Slashdot Mirror
Podcasting
SFEley (Stephen Eley) writes "Todd Cochrane's Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide has been heavily pushed in the podcasting community as the first of a wave of podcasting books to be released in the next several months. All of these books will surely cover the same themes, more or less: what podcasts are, how to listen to them, and how to produce your own. The popularity of podcasting is exploding right now, with coverage in every press outlet and Apple hyping it as The Next Big Thing. It's easy to see that there will be a huge demand for these books, even if they don't do much more than state the obvious. So what about this one? Other than being the first, does it offer any compelling virtues for the would-be podcaster or listener?" Read on for Eley's answer to that question.
Podcasting: Do-It-Yourself Pirate Radio for the Masses
author
Todd Cochrane
pages
281
publisher
Wiley
rating
4
reviewer
Stephen Eley
ISBN
0764597787
summary
How to find, record, and publish podcasts
Before we can even begin to talk about the book, we ought to cover the preliminaries. If you've been living under a rock for most of 2005, you may not know that podcasting is the latest Internet publishing wave, getting most of the same hype that blogging has gotten but much faster. In its simplest form, it's just people producing audio files (talk, music, whatever) and syndicating them over an RSS feed. Listeners can then use one of several apps to automatically download them and load them onto an MP3 player. The mainstream media, feeling some embarrassment for missing the last few Web boats, has jumped on podcasting and given it, frankly, a lot more press than it probably deserves right now.
A note on the author: Todd Cochrane produces Geek News Central, a very popular tech podcast wherein he reads out news headlines and offers commentary. He also founded and manages the Tech Podcast Network, a consortium of other technology podcasts that band together for cross-promotion, content standards and advertising, and he's the main force behind the heavily advertised and sponsored Podcast Awards. It's fair to say that Cochrane has done a lot for podcasters in various ways, and although I've disagreed with him on some of the details of his projects, I respect him highly for his tremendous energy and the work he's done to make podcasting a respectable form of media.
Another note (and disclaimer) on myself: I also have my own podcast, a moderately popular one that narrates science fiction short stories. In a practical sense this makes me both a podcaster and a literary editor. Which means, in turn, that I have a sensitivity both to poor information on podcasting and poor writing.
And with all that said... I'm afraid Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide is a marginal book at best. It doesn't suck, and there's nothing horribly wrong with the information it gives, but it has two endemic problems. Cochrane's responsible for both, but I put the real blame on his editors at Wiley, who likely ignored them in their rush to get the book out before any others.
The first problem is the writing. It's possible that this bothers me more than it would others. Todd Cochrane may be an intelligent, selfless, wonderful guy -- I truly believe that he is -- but the man can't write. The entire book exhibits a rushed, forced-casual, eighth-grade English paper style that grates on me like nails on a chalkboard. Cochrane even admits this in his acknowledgments: "Early on, I made it clear to Chris [Webb], my acquisitions editor, that I was a geek/tech guy first and that he did not want to see my English grades. Even so, he assured me that I was their man, and I went to work."
Well, Chris Webb, you're a dumbass. You picked someone who admitted he couldn't write to write a book on a breakthrough technology. As a result, the book is vague, meandering, and frequently redundant, e.g.: "You will want to use this Recording Control window to control your default recording device." That phrase ("You will want to ...") crops up everywhere: the book's not only in second person, but it's a second person that tells the reader what he/she wants. The only sentence opener that appears more often is "Obviously" -- which frequently precedes a thought that is neither obvious nor related to the sentence before it.
You will also want to ignore the poor punctuation and comma splices, the frequent intersplicing of Notes and Tips paragraphs that seem indistinguishable (in both font and content) from the main text, and very often, the simple use of the wrong words. In many cases this is simply amusing: "[Dave Winer's] analogy was that it was taking longer to download the video than it was to play it." Uh, that's not an analogy, dude. In at least one case it leads to a technically incorrect statement: "The reading on the software-controlled meter in my audio-recording package showed nearly 40 dB of baseline noise," when what he really meant was a noise floor of -40 dB. Two very different things.
The other major problem is the narrow perspective. It's really Podcasting: The Do-It-Todd-Cochrane's-Way Guide. Everything in this book is about Cochrane. Every example is his own podcast, every screenshot of a Web page is his own, and he's got multiple photos of himself in various dorky situations. Any photos of other podcasters? Mur Lafferty, perhaps, or Soccergirl? You wish. I have no problem with Cochrane using himself as a starting point, but it's a very diverse field, and nobody podcasts with quite the same gear or the same techniques as anybody else. Cochrane says he spent significant time interviewing software developers for the chapters on applications, but there's no indication anywhere that he spoke to any other podcasters in writing this book. That's a huge mistake, rushed deadlines or no rushed deadlines. Not only does it reduce the book's utility, but it also makes the prose seem dreary, monotonic, and egocentric.
So there's my overview. For those who think the book may still have some use to you (and it might, if you can put up with the above) I'll break it down by section:
Part I: Listening to the Podcast Revolution This section has three chapters, and they're useless. The book begins, "Do you have specific interests? How about triathlons? I have to admit, most radio broadcasts don't deal with those kind of subjects. But that's about to change." Yeah, okay. The problem here (beyond the clumsy writing) should be obvious: if you have no idea what podcasting is, you're not interested enough to buy a book on podcasting. The first chapter, "What Is a Podcast?" has Cochrane spiraling around the subject of podcasting for twelve pages without ever giving a simple definition. Then we've got two chapters which together describe the leading software tools used to download podcasts, and tutorials for using them to subscribe to -- can you guess? -- Todd Cochrane's podcast. To be fair, it was a pretty decent overview of the major client applications at the time of the book's writing; which means it's already obsolete, as iTunes 4.9 has totally changed the landscape since then. Of course, that can't be helped. The real weakness of this section is its superfluity: if you're willing to pay $20 for a book on podcasting, it's because you want to make podcasts. Even Grandma's not going to buy this book to learn how to listen to them.
Part II: Joining the Revolution: Your Own Podcast Here's where the book starts to get genuinely interesting. The obligatory but stupid chapters on listening to podcasts are behind us; now it's all about making them. The first chapter here, "Choosing a Podcast Format," actually has little to criticize. His basic message is sound: Follow your passions; develop a show structure and follow it; and be aware of copyright issues if you're playing music. All of that is good advice, and his detailed description of his own show structure and notes is appropriate here. This is followed by a completely unnecessary chapter about computer choices, in which he shows his Windows colors and comes off a trifle condescending toward the Mac. ("In researching materials for this book, I found I could not do the reviews justice unless I had a Mac, so I purchased a Mac Mini ... I knew that if I could record a podcast on a Mac Mini, it would probably make the Mac fans happy.") Then, at last, he delivers the first truly crunchy chapter: "The Semiprofessional Podcast Studio." This chapter's honestly very good, running the gamut of sound cards, microphones, mixers, Firewire interfaces (he dismisses USB interfaces rather unfairly), digital recorders, even quiet case fans. Some of it's hand-waved, and some of it's so vague it's just silly: "A condenser microphone is generally never found in households. People might have them, but they usually are not aware that they do." On the other hand, his discussion of quality sound cards does have much of value (barring the "40dB of baseline noise" misstatement I mentioned above), and he gives one of the best descriptions of mixers and effects processors for novices that I've found. If you have no idea what sort of equipment you might need for quality sound in your podcast, you'll get a decent grounding here. Not an excellent grounding, but perhaps enough to parse a little bit more of the serious sound FAQs on the Web.
Part III: Recording Your Podcast and Performing Postproduction Tasks (Yes, the man can't even name things with brevity.) There's one weak chapter here and two great ones. In "Recording Locations," Cochrane reveals that you can podcast at home, in your car, at a restaurant, or walking around. Whee. Then we get to the actual process of recording and postproduction, and the book honestly shines. He describes step-by-step how to set up Audacity (the excellent freeware Win/Mac/Linux sound editor) to record, how to set up a typical mixer, and best of all, how to set levels properly. Levels are the bane of any audio amateur, and these half-dozen pages are gold; it's the one thing a novice podcaster is likely to turn back to and reference several times over in his first few recordings -- or ought to, anyway. His advice on noise reduction, amplifying, and normalizing is spot-on, the steps listed for MP3 encoding are simple but solid, and he even gives several good options for ID3 tagging. (A step too often overlooked by podcasters.) I could complain about a few weird digressions -- e.g., the postproduction chapter tells you how to upload to Openpodcast.org, which is an utterly bizarre thing to advise -- but they're easily ignored, and overall this section truly shines.
Part IV: Hosting and Preparing to Publish Your Podcast This section's ... okay. His chapter on hosting is mostly a treatise on how to evaluate service agreements, which is valuable enough in itself but can be overkill for someone just starting out. There are a few math exercises for estimating bandwidth -- useless when you don't know your potential audience size -- and a brief list of "podcast-friendly hosts" which is, of course, already obsolete. His coverage of publishing methods is about weblog software -- wait, scratch that, it's about MovableType. He's infatuated with MT, and devotes several pages on a step-by-step for hacking MT's code and templates to support enclosures with full-source RSS code listings, then mentions virtually offhand that Wordpress and Radio Userland support enclosures out of the box. This is another case where having multiple podcaster perspectives would have helped. Finally, we get a chapter named "The Life Breath of a Podcast: RSS 2.0 With Enclosures," just barely longer than its title, which covers how to use FeedForAll to hand-crank an RSS file if you don't have blogging software that will make one for you. It might have been a valuable chapter if he'd spent any real time explaining RSS 2.0 or enclosures.
Part V: It's Show Time A closing section that's nearly pointless, but mercifully brief. There's an entire chapter about using graphical FTP clients -- lame because anyone who's that blinking-twelve was lost back at Chapter 6. The meaty chapter is called "Feedback, Promotion, and Paying the Bills," and it has some moderately useful information and some large gaps. Feedback apparently means "have a mailing list and a voicemail line, and hang out on Skype." Okay. Promotion's about directory listings and exchanging promos with other podcasters; then he offers a long commentary on advertising and why it's a fine thing to have. Unfortunately, other than creating a media kit he has nothing much to say on how to contact and market your show to advertisers. And the final chapter of the book, "Where Do We Go From Here?" offers a few vapid musings of the sort all podcasters talk about over beer: we're going to kill mainstream radio, podcasts will band together and commercialize, all the starving children of the world will have an MP3 player ... And Yes, in his final sentences he invokes the already-tired "Podcasting Revolution" chestnut. Not much to say here, but rest assured, he says it.
So there you have it. That's the entire book. Worth buying? That depends. If you're itching to get started with podcasting, if you're an absolute beginner when it comes to sound recording, if the online resources at Podcast411 and other sites don't float your boat, and if you can't wait a few more months for books like Podcast Solutions and Podcasting for Dummies to come out ... then sure. There are at least three or four good chapters in here with information you can use. It's not all the information, and you have to take Cochrane's style and limited viewpoint with a big grain of salt, but it'll get you started. For less than twenty bucks, at least it isn't a high-risk investment.
On the other hand, if you're the bootstrapping type, or you already know most of what you're doing, then there's not much in here you can't figure out online and through experience. And if you're patient, there will be other books, and I'm almost positive they'll be better written.
You can purchase Podcasting: the Do-It-Yourself Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Before we can even begin to talk about the book, we ought to cover the preliminaries. If you've been living under a rock for most of 2005, you may not know that podcasting is the latest Internet publishing wave, getting most of the same hype that blogging has gotten but much faster. In its simplest form, it's just people producing audio files (talk, music, whatever) and syndicating them over an RSS feed. Listeners can then use one of several apps to automatically download them and load them onto an MP3 player. The mainstream media, feeling some embarrassment for missing the last few Web boats, has jumped on podcasting and given it, frankly, a lot more press than it probably deserves right now.
A note on the author: Todd Cochrane produces Geek News Central, a very popular tech podcast wherein he reads out news headlines and offers commentary. He also founded and manages the Tech Podcast Network, a consortium of other technology podcasts that band together for cross-promotion, content standards and advertising, and he's the main force behind the heavily advertised and sponsored Podcast Awards. It's fair to say that Cochrane has done a lot for podcasters in various ways, and although I've disagreed with him on some of the details of his projects, I respect him highly for his tremendous energy and the work he's done to make podcasting a respectable form of media.
Another note (and disclaimer) on myself: I also have my own podcast, a moderately popular one that narrates science fiction short stories. In a practical sense this makes me both a podcaster and a literary editor. Which means, in turn, that I have a sensitivity both to poor information on podcasting and poor writing.
And with all that said... I'm afraid Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide is a marginal book at best. It doesn't suck, and there's nothing horribly wrong with the information it gives, but it has two endemic problems. Cochrane's responsible for both, but I put the real blame on his editors at Wiley, who likely ignored them in their rush to get the book out before any others.
The first problem is the writing. It's possible that this bothers me more than it would others. Todd Cochrane may be an intelligent, selfless, wonderful guy -- I truly believe that he is -- but the man can't write. The entire book exhibits a rushed, forced-casual, eighth-grade English paper style that grates on me like nails on a chalkboard. Cochrane even admits this in his acknowledgments: "Early on, I made it clear to Chris [Webb], my acquisitions editor, that I was a geek/tech guy first and that he did not want to see my English grades. Even so, he assured me that I was their man, and I went to work."
Well, Chris Webb, you're a dumbass. You picked someone who admitted he couldn't write to write a book on a breakthrough technology. As a result, the book is vague, meandering, and frequently redundant, e.g.: "You will want to use this Recording Control window to control your default recording device." That phrase ("You will want to ...") crops up everywhere: the book's not only in second person, but it's a second person that tells the reader what he/she wants. The only sentence opener that appears more often is "Obviously" -- which frequently precedes a thought that is neither obvious nor related to the sentence before it.
You will also want to ignore the poor punctuation and comma splices, the frequent intersplicing of Notes and Tips paragraphs that seem indistinguishable (in both font and content) from the main text, and very often, the simple use of the wrong words. In many cases this is simply amusing: "[Dave Winer's] analogy was that it was taking longer to download the video than it was to play it." Uh, that's not an analogy, dude. In at least one case it leads to a technically incorrect statement: "The reading on the software-controlled meter in my audio-recording package showed nearly 40 dB of baseline noise," when what he really meant was a noise floor of -40 dB. Two very different things.
The other major problem is the narrow perspective. It's really Podcasting: The Do-It-Todd-Cochrane's-Way Guide. Everything in this book is about Cochrane. Every example is his own podcast, every screenshot of a Web page is his own, and he's got multiple photos of himself in various dorky situations. Any photos of other podcasters? Mur Lafferty, perhaps, or Soccergirl? You wish. I have no problem with Cochrane using himself as a starting point, but it's a very diverse field, and nobody podcasts with quite the same gear or the same techniques as anybody else. Cochrane says he spent significant time interviewing software developers for the chapters on applications, but there's no indication anywhere that he spoke to any other podcasters in writing this book. That's a huge mistake, rushed deadlines or no rushed deadlines. Not only does it reduce the book's utility, but it also makes the prose seem dreary, monotonic, and egocentric.
So there's my overview. For those who think the book may still have some use to you (and it might, if you can put up with the above) I'll break it down by section:
Part I: Listening to the Podcast Revolution This section has three chapters, and they're useless. The book begins, "Do you have specific interests? How about triathlons? I have to admit, most radio broadcasts don't deal with those kind of subjects. But that's about to change." Yeah, okay. The problem here (beyond the clumsy writing) should be obvious: if you have no idea what podcasting is, you're not interested enough to buy a book on podcasting. The first chapter, "What Is a Podcast?" has Cochrane spiraling around the subject of podcasting for twelve pages without ever giving a simple definition. Then we've got two chapters which together describe the leading software tools used to download podcasts, and tutorials for using them to subscribe to -- can you guess? -- Todd Cochrane's podcast. To be fair, it was a pretty decent overview of the major client applications at the time of the book's writing; which means it's already obsolete, as iTunes 4.9 has totally changed the landscape since then. Of course, that can't be helped. The real weakness of this section is its superfluity: if you're willing to pay $20 for a book on podcasting, it's because you want to make podcasts. Even Grandma's not going to buy this book to learn how to listen to them.
Part II: Joining the Revolution: Your Own Podcast Here's where the book starts to get genuinely interesting. The obligatory but stupid chapters on listening to podcasts are behind us; now it's all about making them. The first chapter here, "Choosing a Podcast Format," actually has little to criticize. His basic message is sound: Follow your passions; develop a show structure and follow it; and be aware of copyright issues if you're playing music. All of that is good advice, and his detailed description of his own show structure and notes is appropriate here. This is followed by a completely unnecessary chapter about computer choices, in which he shows his Windows colors and comes off a trifle condescending toward the Mac. ("In researching materials for this book, I found I could not do the reviews justice unless I had a Mac, so I purchased a Mac Mini ... I knew that if I could record a podcast on a Mac Mini, it would probably make the Mac fans happy.") Then, at last, he delivers the first truly crunchy chapter: "The Semiprofessional Podcast Studio." This chapter's honestly very good, running the gamut of sound cards, microphones, mixers, Firewire interfaces (he dismisses USB interfaces rather unfairly), digital recorders, even quiet case fans. Some of it's hand-waved, and some of it's so vague it's just silly: "A condenser microphone is generally never found in households. People might have them, but they usually are not aware that they do." On the other hand, his discussion of quality sound cards does have much of value (barring the "40dB of baseline noise" misstatement I mentioned above), and he gives one of the best descriptions of mixers and effects processors for novices that I've found. If you have no idea what sort of equipment you might need for quality sound in your podcast, you'll get a decent grounding here. Not an excellent grounding, but perhaps enough to parse a little bit more of the serious sound FAQs on the Web.
Part III: Recording Your Podcast and Performing Postproduction Tasks (Yes, the man can't even name things with brevity.) There's one weak chapter here and two great ones. In "Recording Locations," Cochrane reveals that you can podcast at home, in your car, at a restaurant, or walking around. Whee. Then we get to the actual process of recording and postproduction, and the book honestly shines. He describes step-by-step how to set up Audacity (the excellent freeware Win/Mac/Linux sound editor) to record, how to set up a typical mixer, and best of all, how to set levels properly. Levels are the bane of any audio amateur, and these half-dozen pages are gold; it's the one thing a novice podcaster is likely to turn back to and reference several times over in his first few recordings -- or ought to, anyway. His advice on noise reduction, amplifying, and normalizing is spot-on, the steps listed for MP3 encoding are simple but solid, and he even gives several good options for ID3 tagging. (A step too often overlooked by podcasters.) I could complain about a few weird digressions -- e.g., the postproduction chapter tells you how to upload to Openpodcast.org, which is an utterly bizarre thing to advise -- but they're easily ignored, and overall this section truly shines.
Part IV: Hosting and Preparing to Publish Your Podcast This section's ... okay. His chapter on hosting is mostly a treatise on how to evaluate service agreements, which is valuable enough in itself but can be overkill for someone just starting out. There are a few math exercises for estimating bandwidth -- useless when you don't know your potential audience size -- and a brief list of "podcast-friendly hosts" which is, of course, already obsolete. His coverage of publishing methods is about weblog software -- wait, scratch that, it's about MovableType. He's infatuated with MT, and devotes several pages on a step-by-step for hacking MT's code and templates to support enclosures with full-source RSS code listings, then mentions virtually offhand that Wordpress and Radio Userland support enclosures out of the box. This is another case where having multiple podcaster perspectives would have helped. Finally, we get a chapter named "The Life Breath of a Podcast: RSS 2.0 With Enclosures," just barely longer than its title, which covers how to use FeedForAll to hand-crank an RSS file if you don't have blogging software that will make one for you. It might have been a valuable chapter if he'd spent any real time explaining RSS 2.0 or enclosures.
Part V: It's Show Time A closing section that's nearly pointless, but mercifully brief. There's an entire chapter about using graphical FTP clients -- lame because anyone who's that blinking-twelve was lost back at Chapter 6. The meaty chapter is called "Feedback, Promotion, and Paying the Bills," and it has some moderately useful information and some large gaps. Feedback apparently means "have a mailing list and a voicemail line, and hang out on Skype." Okay. Promotion's about directory listings and exchanging promos with other podcasters; then he offers a long commentary on advertising and why it's a fine thing to have. Unfortunately, other than creating a media kit he has nothing much to say on how to contact and market your show to advertisers. And the final chapter of the book, "Where Do We Go From Here?" offers a few vapid musings of the sort all podcasters talk about over beer: we're going to kill mainstream radio, podcasts will band together and commercialize, all the starving children of the world will have an MP3 player ... And Yes, in his final sentences he invokes the already-tired "Podcasting Revolution" chestnut. Not much to say here, but rest assured, he says it.
So there you have it. That's the entire book. Worth buying? That depends. If you're itching to get started with podcasting, if you're an absolute beginner when it comes to sound recording, if the online resources at Podcast411 and other sites don't float your boat, and if you can't wait a few more months for books like Podcast Solutions and Podcasting for Dummies to come out ... then sure. There are at least three or four good chapters in here with information you can use. It's not all the information, and you have to take Cochrane's style and limited viewpoint with a big grain of salt, but it'll get you started. For less than twenty bucks, at least it isn't a high-risk investment.
On the other hand, if you're the bootstrapping type, or you already know most of what you're doing, then there's not much in here you can't figure out online and through experience. And if you're patient, there will be other books, and I'm almost positive they'll be better written.
You can purchase Podcasting: the Do-It-Yourself Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Surely the death knell of any technology is when it finds itself in print!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
The very first Podcast novel (which is Unbelievably good IMO) is Earthcore by Scott Sigler and can be downloaded at: http://www.scottsigler.net/earthcore/
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I still don't get 'podcasting'... blogs are bad enough, but I hate talk radio so I don't think I'd be down with 'talk blogs'.
I guess I just don't get it cause I don't have an iPod.. maybe I'm not cool enough.
So, I'm like riding on the bus to work/school at the Dub, and this Husky couple, like guy-guy, well they get on the bus and they're all touchy-feely, which doesn't mean anything cause I'm like from Fremont, and we're so zen we're buddha so you can never tell.
Anyway, the next stop this girl gets on and this classic moment of iPod zen, she hands her MP3 flash stick - like we're so tech we're past watches cause you just look at your cell if you want a timecheck - anyways, so she hands the stick and the earbuds to one of the guys and goes - this is true, i was like staring cause she's hot in a geek way so i saw it - anyways, she hands it to one of the guys and she'd voice recorded the guy singing karaoke rap and everyone busts out laughing, cause it'll probably be the next band cause she added an electronica dance beat to it, almost uber-house, and everyone loved it.
so, now it's Podcasting on the web, and i feel kind of bad, cause it wasn't even an apple iPod, it was just a flash MP3 stick like we all buy.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why do people wish to hear amature-hour radio? There most likely is a reason why these people aren't syndicated nationally.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
This shouldn't be a book! At least, not a paper book. It should be a Podcast or talking book.
Surely the death knell of any technology is when it finds itself in print!
Yeah, remember when they started publishing the Gutenburg bible - that killed off printing for like, thousands of years - oh, wait, no, that never happened.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Podcasting: something else to do with the computer, but gawd, you have to have a dull life! and slashdot is always there for that.
Let's continue to spread the usage of this riduculous term by encouraging it's usage. YES! Good idea.
BytesTemplar.com
In order to perhaps apply some relevance, perhaps you should consider turning your rant into a podcast....
I don't read books, where can I get the podcast?
I wanted to find something on the audio aspects of recording my podcast. I looked on Amazon and could tell from the Table of Contents of Cochrane's book that this one was lame. I think I figured out that it was rushed to print.
Too bad for Wiley Amazon does give a "peek inside. "
I could see it was Windows only, when we're using Macs. We got on first show out using Garage Band in less than a week from concept to delivery - and it was GOOD, if we do say so ourselves.
Since there was no good book worth $20 I used Google and the tips from Podcast 411 and Doug Kaye for resources instead of waiting for a book.
That, and I listened to Geek News Central long enough to know he was lamer... He believes in UFOs being alien visits for chrissakes.
Liberache gay. But more power to Todd on making a buck off of the "hipsters".
Step 1: Start Drama with book author on Yahoo Groups list.
Step 2: Submit a bitter, mean spirited, personal attack disguised as a book review to Slashdot.
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Profit.
(Disclaimer: Don't know either of them. Actually thought, based on the review, that the reviewer was writing his own podcast book and was back-channel promoting it while tearing down another book. Found the thread in the google search trying to validate this. Actually proud of reviewer for creative flaming strategy and wish I had though of that first.)
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Uh, dorky review, dude. You'd be able to write better -- in the second person or otherwise -- if you followed your own advice.
Do what most people want to do when they want a fucking internet radio station.
Start a shoutcast server or icecast stream like most people and quit trying to make everything so goddamn hip and trendy.
No need for RSS feeds just constantly stream..
BOOYAH
This page carries a pretty accurate and humorous description of my feelings on these overused buzzwords. To quote:
Lately I've been hearing a lot of stupid people parroting stupid buzz words. There are too many to list all of them here, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to try. I propose that we all agree, here and now, to strike these words and phrases from our collective for the betterment of humanity, and the improvement of my blood pressure. Thank you.
Podcast: Someone had the revolutionary idea of taking a compressed audio file and putting it online. Yeah, doesn't sound so sexy when I describe it for what it is, does it you morons? It would have been a great idea if streaming audio wasn't already around for over a decade before the word "podcast" entered the lexicon. Man, I can't stand the word "lexicon." Talking about all these shitty words has made me start using shitty words. I'm so pissed, I just slammed the door shut on some kid's nuts.
Podcasting: It's snob for "streaming audio."
Podcatcher: Any idiot with an iPod, web browser, or ears.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
for music, i enjoy
http://post-radio.blogspot.com/
it's a new project so bare with him.
Bridge Keeper: So what about this one? Other than being the first, does it offer any compelling virtues for the would-be podcaster or listener?
No.
Bridge Keeper: Oh, well, go ahead and cross.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Even though I did some searching around, I haven't yet found an app for linux that does this amazing "subscribe, download, sync to an mp3 player" that the book/review talks about. What apps are out there for linux that are capable of these feats?
Yeah, I looked a digg. 99% of the stuff there is crap. 98% of it is NOT technology related. It's not timely (yes, PLEASE let me see week old news on the front page). Digg has just as many, if not more, problems with misrepresentation of the article, duplicate articles, trash articles, and everything else that you complain about. If you want to see things not related to technology, go for it. If you want to see things like "read my blog on how X sucks," go for it. Otherwise, I'll stick with something that has some actual content worth reading, even if it does have some problems, there are a lot fewer.
Who's got numbers showing how many people listen to "podcasts" with their iPod, vs how many listen to any kind of network audio transmission they're just calling a "podcast", directly at their computer? How many of those computer listeners are listening to streams ("Internet radio", etc), how many to downloads (iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc)? And how popular is BitTorrent vs just HTTP (or RTSP, MMS, etc)? If the normals are going to herd along our beaten paths bleating "podcast", I want to hear from the sheepdogs who can sort out the woolier ones for better shearing.
--
make install -not war
anybody else think podcast is a lame word for "hour long mp3" ???
I have plenty of hour long mp3's... can I call them podcasts now too?
Honest, I really tried to join the Podcast-superhighway. But what I discovered is that all the podcasts that are highly rated and have even received numerous kudos in woodfiber-casts like NY Times are just too boring. Invariably, it is some individual going on for 20 minutes about how popular their podcast is, and then they whine about how unfair life is and what's wrong with the world. Just listen to a few - you'll see what I mean. It's been a trial to find even 4 podcasts that I find worth listening to. And really - it's just an mp3 file. Now it's time for me to "time-shift". Gotta go!
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
So in a way, I feel like I've done my part to scrap this bullshit. I'm proud.
The newspaper I write for wanted to do this huge writeup on this overhyped marketingspeak word. When I explained that "Podcasting" is nothing more than a digital audio file to a server....but downloading it AUTOMATICALLY!!!!!11111!!1, they scrapped it.
So, basically, you talked yourself out of going to listen to free music and talking with band members, just to prove a point?
Um, ok, whatever.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They're just audio files, right? Like the hundreds I have on my hard drive? Am I missing something? I never did see a book on MP3.
personally, i have a lot of fun doing podcasts. even though mine isn't anything amazing. i don't think we should be using the word we're using, however. eck!
http://post-radio.blogspot.com/
...interesting if true.
Why is the ability to put it on a portable digital player making such big news?
Vote for Pedro
For the same reason TiVo was such a major innovation over the VCR: They do essentially the same thing, but with less manual user intervention.
I listened to a couple weekly downloadable radio shows before this whole "podcasting" thing became so popular. I had to visit each site from my bookmarks, and download the MP3s manually to my player. With podcasts, I just leave my mp3 player hooked up, and the software loads it up automatically.
Does that make me 12 years old? WTF kind of comment is that?
I'm not the guy that posted the "mean-spirited" attack.
But I'm the "College student wanting to create a podcast" that started the thread
I feel so honored right now. To be mentioned on slashdot has been somewhat a goal of mine. I can die a happy man now.
I am still looking for the "Quick and Dirty" route to podcasting and might even write my own guide on how to do it once I get on my feet and get out there into the world. Free of Charge of cource
(BTW, the guy that wrote the book e-mailed me in regards to my questions about making a podcast...Telling me to buy his book)
Many individuals and news organizations missed out on the leading edge of "blogging" and have been struggling to catch up. Somebody told them that "podcasting" was the Next Big Thing, and they created their own hype whirlwind.
But hey, if you can have WebTV For Dummies, why not have an entire book about podcasting?
What we need to do now is combine fad buzzwords with fad law-breaking. Henceforth all podcasts must be distributed on p2p networks. If we can figure out how get them inappropriate ESRB ratings we'll trendily offend absolutely everyone.
Anyone know of some good emo music with a Creative Commmons license? I will be podcasting soon @ http://www.bleedemo.com/
_________
The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?
People keep posting that stupid link, and it doesn't get any less stupid or clueless. "Podcasting" isn't the audio, it's the means of distribution.
Yes, it's that important!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
BOZEMAN, MT--The few people close to Mitch Delomme say that he doesn't realize the implications of his new podcast, an agonizingly personal 40-minute digitally recorded capsule of news, information, and trivia about the chronically lonely pizza-delivery man.
"I wanted to share something about myself," said Delomme, 48, who in the course of his life has been heavily involved in ham and CB radio, personal home-page construction, and participation in late-night community-access cable.
Delomme's podcast is currently available on all major subscription links, where it has attracted no attention.
He is Dave Winer!
Why does Slashdot continue to use BN.com as their affiliate program for books?
Amazon continually beats them in price on every book review done.
Amazon $13.59*
*Yes it's an Aff link.
Admitedly, "podcasting" is a buzzword for a technology that's been around for over a decade. And yes, most podcasts will be lame and irritating Live Journal analogs.
... but we're early technology adopters and geeks.
... and the brilliant part about the whole scheme of things is that you *don't* have to listen to the crap. Isn't that why we invented this stuff in the first place? Because radio sucked?
Despite all this, I think it's an important phenomenon. Sometimes all it takes is a buzzword to create an industry out of an interesting but previously unsexy technology (hey, that's what happened to the Internet). It will take a while to mature, and there are some hurdles that need to be addressed (copyright issues and what-not), but in the end it's a disruptive technology and an opportunity to challenge radio's dominant share of the audio broadcast market.
Yeah, I know -- we've all been streaming music and radio shows for years, and sometimes ripping and burning 'em for later enjoyment
The fact of the matter is that everyone I've explained podcasting to is excited about it. Not just my geek friends, but my parents and their friends. Time shifting is a *big* deal in broadcast media. Once people get it, they say "why didn't they do that before?"
So, that's why podcasting is important. It's not important because of some revolutionary technology -- it's important because it's the fruit of revolutionary and evolutionary technologies: the Internet, broadband, home recording, portable digital players.
Frankly, I'm surprised by the nay sayers here. This is the sort of stuff we've been having wet dreams about since the late ninties. The rest of the world finally figured it out, and now they're interested in throwing heaps of money at *us* to make it happen.
So stop whining, jump on the bandwagon, and make it something worth while. You might even make a pile of cash doing it.
http://www.current.tv/
What about our good friend, we have no casting anything without Al inventing the Internet (j/k). But is it really limited to audio only? Check out 366 on Direct TV. I am actually fairly addicted to it.
Cron. Check it out, it's the newest fad. Podcasting is so 15 minutes ago.
At the very least, they are admitting that it isn't anything revolutionary.
I'm a bit annoyed that an Apple-based title (pod*)has been attached to something obvious and which, minus RSS (another obvious step to RSS audio files), has been done for almost a decade.
Note that my problem isn't with Apple, but the idea that this is something new. It isn't, and calling it podcasting is simply applying an inappropriate bullshit title to something that already had a name: downloading and listening to audio files.
Other than the brief note about being careful about music copyrights, I'm wondering if the author delves into where Podcasters can obtain licensed production music that has the appropriate usage rights for Podcasting, which seems to fall somewhere between multimedia and broadcast. I'm hoping to capitalize on the craze soon when I restructure the pricing on my site, but this is so new that I have no idea if people are willing to actually license music for their Podcasts - maybe the larger ones with corporate sponsors, but I really want to cater to the small guys, including giving away free music now and then with a CC license. Any thoughts? Do you think people will pay for Podcasting music like they do for say a Flash animation, etc.?
--- Shoo-be-doo-be-do-wop-say-what-yeah!
Prior to a few months ago I had no idea what a Podcast was (and this is coming from a computer geek/audio engineer). I suppose it is precisely BECAUSE I'm an audio guy that I was not aware of Podcasts... because I don't have an MP3 player (portable iPod type, anyway). When I want to listen to music, I use a STEREO system, not my computer.
But anyway, in March a friend suggested *I* do a Podcast, and I thought he was crazy. I suggested we do one together, and these few months later, we have 7 episodes in the can, and are having a BLAST.
I really enjoy the freedom the format allows, and the distribution potential of the internet. If you have something to say, do it in a podcast.
As long as I'm posting, check out my sig and give OUR Podcast a listen. I think you'll enjoy it.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
Too bad you can't patent stupidity. I'd be the richest crusty crudge on the planet.
Podcasting: Do-It-Yourself Pirate Radio for the Masses
Come on, now.
It is safe to say that the technology behind podcasting is not breathtaking. To me, it is the social aspect of podcasting that is so great. In the past, I would either have to listen to music radio or NPR. Now, I can choose to listen to something more relevant to me. Until podcasting, I can't think of a technical radio station that I could listen to when I was jogging, but now I can download some good techie podcasts and not have to settle for pirated audio from gnutella. Now, subject matter experts (or novices talking with experts) can put out audio for niche crowds.
Is there crap out there? Of course. The medium is new and everybody is trying to make their mark. If I remember correctly, everybody jumped on the 'homepage' bandwagon for a while. With all of the out-of-date homepages, I'm not seeing that being a big deal any more. Even some podcasts that I was listening to a few months ago are long gone. We are in the midst of a big wave of content. Soon, most will fade away and only the strong or insanely board will survive.
I currently host a podcast that seems to have found a niche market. In the podcast, I interview people in the Perl community about what they are doing and such. So far, the cast has had only constructive feedback from those who have listened. Before Perlcast, it was not easy to listen to an interview with Larry Wall or Damian Conway or any of the other contributors to the Perl community. Now it is easy. The people in the Perl community get it. They see that we can listen to conversations about Perl at our convenience. The podcast medium might end up with some big names, but it is the niche markets where the difference is really felt.
And to everyone bitching about the word 'podcast', let me here a better name? It is catchy and the meaning is almost intuitive... much better than 'audio-file-in-rss-enclosure-cast'. WTF do you want to call it? Think of it this way, once circular saws became skil saws, we forgot who Skil was. A brand is only useful until it is commoditized.
Podcasting
Blog
Blogosphere
Memes
I have tried the podcast 'thing' for several months. Using iPodder, searching for podcasts all over the web, and then loading them to my Dell DJ.
Overall if I had to guess, I would say that I sampled over 200 podcast 'shows' over a 6 month period. There are now only two 'subscriptions' left in my iPodder interface: Science@NASA and StarDate. All of the others came and went. I found that I just could not listen to them for multiple reasons.
I am really into amateur astronomy and space science, so the recordings of the same articles that I would read at the Science@NASA and StarDate websites now loaded onto my mp3 player made it even easier to gain timely information about my hobby. I could even sit and listen to the articles via mp3 while at work doing something mindnumbingly repetitive.
Anyhoo, I would summarize by saying that if you find a worthwhile 'podcast' or two that provide a regular source of information in mp3 format instead of print, you will benefit. Otherwise I can't see much utility in just listening to people's podcasts just because the technology is there.
> Worth buying? That depends. If you're itching to get started with podcasting,
... then sure. There are at least three or four good chapters in here with information you can use. It's not all the information, and you have to take Cochrane's style and limited viewpoint with a big grain of salt, but it'll get you started. For less than twenty bucks, at least it isn't a high-risk investment.
Why would you buy it if you weren't?
> if you're an absolute beginner when it comes to sound recording,
In other words, the target audience for the book?
> if the online resources at Podcast411 and other sites don't float your boat,
Can't say I have even heard of Podcast411
> and if you can't wait a few more months for books like Podcast Solutions and Podcasting for Dummies to come out
So we are supposed to assume sight unseen that those are going to be better? Why? And many bought Todd's book months ago.
>
Which is probably the most anyone can ask for of any podcasting book.
In all the years of reading Slashdot, this is easily the worst review I have ever read.
... infamous quote from early to mid nineties.