo is all about – lensmasters create a lens on a topic they know a lot about, and users search through lenses to find whatever it is they are after. From the FAQ:

A lens is one person’s (lensmaster’s) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It’s a place to start, not finish.

There’s a lot more useful answers in the FAQ, so check it out. So far I have noticed the site has been a little slow, no doubt because it’s probably received a lot of traffic all of a sudden. Aside from that (and the rather plain and unhelpful homepage) I am quite enjoying Squidoo! I have created my own lens, titled MasterMaq on Podcasting. Hopefully I can share some useful information on podcasting.

I’ve got to play with it a little more, but here are some initial thoughts:

  • I hope they make it possible to add your own modules in the future! I think there would be lots of interested developers, myself included.
  • It doesn’t look like there’s anyway for a reader to communicate with the lensmaster, at least not without tracking down their blog and then their contact information. There doesn’t appear to be any comments or anything.
  • For the most part I like the interface. As I mentioned, the homepage is kind of useless, but beyond that it’s pretty well thought out.
  • Why are the Google Adwords styled so much differently? I think the colors should look more like the rest of the site.

I read this somewhere in the last couple days (I forget where, sorry) and it’s quite a good description – Squidoo is like About.com for Web 2.0. That pretty much sums it up! Time will tell how useful it is, and how much I gain from being a lensmaster. In the meantime, I encourage you to go check it out! There’s lots of interesting lenses already, and it’s pretty easy to make your own.

Read: Squidoo

Podcast is Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year

Post ImagePodcasting has had an amazing year, and it just keeps getting better. Steve Rubel reports that the Oxford Dictionary has chosen “Podcast” as its word of the year for 2005 (press release also available):

“Only a year ago, podcasting was an arcane activity, the domain of a few techies and self-admitted ‘geeks.’ Now you can hear everything from NASCAR coverage to NPR’s All Things Considered in downloadable audio files called ‘podcasts.’ Thousands of podcasts are available at the iTunes Music Store, and websites such as iPodder.com and Podcast.net track thousands more. That’s why the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected ‘podcast’ as the Word of the Year for 2005. Podcast, defined as ”a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player,“ will be added to the next online update of the New Oxford American Dictionary, due in early 2006.”

That’s a very broad definition though, don’t you think? Shouldn’t there be a requirement for a web feed (RSS or Atom or something)? The podcasting naysayers will be quick to point out that there’s nothing new about “a digital recording…made available on the Internet for downloading” and they are absolutely right. It’s the addition of a web feed that makes podcasting a fresh take on old technology!

Read: Steve Rubel

Wikipedia Under Fire

Wikipedia is without a doubt one of my favorite websites. Even though I have only ever made one or two contributions to Wikipedia, I find the site invaluable for research. The vast amount of information immediately available is hard to overlook for research of any sort (there are 848,598 English language articles as of this post). If you have a question about something, you can probably find the answer at Wikipedia.

Called “the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future” by Wired Magazine in March of 2005, Wikipedia has enjoyed much success. The Wired article is just one of many mainstream media articles praising the site, and there are many thousands if not millions of bloggers and others who use and recommend Wikipedia each and every day. The New York Times offers some numbers describing Wikipedia’s success:

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Lately though, despite all of the success and impressive usage numbers, cracks have started to appear. Two questions, both of which have been asked before, have once again been brought into the spotlight – just how reliable is the information found on Wikipedia, and where is the accountability?

Consider what happened to John Seigenthaler Sr.:

ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler’s biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he “was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby.”

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

Whoever added that false information to the article did so anonymously, so beyond publicly stating the truth, Mr. Seigenthaler really had no recourse. So there’s the issue of false information, and how to stop people from entering it. Wikipedia works on the premise that mistakes are caught by later contributors, and regular users who monitor changes. Clearly, that doesn’t always work.

If reliability and accountability weren’t enough, how about ethics? Should you edit the entry for something you were involved in? The question was raised earlier this week when Adam Curry attempted to make some changes to the entry for Podcasting. Dave Winer explains:

Now after reading about the Seigenthaler affair, and revelations about Adam Curry’s rewriting of the podcasting history — the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?

Dave makes some very good points. Upon first reading his entry, I though the question of historians and third-party observers was very obvious and a simple way to resolve these kinds of issues. The more I thought about it though, the less sure I felt. Requiring historians and non-participants to write the entries simply because that’s the way we’ve always done it may not be the best way to move forward. Thanks to Wikipedia and the web in general, we have the ability to turn the conventional wisdom “the winners write the history books” completely upside down. By editing websites like Wikipedia as events are taking place (such as the creation of podcasting) do we not have a better chance of capturing a more realistic view of history? If all sides of an issue can enter their views, do we not have a more accurate and complete entry? Of course, we unfortunately need to deal with flame wars in many of these cases, but maybe that will change as the process matures.

The issues I mentioned above are currently getting a lot of attention, and are pretty natural in the evolution of a system like Wikipedia. I don’t think anyone should be surprised that questions of reliability, accountability and ethics are being asked. And if you really stop and think, you’ll probably realize that the solution to all of these problems has been around for a very long time. As with all websites on the Internet, it is up to the reader to use his or her best judgement in evaluating the accuracy and relevancy of the informaton on a web page. Searching the information available at Wikipedia should be no different than searching the information available in Google – reader/searcher/user beware.

AmigoFish

Post ImageI first learned of Dave Slusher’s AmigoFish project while talking to him on the way back from the Portable Media Expo (Dickson, Dave and I were on the same flight to Denver). AmigoFish was in private testing for a while, and on Tuesday Dave took the wraps off:

It’s time that I announced the project I’ve been working on in my evenings and weekends. It is a collaborative filter for new media – podcasts and videoblogs mostly. Behold, the mighty AmigoFish! You can create an account, rate the things you care about and get predictions for other things you might like. I’ve been using it that way pretty much every day for the last month, and have found all kinds of new things to listen to. Try it out and let me know what you think. I’m not going to burden everyone with the “beta” or not nomenclature. It is a work in progress, much like everything like this.

I kinda like the idea of not using “beta” to describe the service. I took a quick look at the site today but haven’t really tested it out yet. I have heard many great things though, so if you’re looking for a slightly different way to find a podcast you might enjoy listening to, give AmigoFish a try.

Dave, I realize it’s a work in progress, but you need a logo or something!

Read: AmigoFish

Podcasting Research Findings

Post ImageYou might recall that a little over a month ago I mentioned Peter Chen’s very promising survey of podcasters and the preliminary results. I remember getting the email about the final findings, but I must have overlooked it in the chaos that was my November (at least the first two weeks). From the abstract:

Based on a survey of 366 podcasters and videobloggers, this paper examines these emerging cultural practices from aspect of production, with specific interest in producer motivations, production methods, the relationship between formats, and audience numbers. The exploratory research findings – largely limited to English language producers – illustrates a number of interesting features about this area of activity.

I’d go out on a limb and posit that “podcasting” and “audioblogging” are generally accepted to be different practices, and I don’t think that “video podcasting” and “videoblogging” will be any different. That being said, the title of the research as “Podcasting and Videoblogging” is kind of off-putting. Is it really videoblogging, or is it actually video podcasting? It would make a difference if you’re really trying to compare the audio and video guys.

The findings are really quite interesting and basically make me long for even more research. Of course, too much research can be a bad thing in some cases too (today wine will save you, tomorrow it will kill you, etc). The frequency of production, gender, and age of producers are immediately the most interesting, but there is lots of data to grok.

Read: Peter Chen

Podcasting and Model Airplanes

Post ImageI have written quite a bit about what I call “Average Joe Podcasting“, or podcasting for normal people who don’t want to turn it into a business. I have also mentioned that I think the most common form of podcasting will indeed be this kind of hobby podcasting, not radio-style business podcasting. Unfortunately, it seems rare that someone else understands this, but today I found another person who does:

Rob Walch, a podcasting consultant and host of the popular 411 interview podcast, says he’s bombarded with questions from people looking to strike gold with podcasts. His advice? “I tell people that over 80% of podcasters will never even break even,” he says. “This is a hobby. You don’t expect to make money from flying model airplanes, and chances are you aren’t going to make money from podcasting.” Still, for trailblazers like Curry who are quickly forging links to one another, it won’t be for a lack of trying.

Well said, and in a way that I think a lot of people will be able to understand. Not that it’s bad for people like Curry to try and make some money from it, every industry needs that, I just feel that it won’t overshadow the rest of podcasting for very much longer.

Read: BusinessWeek

Podcasting – the "teenager" of media

Post ImageI feel very lucky that I’ve been able to watch podcasting grow since the beginning basically, and through that time I’ve noticed a number of things. Such as the fact that the media has to put podcasting (or whatever is new and hot) into a category at every stage of it’s growth. Always comparing, always categorizing. A good example is Jon Fine’s article in BusinessWeek (Nov 28th) entitled “Can Podcasting Do Business?“:

Podcasting is the teenage clique of media. Small enough that its pioneers refer to one another by first names only, young enough that it’s unclear which media model fits it, and brazen enough to believe it can figure it all out by itself. Parents will tell you how stubborn adolescents can be — and how, more annoyingly, adolescents are sometimes right.

Sounds good as a categorization, and in some respects it works, so it gets printed. Good sign of the times we live in too – I very much doubt that similar sorts of things were written about the automobile industry or the software industry when they were starting out (though I don’t know for sure, I’m not that old). We’re at the point that we can monitor the growth of an industry from the start and in a very indepth way, for good or bad.

Note too that a “model which fits it” is still pointed out. That’s another aspect of the growth of podcasting that just won’t go away it seems, that everyone thinks it must have a business model.

Read: BusinessWeek

Podcasting Links

Post ImagePreparing for and traveling to the Portable Media Expo last week meant that I fell behind on my usual tracking of what’s happening with podcasting (well aside from what I learned about at the expo itself). So I’ve been slowly catching up lately. Here are some of the highlights from my del.icio.us feed:

As I come across new items, I’ll of course add them to my feed.

Read: Podcasting Links

Another Reason Why Apple Sucks

Post ImageThere are many reasons to love Apple, and yet many more to hate them too. An article I came across today falls into the latter category (and actually, I noticed this at the Portable Media Expo over the weekend):

iPodder Lemon was a free application distributed under the General Public License, or GPL, that allows users to manage their podcasts–audio and video programs downloaded from the Internet to an MP3 player.

The application’s developers say Apple’s legal team asked the open-source group to drop the name of the software because it suggested a connection to the company’s flagship iPod device. The developers have changed the name of the product to Juice.

What is happening here? Apple is not protecting their intellectual property. I don’t believe the average user would confuse the iPod with iPodder Lemon. I also think that iPodder Lemon probably contributed to some sales of the iPod, in fact helping Apple. What’s happening here is that Apple is using their big-company muscle to try and own the idea of “podcasting” in the minds of consumers. Anything related to the iPod, they seem to want to control.

There is a fine line between protecting your trademarks and brands, and bullying applications, devices and services that are part of your ecosystem. I think Apple crossed the line this time! In any case, Juice will continue to be a great application I’m sure, despite the name change setback.

Read: CNET News.com

Portable Media Expo Day 2

Post ImageTraveling has a way of making the old schedule go a little nutty, so I didn’t get a chance to post much over the weekend. Well, that and the fact that Internet access was not as abundant as it should have been! Overall, the Expo was great – both for Paramagnus and for podcasting in general. My only complaint about the entire event would be that there was no wireless Internet. I don’t believe that any technology-related conference in the year 2005 should be without Internet access! That’s one thing Chris Pirillo has absolutely correct with Gnomedex.

In any case, the second day of the Expo went very well. I’d say it was the busier of the two days. We were the first to present in the morning, and despite the fact that the stage Internet did not work, it went very well. I hope the people who were in the audience gained some value out of my presentation. I know some of them did, because they came by the booth later. We also got the chance on Saturday to take a look at some of the interesting things the other exhibitors were doing. It’s a very exciting time for podcasting!

Thanks to everyone who came by and spoke to us during the two-day Expo! It was great to meet you, and we look forward to helping you with podcasting. Thanks also to Tim and everyone at TNC New Media for putting on a great show! We’re looking forward to next year already.

Read: Podcast & Portable Media Expo