In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ve probably heard something about podcasting, a term coined by Adam Curry back in 2004. The name “podcasting” is actually a bit of a misnomer, as it implies something that might require owning an Apple iPod, but podcasting really refers to the process of publishing digital audio, accompanied by metadata expressed in RSS to syndicate the content so that software can automate the download of the content. Pointing such software at the podcast RSS feed and instructing it to download new content when it is published is known as “subscribing to the podcast” — the idea is that with an always-on broadband connection to the Internet, you could use podcast client software such as iPodder, which will periodically poll the various RSS feeds and “notice” when new content is available and download it. This way, when you want to listen to the content, rather than having to wait as it streams in real-time over the network, you can play it like any other digital media on your hard drive, since that’s exactly what iPodder will do, download the podcasts and store them on your hard drive. The logical next step is to then synchronize your portable music player, such as an iPod, with this newly downloaded content, so that you can listen to it wherever you like. This is presumably where the podcasting moniker came from — the idea that you could remotely broadcast content to an iPod, or podcast it. I’m not sure if the cuteness factor of the name outweighs the initial confusion it creates with folks new to the term, but I think the term is here to stay, so it’s better to just educate folks on what it means.

With the introduction of excellent software like iPodder, which is free software available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux, it’s become easy for the average user to subscribe to and enjoy podcasted content. But, what if you’d like to publish your own podcasts for others to listen to and enjoy? Well, the folks at Red Square have created Podifier, which is also free software, which simplifies the process of creating the RSS metadata which is used for syndicating the audio content — the software makes it easy to create your podcast feed. This solves half of the whole podcast publishing problem, the other half being finding a place to host both the audio content and podcast feed data. The typical free web hosting available is geared towards hosting HTML which is plain text and generally doesn’t require much bandwidth. Digital audio, on the other hand, requires much more bandwidth — so, your average free web hosting company may not be adequate for hosting your podcast. I see this niche as a great opportunity for companies, just like Flickr has gone after the digital image hosting space.

I hope you’ve found this explanation useful, and maybe you’ll check out a few podcasts or even publish your own!

Tags: podcasting, ipodder, podifier, rss, free software, adam curry, ipod

It’s June, which means it’s graduation time in the US. Mike Duffy delivers an incredible commencement speech at his daughter’s grammar school, the Sonoma County Day School (SCDS). It is one of the best commencement speeches I’ve read, ever, and this was for a grammar school graduation — you don’t see this quality of message at the college graduation level, even.

Let me back up for a second: I originally wrote that last sentence on June 11th, when Mike Duffy posted his speech. A few days later, on June 14th, Stanford posted the commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave on June 12th. Indeed, if I had to decide between Mike’s and Steve’s speeches and say which is better, I don’t think I could. They’re aimed at different audiences, as Steve’s audience has already made the large investment in a Stanford education, as opposed to the SCDS graduates who still have between four and eight or more years — assuming they continue on to college or beyond — of school ahead of them to do something with themselves. Both messages are relevant, meaningful and well-delivered. I’d recommend that everyone give both speeches a good read and decide for yourself which one speaks to you more, and take it to heart.

Mike Duffy and Steve Jobs have really managed to capture the essence of what is important to focus on and expressed it in a very emotionally accessible way. I hope those kids from Mike’s daughter’s school go on to do great things, and they will, if they remember that all things are possible because we make the rules. I also hope the kids from Stanford realize that all the money and college education in the world won’t amount to anything if you don’t follow your passion, even if it isn’t obvious why you should be, because history will tell a different story about your life than you think it will.

Update 2006-06-08: Stephen Colbert and more great commencement speeches of 2006

Tags:
inspirational,
graduation,
speeches

<p><a href=”http://archive.scripting.com/2005/06/20#When:8:42:37PM”>Dave Winer</a> is <a href=”http://www.opml.org/spec”>OPML</a>’s biggest cheerleader, for obvious reasons. He mentions that <a href=”http://www.steve-lacey.com/blogarchives/2005/06/podcast_shownot.shtml”>Steve Lacey thinks podcast shownotes should be RSS</a>. I think Dave’s right in that Steve’s approach is wrong, but I think Steve’s right that <a href=”http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss”>RSS</a> is the answer, not OPML.</p>

<p>Here’s my take on it: suppose each podcast is treated as its own RSS <channel>. Suppose each “segment” within the podcast that there are notes for is treated as its own RSS <item>. Suppose we adopt the convention for audio URLs that named anchors of the form “[[hh:]mm:]ss[.xxx]”, or hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds from the start of the audio. (I’m not sure I really like this format. Perhaps a simple integer number of milliseconds would be better.) So, an example RSS for a fictitious podcast might look like:</p>

<xmp style=”overflow: auto;”>
<rss version=”2.0″>
<channel>
<title>Some Podcast: June 21, 2005</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/link-to-this.xml</link>
<description>
Some descriptive copy about this podcast in general.
</description>
<item>
<description>Notes for this segment of the podcast, starting at 0 sec.</description>
<enclosure url=”http://www.example.com/path-to-podcast.mp3#0″ length=”8675309″ type=”audio/mpeg”/>
</item>
<item>
<description>Another segment, starting 1 minute, 28 seconds in.</description>
<enclosure url=”http://www.example.com/path-to-podcast.mp3#1:28″ length=”8675309″ type=”audio/mpeg”/>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
</xmp>

<p>This approach would require no change to the RSS specification, unlike Steve’s approach; it would just require applications that process RSS to understand the URL correctly, and those that haven’t been updated will degrade gracefully if they parse URL’s correctly and ignore the anchor portion. One downside of this approach is only being able to specify the starting offset and not the length of the segment, though.</p>

<p>If we <b>are</b> going to change the specification in order to introduce this capability, my preferred solution would be to extend the <enclosure> tag to introduce two new attributes: startOffset, endOffset. For simplicity, these would be integer values in number of milliseconds as offsets into the audio stream. Again, this is simple and straightforward, and backwards-compatible if older applications degrade gracefully and ignore the attributes they don’t recognize.</p>

<p>Hopefully, someone out there will see this rambling and give it some thought.</p>

I finally got sufficiently motivated to implement a comments RSS 2.0 feed. It updates every 60 seconds and contains the 15 most recent comments. Add it to your news aggregator, or subscribe to it at Bloglines.com. Oh, and if you haven’t added the entry feed, do that too (at Bloglines.com).

Magnus Daum and Stefan Lucks publishes Attacking Hash Functions by Poisoned Messages, “The Story of Alice and her Boss”, which gives a meaningful explanation why being able to identify two messages that share the exact same MD5 hash in a reasonable amount of time renders MD5 no longer useful for providing message digests.

I just can’t help but laugh at what could have been a potential title and by-line for this article: Finding two PostScript documents with the same MD5, by Daum/Lucks. Juvenile — I know — but I still think it’s funny.

(via Bruce Schneier)

The full headline reads “NewsGator Technologies Acquires FeedDemon; Acquisition of FeedDemon and TopStyle Strengthens NewsGator’s RSS Platform; Nick Bradbury Joins NewsGator Team” — can’t believe I missed this news (press release). I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d been subscribed to either Nick Bradbury‘s or Greg Reinacker‘s blogs — now I am.

I’m not a user of NewsGator nor FeedDemon — instead, I just use Bloglines — but it’s still interesting. If Bloglines offered RSS syndication of your Bloglines subscriptions (your own personalized RSS feed containing all the aggregated entries from all your subscribed feeds), then using Bloglines with something like Mozilla Thunderbird’s (really lame) RSS aggregator support would be just as useful, to me, as the NewsGator/FeedDemon offering.

I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t been able to keep up with Slashdot so I totally missed this. But, luckily, while reading Justin Frankel‘s blog and listening to the output of an IRC Ninjam session, I caught wind of the news I missed via this entry:

Finally, I’m happy to see AOL open source AVS/Milkdrop/NSV/Ultravox. Woot.

So, I had to Google around and found the BetaNews article from June 3rd, 2005, covering the release. It’s cool that AOLserver gets a nod in the article, even though they call it AOL Server. I guess that’s better than no mention at all.

Here are the relevant links to all the newly open-sourced stuff:

• Advanced Visualisation Studio (AVS)
• Milkdrop
• Ultravox and NSV

So, in an effort to cut down on my monthly expenses, I discovered that my local and long distance telephone service at a minimum costs me ~$150/mo for my four phone lines, before any per-minute usage charges. Now, since I also have a cell phone (that costs me ~$100/mo), I don’t use my landlines much any more, so this is a great target for savings. But, how?

I’d tried various IP telephony product attempts, several years ago, and wasn’t impressed, so I assumed that all the recent VoIP hype was just some new perfume on top of an old stink. Hoping that this wasn’t just some marketing ploy to turn old crap into new sexy, and realizing that it’s probably been at least three years since I last evaluated IP telephony and a lot must have changed since then, as well as a real need to save some money, I decided to give it a try. Especially since today’s VoIP offerings come in pre-paid, no contract terms, it really lowers the risk factor down to zero. When I’ve got things set up the way I like, I’ll write another blog entry about it, but this entry has a particular purpose, which is …

Help me find the perfect VoIP headset (for my own requirements)!

So, what am I looking for? I want a monaural (not stereo), over-the-ear or on-the-ear headset that is ultra-light, with a voice tube or noise-canceling microphone, with either two 3.5mm jacks to connect to a computer’s headphone and microphone jacks or one 2.5mm jack to connect to a cell phone’s headset jack. If it has two 3.5mm jacks, I’ll need a small adapter that joins to one 2.5mm jack so I can interchange the headset with the cell phone, or if the headset has one 2.5mm jack, I’ll need a splitter that has two 3.5mm jacks so I can interchange the headset with my computers. Bonus if all of these accessories can be had cheaply — say, $30-$40 per set.

The closest I’ve come to finding anything that’s suitable would be either the Plantronics Mirage H41 headset (~$80) or, the Plantronics Mirage H41N noise-canceling headset (~$95). I’d need to use these Plantronics headsets that have some goofy looking connector, I’d need to either get a Plantronics 6in. 2.5mm quick disconnect cord (~$10) and the Plantronics Computer Sound Card Cable (~$30) which similar to the 2.5mm quick disconnect cord except it terminates in two 3.5mm jacks.

So, without searching hard for the Absolute Lowest Price Anywhere!™, it looks like one “set” (headset, jacks) will run between $120-$145, well above the target of $30-$40. To be honest, I almost don’t mind paying the premium if the headset really is worth it. Anyone who has one of these headsets, please leave a comment or email me with your feedback. Please be specific as to what product you’re referring to — include model name and number if possible — thanks!

Tags:
lazyweb,
voip

John Panzer writes in his blog about yesterday’s launch and announcement of AIM Blogs, the free-to-the-web version of AOL Journals for AIM users. All you need is an AIM screen name which you can get by clicking here, then you can go and create your blog.

While I think it’s great that AOL is embracing the free web audience and offering up some quality products, I keep fearing in the back of my mind that this could be deja vu of what AOL did to Usenet by unleashing its millions of members there without any kind of guidance of netiquette, best practices and so on. With the issue of bandwidth “stealing” through hot-linking images and other rich-media assets directly from other people’s websites, imagine what will happen when millions of AIM users start creating blogs and hot-linking images all over their blogs. Or AIM bloggers who just plagiarize other people’s content without providing the appropriate attribution to the sources where the content is quoted from?

Time will tell if the reaction to AIM Blogs is “welcome, new members of the blogosphere!” or “aww crap, there goes the neighborhood.” I’m praying for the former, rather than the latter, but in AOL tradition of just handing products over to the technologically ignorant 50% of the Internet’s users without any guidance or education on how to be good corporate netizens, I fear it’ll be the latter. I hope I’ll be proven wrong.

Esther Schindler recently posted about what can be called “flowerbox indicators” to the Extreme Programming Yahoo! Group:

In a Bank of America ad about their investments in crappy neighborhoods (they didn’t phrase it that way), the speaker said they knew they’d succeeded, “when the flowerboxes begin showing up on front porches.” Teams have the same sort of indirect indications, too, for good or ill.

The notion of indirect indicators and tell-tale signs of a team or project’s direction are nothing new. What I really like is the catchy name, “flowerbox indicator.” Thanks, Esther.