Podcasts | Tom Raftery's Social Media

Tag Archive for 'Podcasts'

Zune to illegally add DRM to podcasts?

Published

on 28/9/2006

. 7 Comments

Microsoft is to launch the Zune on November 14th according to its PR site.

This date is just in time for the American holiday of Thanksgiving. What is not clear from the site is if this is an American launch date of a global launch date.

I wrote, in not too glowing terms previously about the Zune. One criticism I missed at that time is that if someone shares one of my podcasts over wifi on the Zune, the Zune adds on its own DRM to my podcast, in direct contravention to my podcast’s Creative Commons Licence causing the podcast to self-destruct in three days or after three plays.

Can someone in Microsoft explain the legality of that to me please? ‘Cos to me, that’s just plain illegal.

Podcasts moving to a new home!

Published

Tom Raftery

on 13/12/2005

in Podcasting and Technology

. 2 Comments

The podcast series I have been doing on this site have proven far more popular than I could have predicted, so I am moving them off to a site of their own - PodLeaders.com.

If you are a fan of the podcasts, note that all future podcasts will be published on that site, not here.

The site is still a work in progress. If you have any comments, or suggestions for the site, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks, Tom.

Site offline briefly - sorry

Published

Tom Raftery

on 30/11/2005

in Personal and Podcast

. 6 Comments

Apologies if you were trying to access this site or its podcasts at around 1am GMT this morning - the site was briefly offline. The site was offline because I exceeded my hosting bandwidth allowance - due to the unprecedented success of my podcasts!

A victim of my own success!

Fortunately the nocturnal FrankP rang me to alert me (knowing that I was probably asleep but also knowing that I would be prefer to be woken to get this sorted asap) and even more fortunately, I have the mobile number of the MD of my hosting co. I rang him and he said he’d get it sorted - that’s good service, thanks Michele.

Who would you like to hear podcast?

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/11/2005

in Podcast

. 14 Comments

Ok, I have done a good few podcasts at this stage and I can honestly say I am really enjoying the interview type podcasts and the feedback to them has been overwhelmingly positive (of course, I realise that is far more to do with the interviewees than anything I bring to the table!).

This is a format I will be doing a lot more of and I already have another couple of interviewees lined up. However, before going too much further down this line, is there anyone you’d particularly like to hear interviewed? In all cases, when an interview is coming up, I will allow people to submit questions that I will subsequently put to the interviewee.

So, who would you like to hear interviewed and what would you like me to ask them?

Shel Israel podcast

Published

Tom Raftery

on 22/11/2005

in Blogging, Business blogging, Interviews and Podcast

. 5 Comments

The Shel Israel interview went ahead last night, as planned. Shel was great, full of warm humour, interesting insights and relevant anecdotes. below are the questions I asked him and the times in the podcast they were asked:

Shel, what is it about Ireland that appeals to you? - 1:15

You guys wrote Naked Conversations right out there in the open - as you completed each chapter of the book, you published it online - what was it like writing a book as transparently as you guys did with Naked Conversations? - 2:30

Most people have read the book now online, will they buy it? - 5:50

If you were writing another book, would you do it online? - 6:30

Given that very few Irish companies have started blogging yet, why should a company have a blog? - 7:28

What are the advantages of blogging to a business? - 8:40

What advice would you give to business bloggers to help them become become successful - 11:50

Companies can be afraid of being open in their blogs (what if our competitors are reading the blog) and are afraid of what will be said in the comments - how do you deal with these fears? - 15:11

If I am a developer, how can I see what people are saying about my application/product? - 17:55

What do you see as the benefits of Podcasts/videocasts to businesses? - 23:30

How is a podcast/videocast of use to smaller companies (smaller than Microsoft!)? - 25:25

So blogs/podcasts/videocasts are about humanising companies? - 27:50

You have recently blogged that you are going to start writing about startups - what aspect of startups most interests you? - 32:30

What challenges do startups face today that they didn’t 25 years ago? - 34:30

Brian Greene’s question:
There are 40,000 blogs updates every hour of the day. How am I to read all that? seriously hasn’t blogging just added to the textual data smog that make it easier for government to bury the truth, making facts harder to come by? 37:30

You can listen to the podcast of this discussion here.

Podcasting search engines reviewed.

Published

Tom Raftery

on 21/11/2005

in Blogging and Business blogging

. 0 Comments

In my recent podcast with Robert Scoble, one of the issues I raised with him was how much easier text blogs are to index for a search engine, than are podcasts or videoblogs. Robert agreed that this was the case but he made the point that search engines are using link text and the text surrounding the links to podcasts and videoblogs as a means to indexing their content - not ideal but it’s a start.

Robert went on to predict that because technologies are currently being developed to allow for the indexing of these mediacasts that we will see great strides in this area in the next twelve months.

Sure enough today I found a comparative review on Yahoo! News of three podcast search engines which use speech-to-text software to generate written transcripts of the podcasts. The three reviewed are Podzinger, Podscope and Blinkx.

I searched the three sites for the term “Scoble” - Podscope found no podcasts with that term (!), Podzinger found 5, and Blinkx found about 50. I say around 50 for Blinkx because its horrific interface actually made it quite difficult to see how many results there were! None found the podcast I did with Robert Scoble last week!

All three include the ability to add your podcast to the index but the Blinkx link ended in a 404 for me!

However, things are set to improve - as the Yahoo! report put it:

the engines can learn better ways to determine words from their context.

Blinkx co-founder Suranga Chandratillake illustrates the process this way: If a podcast were made about the topics in this story, a computer probably would be right if it detected the phrase “recognize speech.”

But in a podcast about last year’s tsunami, the computer would do better to hear almost the same sounds as “wreck a nice beach.”