Podcasting

There are 77 posts filed in Podcasting (this is page 8 of 8).

Read Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students

We don’t expect you to be experts. In fact, we expect that most of you are putting a podcast together for the first time.

And even though this is a contest, it’s also about learning new skills in a fun way. We want to make that learning easier — so we’ve put together a guide to help you along the way.

This is a great article, will plan to read this closely before my next episode of the In The Car podcast!

Wither the history of podcasting?

This week, I listened to episode 167 of the Radio Survivor podcast, titled “Alternative Histories of Podcasting“. The guest was Andrew Bottomley of SUNY-Oneonta, and the conversation covered the “popular” start of podcasting (Dave Winer, Christopher Lydon, Adam Curry, et al), and a look at audio available on the Internet before the 2004-2005 time period. The hosts seemed to take issue with defining “podcasting” as the technical tools making it possible to subscribe to audio files (podcasts) and easily load them to mobile devices (MP3 players, smartphones). I do not deny that the examples that Dr. Bottomley gave of Internet audio files pre-2004 were correct, but I think there is a reason why they were not called podcasting – because there was no “pod” available! For better or worse, the iPod was the first convenient audio player, iTunes was the first convenient way to get audio on a device, and the name “podcasting” grew out of the development of these tools and other tools of audio production and distribution.

I hope that Dr. Bottomley will document his research in this area (seems like he is working on a book). However, I am more interested in finding good podcasts to listen to, and playing around with creating podcasts myself. As Dave Winer has pointed out, creating and distributing podcasts is an open platform – anyone can do it. People can disagree on “who was first” or “what is a podcast”, but I want to focus on the practitioners, the people who are creating podcasts, no matter what the topic.

Bug report for PocketCasts

I use Pocket Casts on my Samsung Galaxy S5 to listen to podcasts, and I love it! There is a podcast that I am having problems in getting the latest podcasts in the feed. Ironically, it is the feed for Dave Winer’s Scripting News weblog, the inventor of podcasting! Here is a bug report, hopefully Shifty Jelly can look into this.

Here’s the bug report (per this format):

  1. What I did

I selected the Discover option in Pocket Casts, tapped the magnifying glass in the upper right corner, and entered the feed URL (http://scripting.com/rss.xml) into the text box. Pocket Casts then showed this screen:

The podcast that is shown at the top is from 2015 (Silos Vs. The Internet). I was able to download this and play it.

2. What I expected to happen

I thought that Pocket Casts would read the feed URL and collect the current podcasts referenced in this feed (at 1:09PM PST on June 30, 2018, there was one podcast in the feed, dated June 28, 2018).

3. What actually happened

Pocket Casts read some feed that was not the current feed for the URL and provided a list of podcasts that were quite old.

I took a look at the feed given above and my weblog feed (http://andysylvester.com/feed/) and I did notice one difference between them. My feed as a mp3 file as an enclosure, but the Scripting News feed has a m4a file. The mime type is the same (audio/mpeg). Maybe the Scripting News feed should have a different audio type (audio/mp4, perhaps). However, the file plays in Google Chrome.

Shifty Jelly, let’s hear from you!

 

 

Using app from Jon Udell to annotate web audio

I linked to a Jon Udell post on Sunday where he describes his recent experiments on annotating audio files available on the Web. It looked so good that I had to try it to annotate a podcast!

His app is at http://jonudell.net/av/audio.html. I then needed to find a URL to a MP3 file, which took a little bit of searching, since a lot of podcast play pages are not a direct link. Finally, I settled on an extended cut episode of Side Hustle School.  I hovered over  the “Listen Here” link for episode 12 and saw that it was a link to a MP3 file. I copied the link address and pasted it into the url text box in the Jon Udell app. Next, I entered a start time and stop time for the clip (from 1:00 to 2:00) in the selection boxes on the app page, then clicked the button “Play clip”. The app then started at 1 minute in and played for 1 minute – excellent! Finally, I clicked on the link at the bottom where it says “link to av editor with these settings” to get a URL for my clip. Now you can listen to it as well!

Thanks Jon!

We have great tools to create – are we creating great things?

I have been following Doc Searls’ account of the podcasting conference at Columbia University this past weekend. It is fascinating stuff – I wish that Columbia would have made these presentations available online – maybe they will at some point. My takeaway is that there is a lot of diversity in podcasts (subjects/formats), that there is no controlling silo (although many bigger podcasters seem to worship at the Temple of iTunes…), that there are a lot of podcast gems out there but it can be hard to find them (discoverability), and that like Sturgeon’s Law says, there are a lot of low-quality (my euphemism) podcasts out there, but hopefully through experimentation, better podcasts will arise.