For those of you who have been following my podcasts, you will be aware that I recently switched from recording landline to landline to recording Skype calls and the audio quality of the podcasts increased markedly - or so I thought!
However, I received an email from a Margaret this morning which said:
I was wondering if you might be able to increase the Audio Sample Rate when you produce your next audio interview. The latest one with Mr. Ismail is done at 11kHz and my mp3 player won’t work properly unless it is at least 20 kHz. It sounds like really slow, drawn-out speech. The Bit Rate of 32kbps is fine but it’s the Audio Sample Rate (must be 20kHz or higher) that is critical.
Perhaps it is only my weird Creative Zen Micro that has this restrictive specification, in which case please disregard this email. I will make your mp3 into a wav file and then I can listen to it, no problem.
Thank you and this is only a suggestion. No reply is necessary.
I was curious about this - I hadn’t changed, in any way, how I exported the files to mp3 (Audacity: File -> Export to mp3) so what had changed? I checked the settings in Wiretap Pro and Skype - nothing obvious there. Then I go to thinking again.
The new process gets in a stereo file, whereas the landline to landline was mono. I tried converting the stereo file to mono in Audacity and exporting it and Bingo! 22050hz!
I uploaded the new 22khz files and replaced the existing ones for the Steve Rubel interview and the Salim Ismail chat of this morning.
Margaret - once again, thanks for taking the time and effort involved in pointing out this glitch to me - hopefully this makes these interviews even more accessible.
Salim broke my head in this interview!
This was one of the most informative podcast interviews I have yet done - Salim introduced me to the concepts of structured blogging, and the feed mesh. Structured blogging is a whole new concept in web publishing which literally blew my mind - PubSub will be officially announcing Structured Blogging next Tuesday with Marc Canter (there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Structured blogging yet - I got the scoop!).
If you publish on the web (if you are a blogger, for instance) you need to listen to this interview
The questions asked and the times in the interview I asked them are below:
Who is Salim Ismail and what is PubSub? - 0:32
What is PubSub? - 1:19
Is this something similar to Technorati’s Watchlists? - 2:01
What kind of people are using PubSub right now and what are they using it for? - 5:14
If a company (BUPA Ireland, for example) wants to use your service for brand management, they do what? - 7:27
You publish full feeds whereas Technorati publish partial feeds (presumably to bring people to their site), so how are you monetising this? - 9:22
No-one left any questions for you on my blog - is this due to PubSub being below most people’s radar? - 11:42
So if you are a job seeker or house buyer looking for houses or jobs with particular criteria…? - 18:30
What is structured blogging? - 19:32
So have you just destroyed Ebay’s model? - 27:27
The feed mesh? - 31:37
How soon will the tools for publishers be available? - 35:00
How are you going to monetise this? - 38:23
Do you listen to podcasts? - 40:22
Do you have any particular favourites? - 40:57
Download the interview here 9.7mb mp3.
We didn’t get to cover all the topics we wanted to cover in this interview so I will be publishing a follow-up next week - stay tuned!
I was having a strange issue recently on this blog - occassionally a blog post would 404 when the PermaLink was clicked on - the post would appear fine in the blog’s main page but any attempt to view it individually would fail! Deleting the post and re-posting with a new title solved it, so some part of the title seemed to be causing the problem.
This happened twice in the last couple of weeks - both times with podcast interviews posts. This got me thinking - I checked the mp3 filename and in both cases the mp3 filename was the same as the post title (i.e. darren-barefoot-interview.mp3 in a post entitled Darren Barefoot interview). Again, another solution, if you come across this issue is to re-name the mp3 file - this should have less impact than deleting posts and re-posting under a new title.
Finally, being aware of this, come up with a procedure to ensure that your post titles and files don.t share a name and it should no longer be an issue.
I have been hearing a rumour on the grapevine that Yahoo! may be buying Del.icio.us for between $30-$40 million. I’m not sure yet if this is more rumour-mongering - the same as the Riya-Google rumours of a few weeks ago or if there is something more behind this.
UPDATE:
The Yahoo! - Del.icio.us deal was announced today - cool, I was on the nail!
Captcha’s are lame
A captcha is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart - in other words a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not a computer user is human (or another computer).
From the Wikipedia entry on Captcha’s:
Recently, I have seen several bloggers install captcha’s as a way to try to stop comment spam on their site - guys, captcha’s are lame.
Why are captcha’s lame? Captcha’s are lame because:
There are many good anti-comment spam tools and procedures available, don’t use captchas.