Blogarithms

Today was the first official edition of Christopher Lydon’s new PRI radio program. As Doc, one of today’s guests, suggests:

Then take it the next step, and tell your local public radio station you’d like them to pick up the show.

But therein lies the problem. I don’t care whether my local public-radio station (KQED-FM) carries the show or not. I wouldn’t be likely to listen to it unless I just happened to be in my car at the right time of day. I want the time-shiftable podcast edition. I’ll get it from the ‘Net thank you. In fact, even if I’m in my car when the live show is on, I’m more likely to be listening to an earlier edition through my iPod.

This is exacly why radio — even good radio — is threatened by podcasting.

While I’m including the audio version as an attachment to this post, I’m no longer going to publish a detailed text version of the weekly IT Conversations News here in my blog. As it is, it takes about four hours to write, record and edit the audio version and to prepare the email edition. I think an additional blog version is redundant.

If you want to get the news via the web, just go to the IT Conversations web site. The most recent two weeks (about 20 programs) are right there on the home page. And if you want to get the news via RSS, just subscribe to one of the many IT Conversations RSS feeds.

Our collaborative production model here at IT Conversations is working great. In fact, all but one of the programs published during May were produced by Team ITC.

We have enough audio-engineers for the moment, but we could use another two or three copy/photo editors. If you’re interested, take a look at the wiki page. You should be a good writer — spelling and punctuation counnt! — and you should be able to do some simple image editing in Photoshop or some other tool.

Based on technology from MTG, the Freesound Project looks like an intriguing source for podcasters and others:

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to

* browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a “sounds-like” type of browsing and more
* up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
* interact with fellow sound-artists!

We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn’t been a solution.

It’s always stimulating to spend time with people smarter than yourself, and today at lunch I was at a table with six of them. We talked about many things related to podcasting and community, but I left pondering one question: What are the advantages and disadvatages of developing or encouraging multiple isolated communities as opposed to a single centralized one?

Here’s the context. If a podcast (or any other form of expression) is published via multiple channels, and if each of those channels has its own community of listeners, those listeners will interact in isolation from the other communities formed among the listeners via the other channels. If you receive a podcast from web site A and I receive it from web site B, and each of those sites has their own community tools, you and I won’t be able to exchange ideas. In fact, we may not even know one another exist are are interested in the same topics. If carried to an extreme, there are as many distribution channels as there are listeners and we all end up in communities of one.

OTOH, if we all intereact within a single, larger, centralized community, might that be so large and busy as to be impresonal and no longer valuable? At least in this case, the possibility exists for us to interact, then break off into separate groups.

Just food for thought perhaps.

IT Conversations is among the eight Podcast Picks in a series of articles on podcasting at Business Week Online. The site is asking its readers to vote for their favorite from among the eight.

(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.

• MR Rangaswami - Software 2005 (rated 2.5 by our listeners)
• Fran Hawthorne (3.0)
• Scott Cook on Larry’s World (3.2)
• Doug Engelbart - Large-Scale Collective IQ (3.5)
• Cory Doctorow - All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (3.7)
• DW Buffa (3.8)
• Peter Yared - ActiveGrid (3.8)
• Geoffrey Moore - Open Source Has Crossed the Chasm (4.1)
• Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen (4.2)

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

• Thomas Malone (3.8)

We’ll be at Supernova again this year. [San Francisco, June 20-22] Make sure to say Hi if you’ll be there. If you’re on the fence I strongy recommend it. It’s one of the great networking events of the year.

Here in the U.S. it’s Pledge Week for our public radio and television stations, and whenever that happens it reminds me that it’s time to beg for money to support IT Conversations. Until we can get more of those big-time underwriters on board, I’m paying all the infrastructure costs (hosting, telecom, etc.) and our awesome partner, Limelight Networks, continues to distribute most of our audio through their worldwide content-delivery network (CDN). But in the spirit of listener-supported audio, we depend on donations from you for all the post-production audio and editorial work done by our Team ITC volunteers.

But if they’re volunteers, I hear you say, how come they need money? Good question. At our current production rate of ten shows per week (~45/month) and a two-person crew for each show, no one gets enough $$ to even dream of quitting his or her day job. But it helps. Your donations to our Tip Jar are a way of saying Thank You to Team ITC, and it encourages them to keep producing our shows in their spare time.

So just take a moment to think about how much IT Conversations means to you. Think of the number of hours you listen each month and how valuable those hours are to you. Then think about how much you’d be willing to pay if we had to charge for our content, and give at least a portion of that amount to our Tip Jar. Not only will the members of Team ITC be most grateful, but you’ll be helping us prove that the concept of listener-supported audio really is sustainable.

FYI, we received nearly $2,000 in the Tip Jar in April (our first month for Team ITC), and distributed nearly half of that to the team members. We held off distributing it all because we anticipated a drop-off in contributions after the first month. Perhaps not surprisingly, many Team members turned down the money and asked us to either keep their share in the pool for others or to donate it to a third party. For April, we gave $200 to the EFF and $160 to the Internet Archive. For the forseeable future we won’t use any of the Tip Jar funds for infrastructure, and none of it goes to me.

No, we’re not getting rid of Larry, but we discovered that we managed to upload a defective set of MP3 and M4B files for his presentation at the Web 2.0 conference. If you missed that session or if you gave up listening because the audio didn’t sound right on your player, go back and get the new file. You’ll be glad you did.

At least once a week we get a request here at IT Conversations to record and publish some terrific tech event. Most of them are of the users-group variety, some of which have some awesome speakers. I used to do some local recording here in the San Francisco area, but now I just don’t have the time and I certainly can’t justify recording something that’s not within driving distance. It’s a shame that we can’t capture these terrific presentations and that they’re lost forever.

To address this, we’re creating a new position on Team ITC: Recording Stringer.

At the very least you should be able to take a feed from a mixer or distribution amplifier (DA), and record sessions of at least two hours without a media change. (MiniDisc and DAT work great.) If you have microphones and a mixer as well, you may be able to handle even smaller events. Check out our submission standards for more info on the technical requirements.

If you have the time, equipment and skill to record events in your area, please let me know. (doug@itconversations.com) Please include your location and ZIP or postal code.

Our friends over at the Public Radio Exchange are distributing a terrific week of audio programming:

Hosted from London, Boston and Los Angeles, and reaching audiences on five continents, this special two-hour call-in program will explore the impact of globalization on your way of life, wherever you live. Hosts Robin Lustig (BBC’s Talking Point), Dick Gordon (WBUR’s The Connection) and Larry Mantle (KPCC’s AirTalk) will guide a lively global conversation between experts from around the world and listeners who call, e-mail or send text messages.

But of course, they’re also producing the podcast version for those of us who live time-shifted lives. [Source: Steve Schultze]

(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.

• Karl de Abrew and Sam Chandler — Nitro PDF (rated 2.9 by listeners)
• Bart Feder - FeedRoom (3.3)
• Clay Shirky - Phone as Platform (3.4)
• Elizabeth Holmes (3.5)
• The Platform Revolution - Web 2.0 (3.6)
• Larry Augustine - Open Source Applications (3.8)
• Larry Magid- Internet Child Safety (3.8)
• John Markhoff (3.9)

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

• Paul Graham (3.8)

Okay, I’ve been caught playing hookey. Instead of working one of my usual 12-hour days on Monday, Philip Greenspun and I went flying. The aviation weather forecast Sunday night looked pretty bad, but thanks to a big oxygen tank in the back of the Bonanza, we were able to fly high and managed to thread our way around the thunderbumpers all morning, thenflew underneath them on the way home. We landed at Castle Air Force Base for a tour of their WWII warplane museum. Philip is taking his Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) checkride next week, adding that to his fixed wing, helicopter and instrument ratings. He shouldn’t have any problem passing. I tried to get him interested in adding a glider rating, too.

We ended the day, back in Mill Valley, at In-N-Out Burger — arguably better than the Bomber Burgers we passed on at Castle.

(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.

• Justin Kitch - Homestead (rated 2.6 by our listeners)
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger - IT in an On-Demand World (2.8)
• Peggy Lemaux (2.9)
• Geoffrey Nunberg (3.4)
• Dan Gillmor at SXSW (3.6)
• Jeffrey Rayport (3.7)
• The SXSW Podcasting Panel (3.7)
• Lawrence Lessig at Web 2.0 (3.7)
• The O’Reilly Radar - News from the Future (3.7)

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

• Doc Searls (3.8)

We received donations of nearly $2,000 in the IT Conversations Tip Jar during the month of April, and this week I’ll be distributing those proceeds to Team ITC. But in the past two weeks, those donations have started falling off and already May is on a track for far fewer dollars to feed the machine.

We thank all of you who have contributed to our team of volunteers who produce most of IT Conversations’ shows in their spare time, and hope that the rest of you will dig into your pockets to help keep IT Conversations able to bring you our programs.

It took much longer than I hoped, but the first (May 1) IT Conversations Media Kit is now available to qualified underwriters and sponsors. If you’d like to support the #1 audio tech network, please send email to doug@itconversations.com.

As I mentioned three months ago, it looks like we may have to stop delivering .m4b (AAC) versions of IT Conversations audio files. Only about 10% of listeners download the AAC files, and the only significant benefit (other than a slight increase in quality as compared to the MP3s) is that they can be bookmarked on iPods and in iTunes. Unfortunately we have not been able to find an AAC “joiner” that will allow us to splice together already-encoded files as we can do for MP3s. (Does anyone know of such a utility?)

A solution would be for one of our enterprising listeners who knows AppleScript to develop a script that automatically converts files of Genre=Podcast to AAC within iTunes, then deletes the originals. A script like that would be great for iTunes/iPod users for all podcasts, not just IT Conversations.

To be honest, the bookmarking functionality should be built into every player, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be implemented for MP3 files as well.

Congratulations to Cory, the rest of EFF and everyone else who has fought agains the Broadcast Flag. As Cory reported on BoingBoing and Ernest Miller described in more detail, “the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down the loathsome Broadcast Flag, ruling that the FCC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate what people do with TV shows after they’ve received them.” This is an important decision in the fight against the copyright cartel.

I was honored to be a guest today on a new public-radio program hosted by Christopher Lydon. It’s called Open Source and we recorded the pilot this morning with Chris and the production team at the WGBH studios, and we guests scattered about the pod/blogosphere. Chris’ voice has been absent from public radio for far too long. [MP3 audio]

Chris has long been one of my personal heroes, although we’ve never met. And though very few people know (or acknowledge) it I believe that Chris, with help from Dave Winer, was the very first podcaster. That is, Dave put together the first RSS feed with MP3 enclosures, in this case Chris’ superb interviews. I copied the RSS syntax a few days later and launched the podcast edition of IT Conversations on 9/24/03. The name “podcast” hadn’t been coined at that time and didn’t become prominent until nearly a year later when Adam Curry began his Daily Source Code show.