Favourite podcasts: Basic Soul Radio Show • 28 Apr 2008
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:
Click to hear the MP3 (playlist) • 27 Apr 2006
More than a year ago, I wrote an piece on Playing mp3 with an embedded Flash player. Things change quickly in this area, so it’s time for an update.
PDF podcasts: proof of concept • 07 Apr 2006
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...
Apple creates RSS the Microsoft way • 15 Jan 2006
When Apple reinvented the photofeed, they actually were a bit sloppy. Instead of building upon standard RSS and the Media RSS extensions backed by Yahoo!, Feedburner et al., they decided to do what Microsoft has always been accused of: they made a different, non-compatible RSS format.
Apple reinvents photocasting in iLife ’06 • 10 Jan 2006
“Eigen lof stinkt” as they say in Dutch, but who told you back in August of 2005 that RSS + images made sense (‘Photofeed: image podcasting’)?
Christmas present: podcast feed validator! • 25 Dec 2005
I get a lot of “what is wrong with my podcast feed?” kind of questions because I have written a fairly popular tutorial on podcasting with Blogger and Feedburner, and a lot of people start doing podcasts that way. There’s a couple of things that can go wrong:
New podcast icons based on Firefox/IE feed logo • 16 Dec 2005
You might have heard that the Microsoft IE team (and Outlook 12 team) is adopting the orange square ‘feed’ logo for its web feeds:
RFM for RSS feeds: Recency, Frequency, Momentary Value • 13 Dec 2005
I’ve been throwing round an idea in my head for a while: how the RFM method for analyzing and prediction customer behaviour could be applied to RSS feeds (blogs, podcasts, …).
Let’s get rid of podkeyword.com • 02 Dec 2005
Bad wake-up call: theregister.co.uk reports on Erik Marcus, a podcaster who has had his podcast feed hijacked by Podkeyword.com (no link, you know why). Why am I concerned? Guess under what name my Smoothpod Mashup podcast is registered in iTunes?
“Lost” in iTunes: good and bad news • 13 Oct 2005
There’s good news and bad news. First the good: Steve Jobs just issued a wake-up call to the movie industry. He already has shown everyone how to sell music (fixed price, basic DRM, no limits on burning) and hopes to do the same with video. The new iPod video looks great, and is clearly gonna end up on my desk in the near future.
Get ready for video podcasting • 12 Oct 2005
You can argue about whether to call it ‘videocasting’, ‘vodcasting‘, ‘vlogging‘, ‘vblogging’ … But you cannot argue about the surge in buzz about it: John Q. Public is getting ready to create his own movies and show them to the world.
Propaganda: podcast creation tool by Mixmeister • 29 May 2005
While checking for the latests versions of Mixmeister software, the excellent audio tool for crafting MP3 mixes, (they’re at release 6.0 now), I also noticed they just released Propaganda, a Windows software for creating p0dcasts. They’ve built it on the Mixmeister engine: accurate automatic detection of BPM (tempo) and downtime (1st beat of a measure), flawless time-stretching (speeding a song up or down without changing the pitch) and manipulation through a timeline based editor.
Jobs announces Podcasts in iTunes • 23 May 2005
If this is true, it could change the landscape for podcasting significantly: Apple is jumping on the podcast wagon:
iTunes and ID3 tags • 11 Mar 2005
I have a Sony MP-40 car radio that reads CDs with MP3 files. However, since I started using iTunes to create my MP3 CDs, I sometimes seem to lose the ID3 tags (Title/ Artist/ Album). I now know why: iTunes writes ID3v2 tags, and the Sony only handles ID3v1 (MP40 PDF).
Main differences:
Podcast Pepsi Challenge: doing it in the car • 10 Jan 2005
While he was still a sceptic in October 2004, Russell Beattie has taken the Pepsi Challenge and tried out listening to podcasts in the car:
Podcast for business: authenticated podcatching • 09 Jan 2005
Podcasting is still in its infancy. A lot of podcasts programs are about podcasters podcasting, on how they do it and why it’s so great. This is rather normal, since it is still new, and on the producing side a lot of (technical) issues still need to be addressed. I also hear the occasional “It’s 9AM. It’s raining. I haven’t got a clue what to say next.” podcast. But shows like IT Conversations, BBC’s “In Our Time” and The Dawn and Drew Show where the possibilities lie. This is high value content. It is clear that at some point people...
Podcast as muzak replacement? • 04 Dec 2004
Restaurants and hairdressers in Belgium are complaining because the costs for playing muzak in their businesses (performers’ rights or ‘naburige rechten‘) will rise with 30% to 37% (De Morgen, Dec 4, 2004, p.9).
I wonder: is that the same for people who just play Radio 2 in their shops, those who use a PC with some brand of MP3 player shuffle their CD collections around, and even those who pay for subscription-based digital no-commercials no-talking theme-grouped music?
IT Conversations: podcasting feeds your brain • 08 Nov 2004
There’s only one way to check if podcasting can change your life, and that is by diving completely into it. Since last week, I am the proud owner of a 20GB iPod, (the first Apple product I have ever bought) and it is hard not to be enthusiastic about it. It might not be the cheapest hard-disk MP3 player around, but it is by far the most funky. Especially the user interface was very intuitive, which is important for the ain’t-gonna-RTFM person that I am.
