Podcasting from Space

An anonymous reader writes "Podcasting has officially made it into orbit! According to a Geekzone article, Mission Specialist Steve Robinson delivered a short monologue off the southeast tip of Indonesia in which he described the morale of the Discovery crew at the end of their well-publicized mission: 'It's been a fantastic mission up here, absolutely amazing. Some of the hardest work that any of us have ever done. We haven't had a whole lot of sleep, and we've been extremely busy and really happy.' A transcript of the podcast as well as the MP3 itself can be found at Nasa's site."

Comments

Podcasting?

[Andorion]

You mean he recorded a message?

Re:Podcasting?

[Fizzlewhiff]

Why the Apple tag? Apple didn't invent podcasting, they just embraced and extended it.

Re:Podcasting?

[aacool]

He doesn't have an RSS feed, so technically this isn't podcasting. It's still cool. This bit,

Just incredible to be way out there on the end of that arm all by myself and see no evidence of humans anywhere. Just me and the Space Station and the Space Shuttle from a view that neither I nor anybody else has ever seen, and watch the sun come up over the bottom of the Space Shuttle, and get to sort of drink in that big view. I'll never forget it, and I'll never be able to describe it adequately, I'm sure. But I feel very fortunate to have been able to get a chance to do that. And also very glad that it worked!

Re:Podcasting?

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Podcasting is just another hip-to-be-cool term coined by some luminary metrosexual in the blogosphere. Somewhere out there right now there is a passive agressive latte sipping boob tapping "how I invented podcasting", his first book, into an imac. Its the new warhol, baby. I can't wait until the standard of coolness for these new age middle age wanna be a teen icon sorts is how long you can survive in a room with a starved pit bull.

Re:Podcasting?

[nocomment]

Technically it's not, but NASA called it a podcast. NASA does supply an RSS feed for podcasting though. Just search "NASA" in the podcasting thingy of iTunes. They're all pretty short, around 5 minutes.

Re:Podcasting?

[springbox]

You mean he recorded a message?

Podcast: Someone had the revolutionary idea of taking a compressed audio file and putting it online.
Basically.

Re:Podcasting?

[ajax142]

...and see no evidence of humans anywhere

Yes, because that robotic arm, the space suit your wearing, and the GIANT Space Shuttle and Space Station in front of you were not made by humans, they just grew up from the ground.

Hopefully all future spaceships

[BlackCobra43]

Will have escape podcasts. *rimshot*

"podcasting?"

[Saven Marek]

isn't the main thing about podcasting that it is a subscription based service and not just an mp3?

this looks just like a downloadable mp3 that has had the name podcast attached to it because well because podcasting is the meme of the month

A haiku.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is podcasting?
New NASA technology?
Something like blogs.

Re:A haiku.

[PriceIke]

That's hilarious.
Only on Slashdot can one
find such subtlety.

Re:A haiku.

[Rei]

:)

So many people mistakenly think Haiku is about 5-7-5. Japanese 5-7-5 syllable amounts are only a guideline to begin with, and Japanese word lengths don't translate properly to English word lengths, so it makes even less sense in America (where people stress only the syllable count, and nothing else).

The key aspects of haiku, the elements that help encourage it to be deep and philisophical, are the emphasis on extreme brevity and symbolic or paralelling references to nature. My favorite haiku is by Nick Virgilio, writing about his brother who died in the Vietnam War:

"lily:
out of the water . . .
out of itself"

Re:A haiku.

[timster]

It has nothing to do with the characters. Japanese pronunciation is composed of a relatively small number of sounds that are all essentially the same length. So whereas English can have a word like "shrine" and call it one syllable, in Japanese it would need to be broken down into something like "shu rye nee". Or consider the anime character name "Rei", which is (properly speaking) two sounds.

Actually, I should mention that Japanese does have a system of simple phonetic characters. When those characters are used each sign does indeed correspond to a single "syllable".

Okay, I give up.

[xerxesVII]

What the hell makes a podcast so different from an MP3 that it deserves its own word? I'm honestly not trolling here, it's just that the word is driving me nuts.

Re:Okay, I give up.

[twoshortplanks]

A Podcast has a RSS feed (or Atom feed, whatever) that you can subscribe to to tell you when there's a new mp3. That's it. That's the difference.

Which would make this not a podcast. It would make it an "audio recording".

Re:Okay, I give up.

[justforaday]

Which would make this not a podcast. It would make it an "audio recording".

Well, I got this funny feeling that this whole "audio recording" thing is gonna take off like gangbusters...

Re:Okay, I give up.

[Evro]

Thanks for clearing that up. I am now left wondering why this is the buzzword du jour, as it seems pretty boring. Do we have "Podcasts" of "blogs" now, so the angsty teens can discuss their angst in full 44kHz angst-filled audio? These types of trends make me fear for our future sometimes. :-(

Re:Okay, I give up.

[sp5]

A Podcast has a RSS feed (or Atom feed, whatever) that you can subscribe to to tell you when there's a new mp3. That's it. That's the difference.

Which would make this not a podcast. It would make it an "audio recording".

Well.... strictly speaking the definition of a podcast doesn't even qualify as a "cast".

Since you are pulling the RSS file and checking it for updates, and then choosing to downloading the audio file if you're interested it can't be considering casting since everything is pull and not push.

Re:Okay, I give up.

[timster]

Yeah, but it works in a sort of pushy way. Some of us old folk (i.e. over 20 years old) will remember that during the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer days, there was a brief fascination with the idea of "push" content. So when there was new content, you wouldn't have to go get it -- it would be "pushed" right to your desktop through a "channel"!

Once "Push" was implemented, it turned out to be a "reload this Web page every 5 minutes" feature. Alas, though, the eventual simplification of the concept did not save us from years of disabling "Active Desktop" and looking at dozens of Win98 machines running an unconfigured and useless "Channel Screen Saver".

So lemme get this straight...

[fimbulvetr]

1. Nasa publishes an MP3.
2. Someone finds the link to it.
3. Someone realizes they can listen to it on their portable media device.
4. This automagically turns into "podcasting".
5. Someone submits it to Slashdot under Apple using "Ipod" in the summary, solidifying it's chances of making it to the front page.
6. ???

Re:So lemme get this straight...

[dema]

Actually, NASA published it as a "podcast," even though it doesn't really fall under the "official" definition of one.

http://www1.nasa.gov/returntoflight/crew/robinson_ podcast.html

So the proper steps are:
1. NASA gets MP3.
2. NASA calls it a podcast.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!

Re:So lemme get this straight...

[databyss]

Apparantly you don't understand the workings of NASA

1. NASA gets MP3.
2. NASA calls it a podcast.
3. NASA forms committies to manage the development and implementation of aforementioned podcast.
4. NASA develops several deriviate commercial products based on the podcast.
5. NASA mismanages the entire organization into chaos.
6. DEBT!!!

More amazing than you think!

[standards]

This is truly amazing once you understand the details.

They take audio from the Shuttle, digitize it, convert it into an MP3 audio file, create an XML document that refers to the MP3 file, and then jam it all on an accessible web server.

The most amazing part: they have a pretty good workflow to do this whole thing!

Strangely, the web server was not actually located on the shuttle itself. What gives?

Bah! Those kids and their buzzwords

[GillBates0]

The Wikipedia article on Podcasting says:

Podcasting (also known as blogcasting) is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s)....
The word "podcasting" is a portmanteau that combines the words "broadcasting" and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player.

So you're right, the astronaut merely recorded a message, which NASA published as an mp3 file, consequently making all the IPod-toting blog kiddies go hyper.

I could similarly claim Podcasting "officially made it into space" with Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man..." quote, since it's available as an audio file in a variety of places.

A plea

[Gothic_Walrus]

Podcasting is an overused buzz word.

Please, stop calling every kind of audio stream or download that hits the Internet a podcast.

"Come here Watson. I need you."

[richdun]

So, we should now credit Alexander Graham Bell for the first podcast?

Re:Change the name...

[GuitarNeophyte]

Once the beast is in the wild, it's pretty hard to bring it back. Like "Hacker". It's out there for good.

But at least it's like Kleenex. Just because it's earned itself a business-related name doesn't mean that you can't use the technology.

"Goody Goody for our side!", as my grandmother used to say.

Luke
----
Send your boss to ChristianNerds.com, the Computer Encyclopedia that speaks in an easy enough language that even they could understand it.

Re:Change the name...

[Rude Turnip]

Apple didn't invent podcasting and has no control over it. It is named after the most popular audio player out there so that the masses will immediately get a general idea of what it's about.

Re:Change the name...

[Midnight Thunder]

There already is and its called a "Blogcast". Truth is once a term is in general usage its hard to actually replace it with the proper term. Take a Hoover for example or how some people say they will Google for it. Also, I should note that anything that is easy and quick to say will tend to stick. One of the factors that appears to make something quick and easy to say is the lack of hard consonants.

If you'd like to listen to the "podcast"

[Guano_Jim]

Here it is.

Re:Definately Suitable

[amliebsch]

Plus, since mp3s are smaller than uncompressed audio, the files weigh less.

Hamcasting

[leighklotz]

I also listened to the shuttle mission live on my VX2R handheld (about the size of an iPod), courtesy of NA6MF, the NASA Ames amateur radio club retransmitting their internal audio feed on 145.585 MHz.

And just for funsies, I made a sample PodCast RSS of W1AW Morse code practice.