I subscribe to less and less podcasts (not enough time to listen), but there is one I always install on every newly installed iTunes. It’s called the Basic Soul Radio Show, it’s presented by Simon Harrison. Every week Simon selects two hours of old and new funk, soul and electronic music, which makes for a 200MB MP3 every time (upgrade that hard disk!). I have discovered lots of little pearls thanks to it. Some examples from the top of my head:
Expect to encounter a lot of artists/groups that you’ve never heard of. Some of it you won’t like, some you will adore. Because I wanted a better tool to search the 5+ years of archive, I built a little search engine on
that allows me to search for artists, titles and labels. Per found occurrence it allows me to view the full playlist (reformatted from the original page) and if the podcast MP3 is still online, to listen to it (with a SMIL playlist, a M3U playlist or a Flash based MP3 player). I enjoy using it, to see when a track was first played, what other tracks that artist made etc …
Check it out!
PS: Every podcast episode starts with: “Today is the shadow of tomorrow. Today is the present future of yesterday. Yesterday is the shadow of today. The darkness of the past is yesterday. And the light of the past is yesterday“, a piece of lyric from “Shadows of Tomorrow” – Madvillain & Quasimoto.
I got invited by Nokia to talk a bit about podcasting and music discovery. The results of that interview, combined with opinions of Clo Willaerts, Alex Koprivnicanec, Steven Lemmens and Dieter Sermeus, can be found on the Nokia Nsights blog. Instead of just creating a sales brochure for their N95 phone, Nokia created a place where new technologies and trends are discussed, thus touching the bleeding edge of Internet, music, photo, video, and GPS usage. The perfect positioning for a state-of-the-art phone like the N95.
Today, the Nokia N95 starts a new and exciting future, building on the combination of all these revolutionary devices. Therefore, we’ve invited visionaries from across the technology world to share their insights into different parts of the future that got here early.
These are all tools to play either individual MP3 files or playlists (e.g. podcast RSS feeds) in a web page. Most of them are based on Macromedia/Adobe Flash. Where possible, I’ll use my Smoothpod Mashups as an example feed.
Background
I read a lot of info on digital cinema these last months. I find there is little syndicated content (blog feeds) to be found on the topic. Some sites have a page of press releases and/or an email newsletter, but that’s about it. That’s why I have created some custom RSS feeds with feed43. (e.g. Digital Cinematography feed for the CMP Digital Cinematography Magazine)
What I do see is that some sites publish really nice magazines in PDF (Portable Document Format – by Adobe) format (see Videography on the right). You only know about these if you go visit the site of course – very Web 1.0. So if there could be a feed that alerts me of new issues of these PDF files … And while we’re at it, why not put the PDF link as an enclosure in the RSS feed, podcast style? And just like an MP3 podcast is automatically transferred to a portable MP3 player, could a PDF podcast be automatically printed? The answer is: Yes. Let me show you how. Continue reading ‘PDF podcasts: proof of concept’
Ryan and Jen have just announced that they are putting an end to their popular Lost fan podcast, “The Transmission“. Started in May 2005, the show has grown into the most popular Lost audio podcast program, featuring discussion of each episode right after it aired, feedback from listeners and ‘The forward cabin‘: theories and spoilers for following episodes. A very well-produced (Ryan apparently has some radio background) show of 30 minutes each week, presented by two big fans with a good voice. I am subscribed to the podcast, and it almost feels like I know them.
I have no idea what the reason for the sudden decision is (they remain vague on the issue, so I’ll respect that), but I can imagine the show was taking over their lives to some extent. Me for one, I will miss them, I learned a lot about the Lost characters, the storylines and the Hawaii setting (Ryan and Jen are both very proud -and lucky- to be living in Hawai). It takes me more effort than the regular U.S. fan to get to see each episode when it airs (because I can’t buy them on iTunes) so I often heard the podcast before I saw the actual episode, but I still enjoyed both of them.
Ryan and Jen, thanks for your dedication and efforts. Whatever you’re up to in the future, I wish you all the luck.
First of all, it looks like they made a ‘wallpaper-cast’ instead of photocast. The RSS extensions are called www.apple.com/ilife/wallpapers.
The RSS feeds are only accessible with a specific UserAgent, i.e. only with Apple Safari. Try to open it in any browser and you get an error message. (Update: actually, while I was writing this, the behaviour seems to have been changed to delivering the RSS with Content-Type: application/octet-stream. So this is more or less fixed – application/rss+xml would have been better)
The dates are not conform the RFC822 standard: “2006-01-11 16:43:22 -0800″ should be “Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:43:22 -0800″. Most RSS parsers will have no problem with this, but if there’s an official RSS specification, why not follow it.
They put the image URL in the link field, which does not allow extra attributes like type or size. Why not use enclosure?
For all the date related metadata (photoDate, cropdate), why not use Dublin Core dcterms?
A couple years back, Lucas created Webjay, a site for easy creation and playback of playlists from the Web. Users can create playlists using music/audio/video from around the Web (with a simple Web form, from scraping a Web page, or with a fancy Ajax interface created by a 3rd party using Webjay APIs), share them with others, include them on their Web sites, browse other users playlists, play the playlists in any media player, or cannibalize the playlists to create new ones. With Dave Goldberg (head of Yahoo! Music) running around telling people that the playlist is the next frontier in digital media, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re interested in what Lucas is doing with Webjay. Y! Music Engine has some interesting playlisting features, open APIs, and more goodies on the way. Lucas will help shape our strategies around playlisting in the future.
from ymusicblog.com
via google.blognewschannel.com
I like Lucas. He takes and welcomes initiative, is smart and has a vision. Yahoo!’s brainpower just went one notch up.
A guy starts an initiative because he has a vision, not because he wants to make money. The site takes off, he builds a recognized brand without patents, seed capital or X rounds of financing, and eventually gets rewarded. A geek story with a Hollywood ending.
A major new feature of iLife ‘06 is what Apple calls “Photocasting.” Described as podcasting for photos, photocasting makes it possible to share photos over the Internet using one mouse-click. The photos are updated to your .Mac account, where users can subscribe to them using Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
from macworld.com
and
Take Photocasting, for instance. A brand-new feature in iPhoto 6, it lets you share full-resolution photos with friends and family who subscribe via an email invitation you send using your .Mac Mail account. As you update photos in a Photocast album, they appear in your subscribers’ iPhoto libraries automatically — ready to print or add to iPhoto books, calendars, or greeting cards. And anyone can subscribe to your Photocasts: even if they don’t have iPhoto, they can still access your photos via any RSS-compatible web browser.
from www.apple.com/ilife/dotmac/
A totally weird mix of posts on technology, advertising, social software, society, tango and women. Not necessarily in that order.
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