Monday, July 27, 2009

This blog is now a Web cobweb As indicated in the previous post, for seven years this blog was hosted at radio.weblogs.com, which is being discontinued.  So I am posting an archive of all the site's files, going back to 2002, in this subsection of stepno.com.  The conversion to the new site is not perfect. For one thing, there was no way to preserve reader comments on the site, including some good conversations. I'm sorry about that. If you encounter non-functioning links, look for their contents at the corresponding address on this new server. For example, the  page formerly at "radio.weblogs.com/0106327/2007/01/14.html" now should be at http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/2007/01/14.html For my more recent blog entries, see http://stepno.com/blog 1:11:57 AM

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Video blogs IN the Times; Podcasts FROM the Times... Now that everyone but me has DSL at home, video weblogs are probably going to take off the way audio podcasts did earlier this year. (OK, so Apple's video iPod might have something to do with it, too.) Sunday's New York Times has Amanda Congdon's name up in caps, featuring her and Rocketboom.com under the headline, TV Stardom on $20 a Day. That's a reference to both Rocketboom's being featured in Apple's video iPod introduction and its cutting a deal with TiVo... So now Amanda (and presumably Rocketboom correspondents like Steve Garfield) will reach audiences who prefer their video on a bigger screen with a remote control. That combination is something fans of TiVo have been talking about hacking together for months. Sidebar: If you haven't seen them yet, here are Rocketboom's "about" page, and Amanda's informative intro to blogs and vlogs. Also, Steve Garfield was showing how to do this "video podcast" stuff a year before Apple got into the act. Meanwhile, I just noticed that the Times website has started offering its own podcasts: A "come into the tent" sample is free, but most of the audio is part of the "Times Select" subscription service. "Every Monday, an audio version of one Op-Ed column will be podcast for free," the Times says, but you apparently won't have Maureen Dowd herself whispering sweet nothings into your ear -- professional announcers are recording the columns through a Times deal with Audible.com. There's also evidence that the Times is "getting clueful about blogging, sort of,"as Corante's Stowe Boyd put it. See the L.A. Observer story with a Times memo on the topic, and "Carpetbagger," the Times movie- related blog, complete with bloggish features like an RSS feed and comment links. By the way, like the rest of us, the Times still has trouble sometimes keeping up with changes in the technology scene: One of the Times's links on its podcast page, labelled "ipodder (PC)," goes to the "million-seller" (free, donations accepted) project that started under that name and adopted a lemon as its icon last year... until a computer company with another fruit for its name apparently started telling podcast-software developers to find names less like its iPod trademark. The lemon group chose "Juice" (short for Juice Receiver). The parenthetical "PC" in the Times is wrong, too. From the beginning, there has been a Macintosh version as well as a Windows version... and a "GNU/Linux Soon" sign. In fact, every program mentioned here is available for both Mac and Windows. Another Mac-and-Windows podcast collector, iPodderX, is having a contest to find itself a new name. "Exaggerator" might be a good one, since it claims to be "the world's very first Media Aggregator." Thousands of us were able to collect "podcast" style media files with Radio Userland (which we use to write our blogs and aggregate RSS feeds) for a couple of years before podcasting got its name, as my pod/vlog history page explains in ridiculous detail. (Unlike the Wikipedia podcasting page, which I've also contributed to, I'm the only one responsible for mistakes on my own page -- and I'll fix any you tell me about.) The first podcast receivers were simple scripts that dragged the media files from Radio's in-basket into iTunes, to be played or loaded on an iPod. Earlier this year, Apple added aggregating ability to iTunes itself, but all of these "middleman" applications are hardly obsolete. They don't have the commercial distractions of Apple's iTunes Music Store, and they are adding features left and right to compete. Fireant, on the other hand, focused on being an aggregator for video feeds before Apple got into that business. I still love the fact that the "ANT" in its name stands for "Ant is Not TV," even if the Fireant developers' friends at Rocketboom are being seen on old-fashioned TV via TiVo now... thanks to that deal that caught the attention of the Times... which neatly puts this blog entry back where it started. 1:15:00 PM

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Podcastercon (and ONAcon) alert There's a Podcastercon conference brewing for January in Chapel Hill, and it has just collected a substantial donation to help with expenses. Thanks to Paul Jones for the event reminder... and to whoever decided on a between-semesters date -- when I might even be able to get there, unlike the last half dozen conferences I've wanted to attend (including the Nashville bloggercon, annoyingly timed for my end-of-semester madness last year and the Online News Association's annual conference next week in New York). Talk about using the technology: The Podcastercon site is accepting donations via PayPal and plans to share event planning meetings with, of course, a blog and podcast. Meanwhile, if I haven't mentioned it, WUOT has made about a dozen podcasts so far, and has been talking about them quite a bit during fund-raising week. Mark Harmon's podcast has recovered from some feed problems. And mine has degenerated into a text-only blog sub-category until I find time to record some episodes. 1:37:18 PM

Monday, September 12, 2005

News radio (or TV audio) from the Web via podcast Podcasting pioneer Dave Winer posted a note in his weblog the other day asking whether any broadcasters were offering daily news programs as subscribable audio feeds on the Web (you know, "podcasts"). Weekly features and opinion programs are still more common, but I've been listening to some daily news podcasts too... so I dug up a few more and added their addresses to his comments page. (Here are Dave's post and my response.) I added even more to that page later, including some info from other folks who responded to Dave's request, then organized it a little better for a class discussion. (For now, the URLs are still visible on this page, but I may neaten this up later.) Here's the result: TV's PBS Newshour has an audio podcast: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/index.html So does MSNBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams: http://podcast.msnbc.com/audio/podcast/MSNBC-Nightly.xml and I see at least one other daily program on MSNBC's podcast list: http://podcast.msnbc.com/audio/podcast/ CNN's podcast links are here, including its hourly news update: http://www.cnn.com/services/podcasting/ Fox Broadcasting is even calling some of its podcasts "foxcasts," but I haven't had time to look for news among all of its self-promotional links to summaries of TV dramas: http://www.fox.com/foxcast/ Here is some information about Fox News RSS feeds: http://www.foxnews.com/rss/ And this podcasting directory exists, but I don't see links yet: http://www.foxnews.com/xmlfeed/podcasting/ Fox affiliate KCMO in Kansas City has a podcast, even if it could use some text-oriented proofreading, at "The 710 KCMO Podacst Page," http://www.710kcmo.com/podcast.asp Ironically, I haven't had a chance to listen to most of these programs. (There are only so many hours a week to be at the office, and I don't have a broadband connection at home.) A Fox affiliate in San Francisco, KTVU, has a podcast at http://www.ktvu.com/podcast/ and other RSS feeds at http://www.ktvu.com/rss/ For website management, KTVU is an Internet Broadcasting System affiliate, (http://www.ibsys.com) which makes me wonder its scores of other local TV websites across the country all will be on the podcast bandwagon shortly. http://www.ibsys.com/sites/ On television, the visuals carry a lot of the story... I wonder if any of the TV-news podcasts are supplementing the audio somehow, possibly with the audio track of a captioning-for-the-blind service. Dave mentioned noticing an ABC Nightline feed, but it looks like ABC News really has gotten the little orange [POD] bug, with feeds for Good Morning America Highlights, the Nightline news program -- and more than 20 other programs, including some from ABC stations in major cities. I haven't listened to the audio version of Nightline. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Podcasting/ On the radio side of the Web, I noticed that WWL in New Orleans is linking to KIRO, Seattle, for what they're calling an "audio blog" of reports from their guys in Baton Rouge and New Orleans: http://www.wwl.com/Article.asp?id=113214&;spid= I don't see a podcast feed, but when I first noticed the "Seattle" note, I expected one -- I mistook KIRO for Seattle KOMO, which got into podcasting a year ago, long before most of us. http://www.komotv.com/radio/podcast_explain.asp Closer to home, I've been checking out the WTOP morning and afternoon news updates from Washington, D.C., and their feed of the 40 minute CBS (radio) Weekend Roundup, which I hope to use (along with various PBS things) in some classes on radio news next month: http://www.wtopnews.com/?sid=311915&;nid=404 See a related article in RadioMonitor: http://tinyurl.com/caz6o Incidentally, you don't have to subscribe to the podcasts for most of these feeds -- the broadcasters offer the option of playing the audio directly through your browser ("streaming") or downloading individual mp3 or m4a files instead of subscribing. (M4a is a newer format that Apple is pushing, in order to offer advanced features in iTunes. See http://phobos.apple.com/static/iTunesRSS.html and http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/07/how_to_make_enh.html) MediaWeek on WINS in NYC: http://tinyurl.com/a92hw "WINS is offering 12 separate podcasts, all new content (nothing repurposed from the station) and running the gamut from 1010 WINS Morning Podcast to the off-the-wall You Can't Make This Stuff Up. There is also a Spanish podcast, 1010 WINS Noticias Ahora... "Infinity announced in June that nine of its News stations would begin podcasting with WINS acting as the flagship." (Infinity is also the parent company of http://KYOUradio.com, which started an all-podcast format in the spring, including a few words from Dave himself on opening day.) For more on those Infinity affiliates... see http://podcast.medianext.com/ For instance, http://podcast.medianext.com/stations/wbz/ in Boston Or KYW http://podcast.medianext.com/stations/kyw/ in Philadelphia The Philly morning newscast sounds like someone gets the idea, but four minutes is shorter than I expected from the intro: "KYW Newsradio on the run. This morning's news brief to take with you on the way to work or school." Four minutes? Short commute! http://podcast.medianext.com/stations/kyw/ http://podcast.medianext.com/stations/kyw/?archive=34&;d=AM Separate feed: "KYW Newsradio in the raw ... full content from selected news events, news conferences, important speeches, live coverage and analysis." ... and many more, including a hint that they might be /listening/ too... "KYW How's My Driving?" "The management of KYW Newsradio answers questions and addresses complaints from listeners, along with a weekly behind-the-scenes peek at something you never knew about KYW Newsradio." CBC/Radio Canada is in the middle of a labor contract dispute, which may be why its podcasting page is currently unavailable: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/ However, its RSS page mentions a few podcasts: http://www.cbc.ca/rss/ Public Radio affiliates are feeding a lot of http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php weekly feature and interview programs, but not the main NPR newscasts. http://archive.scripting.com/2005/09/10#When:10:33:03PM Dave suspects that has something to do with the network's relationship with affiliate stations, which sounds reasonable. Local NPR stations weave their hometown reports into the Morning Edition and All Things Considered broadcasts, which may encourage some of the top-notch local news reporting by affiliates like our own award-winning WUOT here in Knoxville. I wonder if it would be possible for the local affiliates to put out the podcasts of the combined programs -- including their local news, rather than losing their local listeners to a centralized podcast of the national programs. That would be similar to the way the Associated Press feeds its stories through member newspaper websites, so maybe NPR could ask AP how well it's working out. 10:41:26 AM

Friday, September 2, 2005

Another UT JEM Podcast! With that word "another" in the title, I'm rather facetiously claiming to have been the "first" podcaster from the faculty of the University of Tennessee School of Journalism & Electronic Media -- even though my podcasts have been of the "this is a test" variety... and my current plan is for one that will be more entertaining and educational than journalistic. Now that two tests have worked, I hope to work my way up to a regular "show" about folk music and folklore on the Internet. I named the thing "Podfolk," ignoring any "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" connotations. Back to the news: I've just finished helping my colleague Mark Harmon launch his more political/journalistic podcast, which will include excerpts from his radio program. He calls it Left Turn. For now, you can go there and listen to his audio clips. Soon, you'll be able to subscribe to the site's RSS feed with iPodder, iTunes or similar programs. (The feed is already working, but it won't deliver the audio enclosures until we make some adjustments after Labor Day.) Meanwhile, not to suggest that either Mark or I plan to make a buck on podcasting, here's a new article by a bunch of MBA students and their Indiana University professor, on "Podcasting: A new technology in search of viable business models." I've only given it a quick scan, but I'm disappointed that its history of podcasting doesn't mention Christopher Lydon, whose blog was a catalyst for the first podcasting scripts. His early blog posts are still online, full of digitally recorded interviews with early bloggers and folks like William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Meanwhile, Chris has moved back to the airwaves (as well as the Internet) with his new telephone-and-blog interview program, Radio Open Source. Both his old and new incarnations are worth a listen. In fact, it's still possible to listen to a program he broadcast about blogging in May 2000, when most folks in the "mainstream media" hadn't heard the word! 4:50:53 PM

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Pennsylvania Avenue Podcast President George W. Bush now has a podcast. That is, his weekly radio address, which was already available at a Whitehouse.gov Web page, now has an RSS 2.0 feed that delivers an MP3 file of the address as an enclosure. Here's the usual page: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/radio/ And here's the RSS XML version: http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/radioaddress.xml Honest, this isn't why I'm thinking more about podcasting myself... It's a total coincidence that I was writing about it this morning, and this afternoon found out about Bush's 'cast. I was making a belated a check of accumulated items in my own RSS aggregator, and saw someone else mention Rex Hammock's post about it a few days ago. (I won't name the intermediary, because he's a media professional and misspelled Rex's name. Besides, I should read Rex more often.) Rex provides a presidential iTunes subscribe link button for folks who don't use a separate podcatcher, and he includes a similar link to Democrat podcasts, in a spirit of bipartisanship. Speaking of which, I don't see any word about W dabbling in video blogs or table-talk podcasts like a guy from North Carolina was doing for a few months, before taking a summer break, apparently. 5:30:08 PM

Podfolk: A podcast about folk music and folklore found online Other than the "another kind of communication online" news about Elizabeth Rose and her Storycast, today is a departure from my usual "other journalism" topics. (I'll get back to journalism a little in the last paragraph.) Elizabeth is a storyteller (and UT grad) who has carried Southern folklore at least as far from home as Hawaii. She launched her weekly Storycast last month and has already included "Jack tales," poetry and singing. If I were writing a movie-poster "blurb" for this podcast, it might be the cliches, "I laughed... I cried..." or "Bring the whole family..." Give a listen. She really knows (and clearly loves) what she's doing. The other news is that inspiration struck this morning, thanks to Elizabeth Rose here in Tennessee my old friend Dave Schwartz at WPKN in Connecticut... I was sending "Casey Jones" David a note about Elizabeth, and this train of thought developed: I've been sending people e-mail saying, "hey, listen to this online audio" for years... I know I was already doing it on May 18, 2000, when I turned on the radio and heard Christopher Lydon interviewing a bunch of bloggers, then checked out his website. (I've mentioned, Lydon's role in the birth of podcasting elsewhere.) I like to spread around old songs, but I play records better than I sing. Last year I had a great time as a guest on Dave's radio show, talking about the the Internet and folk music with the editor of a folk magazine and a guy who actually learned to play the guitar online. I've been talking about starting a podcast for a year, since I have everything I need to do it (except time, but maybe if I start out slow...) The idea: Putting all of those things together, why not send out a short "program" once a week about some of the online folk music and Internet folklore things I've found? It's a kind of "service journalism," I suppose, and it'll be a lot more pleasant than listening to me sing or play the banjo! This first episode is really just a test to make sure the feed is working. As a "category" of my main weblog, I will put the Podfolk blog items on their own page, but the page will still have links in its margin to my "Other Journalism" sites. Today's test (this page) will appear on both blogs, so the audio sample is a bit of journalism folklore: There are no comments from me, just Gene Kelly in "Inherit the Wind," speaking one of the most famous slogans in journalism (see my old Web page for some speculative folklore about its origin). It's only a few seconds, a very small ".wav" file that really doesn't need podcasting. If everything works, the home for this experiment will be a separate Podfolk blog page, and the podcast-only subscription feed should be here: As the saying goes, "Stay tuned." At the top of this page I've added a couple of black and white photos I took in the 1970s of a couple of my favorite banjo players. I may change them from time to time. I'd really like to see someone identify the banjo player in the top picture... and some may not realize the left-handed lady played banjo, since she's more famous as a guitar player. If no one else adds a comment identifying them, I will myself... eventually. 11:51:34 AM

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Podcasting for the non-geek I tell journalism students that there's no "one right way" to tell a story, and I've just seen two very different, but excellent, introductions to podcasting, the audio weblog format. Contrasting these two storytelling approaches might make for an interesting discussion in a "new media" or journalism class. One is a professional newspaper package -- two stories, photo and sidebars, plus online-edition Web links. The other is a four-minute amateur video with narration, slides and screen-capture illustration, distributed as part of a weblog. The newspaper Doing it the old-fashioned newspaper way, USA Today sent a reporter and photographer off to the wilds of Wisconsin to capture an image of Dawn Miceli, with headphones, magenta hair, iBook and husband, Drew Domkus, producing their Dawn & Drew Show, a daily half hour characterized as "married-couple banter." The Lifestyle section piece uses the evening with Dawn and Drew as bookends around a clear intro to the downloadable audio program phenomenon, including an interview with pioneer podcaster Adam Curry, and more. Another USA Today reporter, writing from Seattle, told the Money section story, including a technical how-to sidebar, examples from local rock bands to NPR talk to musings of "an angry drag queen," and comments on Apple's apparent lack of interest in podcasting, despite the role of its iPod MP3 player in inspiring the form. Additional business-oriented comments come from Microsoft, Curry, blog-savvy PR guy Steve Rubel and others. The two stories are headlined Podcasting: It's all over the dial (by Marco R. della Cava) and Radio to the MP3 degree: Podcasting (by Byron Acohido). Multimedia weblog Weblogger Lisa Williams added podcasting to her meticulous topic headings some time ago, but (judging from the comments) has a hit on her hands with her four minute video about podcasting. Since telling the story in sound and pictures is the point for discussion, I won't summarize the package here. Go watch! (The original version requires Real Media Player, but there was some talk about converting it to other formats. See her weblog for more info.) Footnote: For more podcasting history and links, see the items I've posted about it here; you might call this a non-linear, episodic approach to telling the same story. Testing my own software setup, today's RSS feed of this page has a Quicktime attachment -- an old unmusical webcam and hair-flipping test that I thought had been deleted from its server long ago. Some other day I'll try to play Arkasas Traveler and read the news at the same time. Or something. 9:12:21 AM

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