Tag Archive for 'Podcasts'

New Audible podcasting format - why bother?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/11/2005
in Podcast
. 10 Comments

I have recently started to take an interest podcasting again - I produced a few podcasts during the summer to dip my toes into podcasting but I had to stop when the soundcard on my PowerBook blew.

Recently, I have recorded a couple of my talks and podcast them with generous help from FrankP and NearFm and even more recently, Robert Scoble has agreed to let me record and podcast an interview I will do with him by phone tomorrow evening.

So I have been following the world of podcasting with increasing interest and was surprised to see a war breaking out there over the weekend!

The war is about what audio format to use in podcasts - traditionally the audio format has been mp3 files but a company called Audible has proposed a new .aa format. According to Mitch Ratcliffe (an Audible consultant), the main advantage of the .aa format seems to be that it is possible to audit how often they have been downloaded - this is, of course, important from a monetisation point of view! However, Mitch rather lost the head (and thereby the argument) when not everyone agreed with him.

As Michael Arrington put it:

Instead of embracing the bloggers that would normally talk about this, Mitch Ratcliffe (an Audible consultant) went on an unmitigated, unprovoked character assasination romp (with follow up attacks) against Dave Winer (â€?he’s willing to stealâ€?), Om Malik and others. This sure is an interesting way to engage the sneezers. As Om puts it, Mitch “goes after the dissenters with a verbal baseball batâ€?…. If you find yourself on the other side of a debate with Dave Winer, Om Malik, Doc Searles, Jeff Jarvis and others, maybe you should rethink your position. Because it is very likely you are wrong.

Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Michael Arrington and others have been mounting a robust defence of mp3’s.

In my own case, I don’t see myself shifting away from mp3s any time soon. As far as I can see from reading about Audible’s new format, you upload your podcasts to Audible’s servers, they convert to .aa and host the podcast there. It is a paid service.

My podcasting is pretty basic - I record the sound, convert to mp3, upload to archive.org (free hosting and bandwidth) and then link to the archive.org file from within my wordpress blog. Wordpress recognises the .mp3 file as an audio file and creates the correct enclosures transparently for me so I don’t need to worry about the tech side of the podcasting. How would WordPress deal with .aa files? I have no idea. I suspect, it wouldn’t recognise them as audio and therefore podcast subscribers (listeners) wouldn’t know you had published new podcasts.

I think Audible’s strategy is wrong here - I think they would have been far better served coming up with a mechanism for measuring stats on mp3s rather than coming up with a new proprietary file format. What do you think?

UPDATE:
Post updated after comments from Mitch and Pete informed me that .aa is not a new format - sorry ’bout that guys.

Podcasting problems!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/10/2005
in Podcast and Technology
. 10 Comments

One of the biggest problems with podcasting is the space and bandwidth podcasts consume. There are a number of ways around this, but none are perfect.

In my how-to post about podcasting, I mentioned that it was possible to use the Internet Archive to host your podcast and video blog files free. The problem with that solution is that at the time it took over 24 hours from submission of a podcast to having it approved.

In the comments of that post Pete Prodoehl mentioned that Ourmedia.org provided a service where files submitted to them would be added to the Internet Archive in a matter of minutes. This service seems to have broken down though. The last two mp3 files I submitted to them disappeared, never to surface in the Internet Archive.

So yesterday, I was trying to upload the mp3 recording of my RSS for non-techies talk. Not having any luck with Ourmedia.org, I decided to try the Internet Archive directly again and this time it was far faster than previously.

It still took roughly 12 hours from submission to approval but at least it worked unlike the Ourmedia.org service and I now can point people to the recording.

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention I tried Odeo as well but I was unable to find how to upload an mp3 through its interface.

Irish Blog Awards?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/10/2005
in Technology
. 9 Comments

Damien has posted a suggestion on his blog that there should be an Irish Blogs and Podcasts Awards and he followed it up with a post on Boards.ie so that there could be a discussion about it (Damien’s comments are still broken!).

Do I think this is a good idea? Potentially! If the idea is implemented correctly, it could be a great idea but there have been instances, in the past, of Irish internet awards events becoming fiascos - we won’t go there in this post!

Anyway Damien, love the idea - it will, if run correctly, help up the quality of the boggersphere (don’t you just love that term - kudos again to Damien for coining it!).

Yahoo! attacks iTunes podcast monopoly

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/10/2005
in Podcast, Search Engines and Technology
. 0 Comments

Yahoo! have just rolled out Yahoo! Podcasts - a service which lets users find, listen and subscribe to podcasts. PodTech has an interview with Geoff Ralston, Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer about the new offering where he says:

We want this to be as open as possible on both ends. We want to work with every device - however a user of Yahoo podcasts wants to consume their podcast, wherever they want to do it, whatever device, and on whatever jukebox. We’re going to work with them (jukeboxes) and we’re going to work with as many standards as possible using standard pcast format to integrate with a jukebox. You can listen to podcasts right on your computer, or you can listen to it right on the web itself. On the other end, we want to be as comprehensive as possible. If you have a podcast we’re going to find you, and if we haven’t found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we’ll get it into our index within 24 hours.

Finally someone has taken on ITunes’ monopoly in this market - iTunes offering is pretty poor, interface-wise, but as they had no significant competition, they didn’t have to improve it. Now, however, with the launch of Yahoo! Podcasts, they have competition from a serious player.

One of the most useful features of Yahoo! Podcasts is the search function - coming from Yahoo!, not surprisingly, it works like a dream. Another nice feature of the site, is the ability to rate and review podcasts - this will add significantly to the value of the directory as the better podcasts come to the top.

This makes me want to start podcasting once more! I’ll have to fix the soundcard on this PowerBook before I can do that :-(

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