• Feb 4, 2008: “What it’s all about” – The Sylvers (1973)
• Dec 24, 2007: “I know all the bitches” – Mr Beatnick feat. Ahu (2007)
• Feb 12, 2007: “Drive me Crazy” – Secret Stealth (2007)

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

http://tools.forret.com/basicsoul/

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.

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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.

The videos

Podcasting: the rise of audio content

Discovering new music got easy

The videos for Internet and Music are already online, the others will follow soon!

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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.

Hosted Service (insert HTML code)

Pupuplayer Free

License: no details – I presume it’s free to use

Format: expects a podcast feed as input

Pickle Player

License: no details – I presume it’s free to use

Format: expects a podcast feed as input – or can work with individual MP3 files

FeedPlayer

License: no details – I presume it’s free to use

Format: expects a podcast feed as input

Webjay (now Yahoo!)

free

can work with feeds or MP3 files, can also generate a playlist from an HTML page

Webjay Wizard

This tool of mine can also be used to create the HTML code for Windows Mediaplayer, RealPlayer or Quicktime embedded players

Software to install (on your server)

This means that at the very least you need FTP access to drop files on specific places on your server (not possible with Blogspot, e.g.).

MusicPlayer

License: This is an open-source (SourceForge) project by Fabricio Zuardi. It is free for non-commercial use.

Method: you reference a Flash file and give it the URL of the playlist. The Flash file is embedded with the usual [object] and [embed] tags.

Format: it uses the standard XSPF (XML Shareable Playlist Format). Webjay can convert any HTML file/feed to XSPF! Check the Webjay wizard to generate the right HTML code for your page!

SoundBlox

License: This is an Apache-style open source project by Laszlo Systems, based on the Laszlo open-source RAD framework. It is free for non-commercial use.

Method: you reference a Javascript file in your HTML headers, and then call a Javascript function with the URL of the playlist. (This is a problem for some sites. Blogger e.g. does not allow <script> tags in its posts, only in the template.)

Format: it uses a proprietary XML format. Files in XSPF format can be converted to the SoundBlox format through XSLT

Flash MP3 Player

License: Creative commons, free for non-commercial use

Format: RSS files, XSPF files

GurusNetwork

License: not explicitly stated. I presume it’s free to use.

Method: you reference a Flash file, which contains the playlist of the MP3 files to play. You can’t specify a self-made playlist

Sonify

License: not explicitly stated. I presume it’s free to use.

Method: you reference a Flash file, which contains the playlist of the MP3 files to play. You can’t specify a self-made playlist

RadioBlogClub

License: free to use.

Method: you host the player with all graphics and a config.xml file, that points to a playlist.

Format: A PHP script creates an XML playlist for all MP3 present in a local(!) folder.

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STEP 2: podcatching the PDF feed
Now what? There is a podcast feed with PDF enclosures, and I want a podcatching application to download them. I chose Juice (the former iPodder) application here, because I can configure it to run a script for each downloaded enclosure (see further). I copy/paste the feed URL in the Juice aggregator and it has no problem downloading the PDF files:

The result of this is: the podcatcher will create a folder for the podcast where all PDF files are stored. So if you prefer to read them on your screen, this is already good enough. But let’s try to get them printed the moment they arrive.

STEP 3: auto-printing the PDF files
Task at hand: I want the PDF files to be printed automatically upon download. I can configure Juice to execute a command line after each download, and I configure it to run a script print_pdf.cmd "%f":

What the script does is:

• check if the file is a PDF file (so skip all MP3, … files)
• if it is call "c:\(path to Adobe Reader)\Acrord32.exe" /p /h %1 so that Adobe Reader opens the file in the background (option /h or ‘hidden’) and prints the document (option /p).

This print operation will take the default printer with default settings, so you have to configure the computer to e.g. print on the color laser (looks nice) with 2 pages on 1 sheet (to save trees) with automatic stapling (if your printer supports that).

Conclusion:
A PDF podcast feed allows you to subscribe to regular releases of PDF files that are automatically printed the moment they are published. There are no technological barriers to do it. It would be nice if Feedburner supported it in its Smartcast service.
Anyone publishing magazines, reports, statistics, account overviews in PDF format: try it out!

UPDATE: Apple iTunes now supports “PDF enclosures subscriptions“. (via Pascal)

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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.

Technorati: lost – podcast – hawaii – hawaiiup

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cf http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml
It’s pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren’t in a namespace.
via scripting.wordpress.com (Dave Winer)

from static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml

• 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?

Compare this to the Flickr Photofeeds: they use standard RSS 2.0, enriched with the MediaRSS extensions.

from www.flickr.com

My prediction: Apple will have to comply to the RSS specification (e.g. using correct dates), but they will stick to their own RSS extensions instead of using Media RSS. So if you have a need for photocasting, wait until Feedburner have released some Apple Photocast specific options, and let Feedburner convert your photocast feed for you:

• SmartCast for Photocast should convert dates to standard RFC822 dates
• it should add an image enclosure to each item (not done now: feeds.feedburner.com/ApplePhotocastTest)
• it should add Media RSS entensions
• using Feedburner means that you can change your feed provider afterwards, e.g. migrate from .Mac to Flickr or Pixagogo, without losing your subscribers
• using Feedburner means that you can monitor how many people are subscribed to your feed.

Technorati: rss – feed – apple – ilife – photocast – photofeed – feedburner – Media RSS

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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 discovered Webjay around about the same time I got into podcasting, and I got into contact with Lucas after I did a survey of web-based Flash players and explored the whole playlist formats issue. I ended up creating a Webjay button wizard because I wanted to link Webjay’s playlist conversion to Fabricio’s Musicplayer.

I like this news for a number of reasons:

• 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.

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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/

Photocasting, photofeed, tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to, whatever. It’s great to be right! Just send that MacBook Pro my way, Steve.

I don’t know how the implementation works yet (but I hope it works out of the box with Flickr, Pixagogo and SmugMug photofeeds).

Technorati: apple – ilife – photocasting – photofeed

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FM Transmitter

First of all, they’re illegal in Belgium, so you can’t buy them anywhere here. Thanks to my numerous maffia friends however, I’ve been able to try 2 Griffins and a white-label gizmo, but my experiences have always been disappointing: impossible to tune right or get an acceptable sound.

Fake tape

There are these cassette look-alikes that you can put in your tape player. Only, who still has a tape player in his car? And what does the conversion electric-to-magnetic-to-electric do for your sound quality?

Custom interfaces

Alpine has a special solution for iPod (didn’t BMW have something like that too?), but we don’t like vendor lock-in.

Line/Aux in

• One year ago I had already talked about Kenwood making car radios with line-in possibility. But Kenwood used the RCA jack on the back of the device, which might have been a good idea in a hifi-stereo world, but not so for portable audio players.I wanted a mini-jack, damn it, but no vendor had that.
• But now: behold the mini-jack!
  - Sony has the CDX-GT200 (about € 130) and its bigger brothers CDX-GT300 and CDX-GT400 (not in Europe).
  - JVC has the KD-G612 (bout € 150) with “Front AUX Input”, as well as the KD-G510 or KD-ADV6160 (last one even plays DVDs)

I hope the rest of the vendors get the message and provide a frontal AUX in on their products. Car stereos, boomboxes, mini-chains, DVD players, DivX players, …
Rip, Mix, Plug it in!

Technorati: mp3 – car – caraudio – ipod

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• Not a valid RSS feed
• RSS feed without enclosures
• Feed not updated when posting new article
• …

To check some of those things, I needed to read and interpret the RSS feed by hand. That’s why I decided to make a podcast feed validator to do the checks automatically. Let’s take Adam Curry’s DailySourcecode podcast as an example:

• the URL of the feed is radio.weblogs.com/ 0001014/ categories/ dailySourceCode/ rss.xml, so I input it into the input field and the results are:
• #1: feed URL exists and can be reached
• #2: feed is a valid RSS feed (but does not conatin the iTunes extensions),
• #3: feed items have audio enclosure (but not all, as you see in the image below. The reason is that two enclosures are wrongly specified as text/html instead of audio/mpeg.)
• #4: the audio enclosure (MP3 file) exists and can be reached

So the enhancements for this feed would be: make sure all enclosures have the right type, and provide iTunes meta data. Better still: use Feedburner to get that and more: subscriber statistics and lots of feed tools.

Try it out for yourself:
Check your podcast RSS feed!

Some more features of the podcast feed check:

• estimation of mean-time-between-posts (MTBP), a metric I talked about in RFM for RSS feeds
• estimation of required bandwidth/storage per month (DailySourcecode: 600MB/month, 175-25.be podcast: 10MB/month)
• works with MP3 audio enclosures and AAC (MPEG-4) audio/video enclosures (any audio/mp* enclosure)
• detailed (technical) information is hidden by default and can be shown through some AJAX functionality.

Technorati: podcast – feed – rss – validation – check

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I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.
(from blogs.msdn.com)

So I decided to update my previous podcast logos with the new graphic:
(If you want to use them, and need the HTML code to copy/paste, check my podcast icon wizard)

Simple icons

: Podcast RSS (generic)

Audio podcasts

: Audio RSS
: Audio RSS (Apple iTunes AAC)
: Audio RSS (MP3)
: Audio RSS (QuickTime MP4)
: Audio RSS (Ogg Vorbis)
: Audio RSS (RealAudio RAM)
: Audio RSS (Windows Media WMA)

Video podcasts

: Video RSS
: Video RSS (Windows AVI)
: Video RSS (DivX)
: Video RSS (Quicktime MOV)
: Video RSS (Quicktime MP4)
: Video RSS (Quicktime)
: Video RSS (Windows WMV)
: Video RSS (XVid)

If you want to know whyI don’t use the acronyms “RSS” or “XML” in the icons, check Web feeds are like RSS, only different.

Technorati: podcast – icon – feed – logo – rss

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Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value – customer segmentation

What does RFM do: it analyses 3 parameters for each customer:

• date of last purchase (recency)
• # purchases per month/quarter (frequency)
• average amount of money spent per purchase (monetary value)

It then does a cluster analysis of the numbers (or in the simple version: a marketing guy decides based on gut feeling) and defines boundaries for each parameter, in order to split them up into categories.

Example:

Recency: R1 is everyone who purchased in the last 2 months, R2 is everyone who bought in the last year and R3 is the rest.

Frequency: F1 is every customer that purchased on average 3 or more times per quarter, F2 purchased at least 1 time per quarter and F3 is the rest.

Monetary Value: M1 are those who purchased more than �500 per visit and M2 are the rest.

In this scenario you have split up your heterogeneous customer group into 18 (3×3x2) more or less homogeneous subgroups that you can address in different ways. Your supercustomers R1-F1-M1 don’t need the same approach as the R3-F2-M1 (the big spenders that haven’t been around to your shop in the last year). And you hope you can predict the behaviour of each customer by analyzing his past behaviour.
(Side note: I learned this stuff while working in Sopres for Stefaan Vermeiren, who’s now teaching the Kiwis to do online banking)

RFM for RSS – feed segmentation

Now how would this work for RSS feeds?

• Recency: date of last post
• Frequency: average # posts per month, or mean-time-between-posts (important is that you only take into account the period from the first to the last post: if the feed contains 1 item per week but the last one was 1 year ago, the frequency is still 1/week i.e. around 4/month)
• Momentary Value: (I know ‘momentary’ is not a great term, just couldn’t come up with a better 4-syllable alternative for ‘monetary’ yet) this is the most creative part: you can count the # of words, # of links, # images, filesize of the podcast audio or the video file, …

What can you do with this kind of statistic? Well, I see some applications:

• is a blog ‘alive’? when do you decide if a blog is no longer active: it will be a combination of recency and frequency. If someone posted 1/week and there has not been any activity for 2 months: probably (momentary) dead. If someone posts 1/quarter and no activity for 2 months: perfectly normal. In statistic terms: calculate mean-time-between-posts MTBP and standard deviation STDEV. If the last post was MTBP days ago, there is a 50% chance that the feed is no longer updated. If it is (MTBP + STDEV) days ago, then the chance is 84%. (MTBP + 2 * STDEV): 97%, etc …
• what kind of blog is it? if average # words/post is low, and # links per post is around 1 (and frequency is 1/day): it’s probably a linkblog (like e.g. bnox). If the #words/post is high, the MTBP is 1 month with a very low STDEV, it is probably a monthly newsletter.
• do I have time for this blog? Now you subscribe to a blog without an idea of how often the author posts, and how long the articles are. With an RFM analysis, the blog could be marked as ‘low traffic’ (2 posts of 500 words per month) or ‘high maintenance’ (60 posts of 300 words per month).
• how much data does this podcast deliver? There is a big difference between a show like DailySourcecode (about 20 podcasts of 40MB per month: 800MB/month) or IT Conversations (2 posts/day of 14 MB each: 840MB/month) and a humble effort like my Mash-up podcast (2 to 5 posts per year of 4,5MB: 1,5 MB/month). For a mobile device, where storage and bandwidth aren’t so readily available (nor cheap), this is an important distinction.

This RFM analysis could be done by a company like Technorati, Bloglines or Feedburner, and they could combine it with language, location, topic and popularity stats to create an excellent segmentation of blogs. Or if someone feels tempted to set it up?

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