Blogarithms

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Mike Milinkovich - Eclipse Foundation (rated 2.8 by our listeners)
• Peter Hortensius - Lenovo (3.0)
• Dean Karnazes - Ultramarathoner (3.2)
• Richard Marks - Interactive Entertainment User Interfaces (3.4)
• Dan Solove - The Digital Person (3.4)
• Jerry Sanders on Biotech Nation (3.6)
• Stephen Yafa - "Cotton" on Tech Nation (3.7)
• George Dyson - Von Neuman’s Universe (4.1)
• Dave Van Dyke - Changes in Radio (4.2)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Bruce Schneier: Beyond Fear (4.0)

Earlier today we passed the milestone of 10,000 registered users on IT Conversations. Since most of our downloads come in anonymously through RSS and other mechanisms, there’s no way to be sure of the ratio of registered-to-non-registered listeners. But if the ratio is the same as that for those who download/stream through the site, our total active listenership (at least one download/stream per month) is between 80,000 and 100,000.

Podcasting has made it into EQ Magazine, one of the better tech publications for recording engineers, etc. In this article by Brian Maggi, he concludes:

Podcasting is real and here, not some vaporware. And yet, some are still going to miss the boat. They won’t recognize its boundless promotional potential, or appreciate the tangible connections it will create with new and existing audio fans.

So you have a choice: Dismiss it now, fear it later, or take this golden opportunity to define and shape it for the better.

Includes the usual mentions of Adam Curry, iPodder.org and Dawn and Drew.

Some of you have heard me preach/predict that the future of podcasting will be reception by autonomous mobile decvices: when you can both manage your RSS/enclosure subscriptions on a wireless mobile device, receive them asynchronously (i.e., not streamed for listening in real time), and cache them on local disk. All without ever using a desktop or notebook computer as we all do now. The new Nokia N91 looks like it might be able to do this given an appropriate application. Expect the other handset manufacturers to offer similar hardware by the end of this year.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Sound Policy: Corporate Blogging (rated 2.8 by listeners)
• The Architecture of Participation (3.0)
• Tom Igoe - Networked Objects at ITP (3.3)
• Rebecca Goldstein - Tech Nation (3.5)
• Gordon Moore - Moore’s Law, 40 Years Later (3.6)
• Jonathan Schwartz - The Participation Age (3.7)
• Keith Devlin - Tech Nation (3.8)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• R0ml Lefkowitz: (More) Missing Open Source Projects (3.4)

I’ve previously ranted about the use of MP3 for anything but final delivery, and here at IT Conversations, Team ITC has been experimenting with the best codec to use for exchanging in-progress audio files. Under consideration have been:

1. MPEG-1 Lauer III (MP3, at 192kbps or 256kbps)
2. MPEG-1 Layer II
3. MPEG-2
4. FLAC (lossless)

We’ve been using MPEG-1 Layer II (MP2) based on my own empirical tests in which I encoded a WAV/PCM original using one of the above, then decoded and re-encoded using MP3 for release. Using MP3 (even hi-res) causes annoying artifacts when decoded/re-encoded. FLAC doesn’t offer much compression, although the audio is perfect. MPEG-2 has a boatload of options, and the ones I tested weren’t any better than hi-res MP3. (I didn’t test them all.)

I then went out and got some advice fom the real experts in public radio. Here are some excerpts from their comments. Stephen Hill wrote:

The quick answer is MP2…[When] the MPEG 1 spec was designed, precisely the problems you are facing were addressed. The solution was a 3 tier system for origination, production, and release formats, which correspond to Layers 1, 2 and 3. Layer 2 is an intermediate production format specifically designed to limit artifacts when re-encoded or transcoded into the final Level 3 release format. You are correct that NPR standardized on MPEG-1 Layer II at 128kbps (mono) or 256kbps (stereo) some ten years ago, and continues to use them today. The latest distribution architecture which they call the ContentDepot, is built on this. You can see the details at www.prss.org.

Steve Schultze of prx.org had this to say:

Basically MP2 survives much better than other codecs when reencoded. In codec-greek MP2 is recommended for “contribution (i.e. link between broadcasting studios with provisions for post processing)” vs. MP3 which is only recommended for “commentary links, i.e. a link for speech signals which are transmitted to the broadcasting station using e.g. one B-channel of an ISDN line.” Read about it here if you’re so inclined.

NPR came to the same conclusion: “Now NPR does not accept audio feeds in MP3 format, because employing this algorithm can lead to degraded audio in fewer generations than does high-bit rate MPEG Layer II.”

For PRX we chose MP2 at 128kbps mono / 256 stereo because it can be used fairly reliably for re-encoding later, is 1/5 the size of an uncompressed WAV, and it is the NPR standard. We generate Real and MP3 files from these MP2s and will likely create Windows Media, AAC and others in the future. Our producers would not have been able to reliably upload hour long WAVs (~600mb) even on broadband connections.

FLAC is non-lossy and is about %60 the size of the WAV, so that’s an option worth considering. However…MP2 would make it easier to get into the radio broadcast chain. Also, FLAC is less widely supported in sound editing software (MP2 *should* work in anything that supports MP3s although that’s not always true) and MP2s can be played in iTunes etc for convenience. MP2s at 256kbps are also still ~half the size of FLAC. If you settle on MP2 then you could give your producers/engineers our mp2 encoder which is drag-and drop with no settings, meaning that everyone is using the same standard.

MPEG 2 frankly still confuses the heck out of me because of the varied video/audio layers and settings.

For our purposes, it ultimately made sense to go with MPEG-1 Layer II as our “archive” and “interchange” format. It sounds like one of the better options for you.

Via one of the podcast email lists I found out about Podscope, a very cool site that searches the audio content of podcasts. Hey…I’m not kidding. It’s pretty cool. Check out this link for China, then click on the + sign to the left of Oded Shenkar: Tech Nation. David Seltzer is the Systems Architect at TVEyes, the company whose technology is behind the scenes.

I was visiting Evan, Noah and the Odeo team this afternoon, and we kicked it around a bit. Evan did some further investigations and explains it well.

Last Friday I had the privilege of being a guest on the Charlotte Talks radio program on WFAE with Mike Collins. The show was about blogs and podcasting. Also on the show were Steve Rubel and Haney Howell from Winthrop University. You can listen to the show. (Windows Media Player required.)

Thanks to an invitation and ticket from Niall Kennedy of Technorati, I’m going to hear Ira Glass speak in Redwood City, CA, on Friday night. If anyone else wants to go and join us for dinner beore the show, just get in touch with either of us.

This week is the launch of a new series here on IT Conversations: Larry’s World featuring Larry Magid. A syndicated technology columnist and broadcaster for more than two decades, Larry contributes to CBS News, the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report and other publications. Larry’s World will be published on Mondays, and you won’t want to miss the official premiere edition this Monday, when Larry interviews Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel. Gordon invented “Moore’s Law,” which is now 40 years old. And it hasn’t been repealed yet.

Thanks to Kevin Werbach, the founder of the event, we’re thrilled to be bringing you the terrific Supernova event this year. It will be held in San Francisco, June 20-22, and our coverage will begin 1-2 weeks later. Don’t miss our coverage of Supernova 2004 in the IT Conversations archives.

Yesterday I posted some 1Q2005 stats from IT Conversations. Here are a few more. First is the count of pageviews.

I’ve been telling people that the number of pageviews has been fairly flat due to the relative increase of those who retrieve audio files via RSS and never visit the site. Guess I was wrong! The number of pageviews during March 2005 was 330,405 or an average of 10,658 per day.

Next is the total number of Equivalent Complete Listens (ECLs).

Equivalent Complete Listens are something I created as a way to report downloads. It’s probably more conservative than most podcasters would like to emply. Most of they techniques others use to count listens result in substantial inflation of results, in my opinion. ECLs are derived from the total number of bytes of downloads (audio only, of course) each month divided by the average size of the programs published in that month. For example:

In March 2005, IT Conversations had 4,485GB total audio downloads, divided by 17.22MB average per program yielding 260,453 equivalent full listens per month (8,402 per day).

New programs are listened to more frequently than older programs, which are not featured on our home page or in our RSS feeds, so we estimate the average number of listens to a new program to be approximately 10,000.

Here’s a summary for the month of March 2005:

• Registered users: 8,812 (up 96% in three months)
• Audio delivered: 4.485TB (up 85%)
• Listens: 260,453 (up 85%)
• Pageviews: 330,405 (up62%)

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful stereo.)

New Programs This Week

(in increasing order of listener rating)

• Geoffrey Moore (rated 3.1 by listeners). In this keynote address from the Software 2004 conference, Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado) considers what might happen to the software industry over the next decade. He looks particularly at what the big, established players might or should do, and how that will affect them and the smaller companies as well.
• Daren Tsui - Mspot (3.1). First there was AM, then FM, satellite radio, streaming on the Internet, podcasting and now Mspot, a small California startup offering audio over cellphone networks. Larry Magid interviews Daren Tsui, the CEO of Mspot, that now offers 13 channels (eight of them for music) of streamed and on-demand audio for mobile phones.
• Real Money in Virtual Economies (3.2). This debate will clue you in to one of the most interesting developments most of us haven’t yet heard of: virtual property markets and their intellectual property issues. The participants make legal, dollar, behavioral, and design forecasts for the virtual property markets within massively multi-player games, debating the practice from seller and designer viewpoints, and business vs. gaming intentions. From Accelerating Change 2004.
• James Stewart (3.2). On Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews James Stewart, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Den of Thieves.” His latest endeavors have been a look inside the wonderful world of “Corporate Disney.”
• Rael Dornfest (3.3). Some would argue that the learned professional dominated the 20th century, whereas, in the 21st century it appears that a paradigm shift is poised and ready. In an age where knowledge, information, and global communication are at the fingertips of almost anyone, the amateur enthusiast, the “citizen engineer”, has the ability to make an impact on the economy and society, to remix culture. Rael Dornfest kicks off O’Reilly Media’s Emerging Technology Conference.
• Neil Gershenfeld - Bits and Atoms (3.6). Imagine a future where personal fabricators allow each of us to make almost anything. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms — yes, there really is such a thing — explains how personal fabricators will revolutionize our world as PCs did a generation ago by enabling us to design and make the tools and products we want in our own homes. A panel of experts then considers the implications of personal fabrication. From ETech 2005.
• Elizabeth George (3.6). Moira Gunn also speaks with Elizabeth George, the best selling author of over a dozen Inspector Lynley mysteries. You’ve seen them on television on PBS’ Mystery, and you will never guess where she gets her forensic science.
• Malcolm Gladwell at SXSW (4.0). He’s back! An all-time IT Conversations favorite and author ot The Tipping Point and Blink, Malcolm Gladwell kicks off our coverage of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. In this keynote address, he discusses how we interact with our environment and make instantaneous decisions based on a multitude of information sources, some of which may actually be driving us awry.

Doug’s Favorites from the Archives

• Clayton Christensen: Capturing the Upside (4.3). The author of The Innovator’s Dilemma says many managers are unable to predict whether an innovation will succeed, so they place multiple bets with the hope that some will be winners. Others try to identify opportunities and develop a rigorous plan to attack those opportunities. But conclusive data is often only available after the game has already been won. Professor Christensen suggests using theory instead. Every action a manager takes, every plan a manager makes is based on some belief of cause and effect.

I was privileged to be among a group of six people associated with blogging and podcasting to have dinner with Jim Allchin of Microsoft last night. I’d write about it, but Thomas Hawk and Evan Williams have already done good jobs on their blogs, and they write better than I do anyway.

I was interviewed recently for this story — an interesting and fairly accurate summary of what’s going on at IT Conversations.

I just published IT Conversations program #500, a Tech Nation show in which Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Rebecca Goldstein who has written a biography of Kurt Godel. Not all 500 shows have been released yet — we have about 45 in the production queue for Team ITC.

Approaching our second anniversary, it’s interesting to look back at the growth of IT Conversations. Here are two charts of the past year’s activity. The first shows the number of registered users, now approaching 10,000. 15%-20% of downloads initiated through the web site are by registered, logged-in users. There’s no way to determine how many of the downloads initiated via RSS (now the vast majority of the traffic) are by registered users.

The next chart shows the traffic of audio file distribution, combining that delivered by Limelight Networks (the majority) and our own servers (for ShoutCast streaming only). On our peak day, we hit roughly 220GB, the equivalent of nearly 7TB per month.

Regarding the dip during December-February, my guess is that it’s due to the lull in the conference season. [More stats here]

After now putting the Marantz PMD660 through its paces for three weeks, it’s time to review and reconsider my earlier comments. In a nutshell, I’m disappointed. It’s not up to the usual Marantz level of quality and it’s overpriced.

Preamps are the biggest problem. They’re noisy. If you use a dynamic mic, you might be disappointed in the s/n ratio. The only way I figure they get the advertised 60dB s/n ratio is with a high-output condenser mic and a fairly strong source. They even specify the use of a condenser mic in the instructions. C’mon, guys. There’s no excuse for such a lousy preamp in a supposedly ‘pro’ piece of gear. I’ve got stuff from Radio Shack that sounds better.

Line-in Headroom is the second most-annoying problem. If you feed it anything higher than a pro-level +4dBu signal, it clips. This is a real problem since lots of other pro gear (like the ubiquitous Mackie mixers) are capable of putting out clean signals that are 12dB or even 20dB higher than +4dBu. Lots of house/PA personnel allow their outputs to go above +4dBu, so if you’re getting a feed from the board/mixer, you could be in trouble. And the clipping occurs before the line-input level control. If they’re going to have zero headroom on the line input, they should have a switchable 20dB attenuator as they do on their other ‘pro’ equipment. As for me, I always have a few in-line attenuators in my toolkit for circumstances like this.

CompactFlash, however, is very cool. I bought a 4GB SanDisk CF for $300, and it gives me a whopping 12+ hours of mono 44.1kHz PCM/WAV recording. 6+ hours in stereo.

Meters are well designed. One of the better features.

Input jacks are mixed. I was attracted by the XLR mic inputs, but why in the world they opted for a stereo-mini line input, I’ll never know. A 1/4″ TRS stereo in would have been appreciated.

Battery life is limited. I bought a set of NiMH rechargables, but I haven’t figured out under what circumstances (if any) they’re charged in the unit. I think I may have to charge them externally. In any case, battery life isn’t great, and since I’m recording long sessions (sometimes a full day) I always use AC power.

ALC is poor. You can easily hear it pumping. I’d say it’s unusable for serious recording. So use manual gain control and watch your levels. (The ALCs on all my Sony MiniDisc recorders are terrific. You can barely hear them working. Too bad the Sony user interface is so bad and that the only way to get the audio out of the MD is analog.)

Value is a serious problem. At $499 plus another $300 for a 4GB CF card, I’m out $800. My Marantz CDR300 direct-to-CD recorder costs less than that, and it’s a far better-made piece of equipment, event though it’s limited to 80 minutes of record time. Compared to what else is out there, I think this thing is overpriced by about $150.

Now that I’ve learned to work around its limitations, I still plan to use it instead of my Sony HD MiniDisc for recording conferences. I’ve also started using it for backups here in Studio 2 because it’s not limited to the 80 minutes of an audio CD.

If you’re looking for the best portable MP3 and PCM/WAV recorder, I doubt this is the best you’ll find. Let me know.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful stereo.)

News and Housekeeping

• Open-Source Audio Production at IT Conversations. Our open-source production model I announced last week here at IT Conversations seems to be working. Not perfectly, mind you, but we’re learning by doing, and we’re managing to get over most of the confusion and other obstacles fairly well. We’ve published two shows by Team ITC so far, and I expect we’ll have 2-3 more each week, and ramp up our production from there.

  I think we can now take on another audio-engineering volunteer, so if you’re interested, take a look at the wiki page. Two things we’ve learned so far are (1) you’d better be very comfortable with your audio tools, and (2) you should have a good idea of the difference between peak and RMS normalization. If you know what I’m talking about and are interested, let me know. Yes, we can take on more producer/editors, too, but at the moment some of the current writers are waiting for audio folks to work with.

• Tips for the Team. Remember, 100% of your donations to the IT Conversations Tip Jar goes to the members of Team ITC who are now producing an ever-increasing portion of IT Conversations in their spare time. So please donate to Team ITC to keep the audio flowing.
• With the Podcast Brothers. I was interviewed by Tim Bourquin on The Podcast Brothers podcast, and I explained the new directions in which IT Conversations is heading. Tim and his brother, Emile, discussed these recent developments on the show after the interview. (MP3)

New Programs This Week

(in increasing order of listener rating)

• Jim Buckmaster & Craig Newmark - Nerd Values (rated 2.5 by our listeners). Nerd Values: Doing well by doing good, or the benefits of sticking with Web 0.0 principles in a Web 2.0 world. Jim is the president and CEO and Craig is the founder of Craig’s List. From the Web 2.0 Conference.
• Media is a Platform - Web 2.0 (2.9). Under Web 1.0, eyeballs were king and old media was dead. But we’re learning that things are a bit more complicated, and media is evolving into new forms and formats. How can powerful brands like the New York Times thrive in an age where content is understood to be free? What happens when the web is capable of distributing massive video files effortlessly and without significant economic impact? What are the new publishing models emerging on the web, and how can media be used as a platform to leverage them.
• Suzi Leather on Tech Nation (3.1). On Tech Nation, Moira speaks with Suzi Leather, the head of Great Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Find out how this nation which permits stem cell research, actually exerts far more government controls than the US.
• Bill Gurley - The Breakout Business of MMORPG (3.5). Bill Gurley, General Partner, Benchmark Capital, says that massively multi-player online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) are an "insanely profitable business." Hear about a game in China that has 9 million active users, and how players are so fanatical in Korea, that the police have had to investigate the theft of in-world characters. Bill says MMORPGs are a business opportunity far beyond EverQuest. From the Web 2.0 Conference.
• Oded Shenkar on Tech Nation (3.9). On Tech Nation, Moira Gunn speaks with professor Oded Shenkar about the rise of China, the lessons of history — as well as what’s happening today — to find out just why he calls this "The Chinese Century."
• Clay Shirky - Ontology is Overrated (4.2). We launch the IT Conversations coverage of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference with another brilliant presentation by Clay Shirky. Ontology, far from being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of its useful life. The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things.
• Will Wright - Sculpting Possibility Space (4.3). From the creator of The Sims and Sim City at Accelerating Change 2004: Games and simulations allow us to experience hypothetical situations in fun and intuitive ways. From the designers’ perspective we need to architect these "possibility landscapes" which players will later explore. Will discusses some of the informal methods, concepts and tools that he uses to approach this design task.

Doug’s Favorites from the Archives

• Philip Greenspun - Software Engineering. Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, was an inspiration to many programmers writing server-side code on Unix/Linux platforms. In this interview Philip describes the evolution of his attitudes towards software engineering and his latest book, Software Engineering for Internet Applications, for a course at MIT where "the goal of the course is that the student finishes knowing how to build Amazon.com by him or herself." Don’t miss the story of how the venture capitalists to whom Philip relinquished control of this $20 million profitable company, Ars Digita, ran it into the ground. There are lessons there for any budding (or experienced) entrepreneur.