November 29, 2007 – 12:19 am
I just got around to listening to a couple of episodes from the recently restarted podcast formerly known as “The Gillmor Gang” (now just called “The Gang”, I believe, due to some hassles with Podshow which I don’t have all the details on). I haven’t caught up to the latest batch yet, but the first couple were very entertaining.
It just reminded me how great this show, and podcasts in general, can be. I say podcasts in general because this is the kind of show that no commercial network would ever carry (for long, anyway). The lack of “polish” is a huge plus in my book, despite what some people (even some participants on the show) might think.
Speaking of that, although listening to Jason Calacanis and even Mike Arrington for any amount of time can be extremely annoying, it’s even worth sitting through that because of all the other good content balancing it out. You might even say it’s because of that, because you get to hear people who strongly disagree with each other do so without pulling any punches but also without crossing the line of disrespect.
You can catch the show at the Gillmor Group on Facebook, or via the RSS feed directly.
October 21, 2007 – 12:50 pm
The first episode of the WordPress Devcast, a podcast about WordPress development, is up as of now.
This is a project that Dan and I started to keep track of the WordPress development scene. For those who might be into that sort of thing, I hope you enjoy it.
I decided to try out the iTunes application for managing podcast subscriptions, just for (what I thought would be) the ease of browsing their directory and subscribing, etc.
For a company that’s supposedly big on usability and UI design, their method for managing podcast subscriptions really bites. Doing a search (or browsing through categories) and then not being able to subscribe to multiple selections from the result set is really lame. As far as I can tell (and if this isn’t the case, please point it out to me) you have to click the “subscribe” button on ONE and only one of the listed items, which takes you away from that screen into your subscriptions. Then to get back to that list (since you have to subscribe one at a time) you have to navigate back into the podcast directory and rerun your search or browse to the same place again, over and over.
That is ridiculous.
No, not the PLA you may be thinking of, I’m talking about the Phone Losers of America. They’ve always put up really funny stuff, and now they’re repackaging some of their older stuff along with new ones into a podcast format. I think the show is up to about nine hilarious episodes now. Even if you aren’t into messing with the phone system, you will still probably find a lot of these things pretty funny.
January 24, 2006 – 4:24 pm
Unless you have a music podcast, don’t do it in stereo. It’s a completely useless waste of space and bandwidth.
December 20, 2005 – 9:21 pm
A couple weeks ago I had what I thought was a brilliant, original idea for a new podcast that I could do where I would do play-by-play commentary on poker games, including pro matches on TV, and pro / high-stakes internet games, and perhaps eventually live games as well, although that may be more difficult because I wouldn’t want to do it while I was playing, but I could take notes and then start recording if I bust out early and go back and record the beginning (based on notes) later.
Anyway, before I actually did anything on this I decided to search around and make sure that no one else had snatched up my brilliant idea before I got to it, and sadly found that they did. I haven’t listened to any of them yet, and I think they are all internet-only coverage of the actual person playing, but still, I don’t know if I want to do it anymore now that I know it’s not unique. Who knows, maybe I’ll listen to them and they’ll stink, and then I might still consider doing it.
Oh well, I guess that I have plenty of other stuff to keep me busy without starting yet another new thing, so for now I probably won’t do it. Maybe someday we’ll get around to doing another episode of our Tythyl podcast.
Since at some point I’m going to be working on some WordPress podcasting software, I thought I’d start posting some audio every now and then, just to get a feel for how the WP system deals with it.
If you’re generally interested in the stuff I write about on here, you may like to listen to these, so feel free to subscribe using your podcasting software of choice, and every once in a while you may hear something you like.
Entry for today: Paul Graham on Great Hackers
Phil Gordon is doing a podcast as he plays the 2005 World Series of Poker, including interviews with fellow players, and commentary in between levels about how he’s playing and where he screwed up. Check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.
I brought this idea up with Dan, and wanted to bring it up here for public discussion. I’ve been listening to various “podcasts” lately (even though I really hate that term), and thinking about doing one myself, just for fun, with the help of Dan and/or whoever else would want to be involved.
For those not familiar with them, at a high-level, they are basically just MP3 radio shows that you record yourself and publish a certain way, so that RSS-capable applications can “subscribe” to your show (among others) and have it automatically downloaded to their listening device whenever they want. In reality, I think Dan summed up their true nature pretty well: “just somebody speaking their blog, instead of writing it” or something to that effect.
If I did do it, it probably would be something like that for me - a lot of the same topics that I post about on here. It would probably lean more toward the technical stuff, specifically computer security related topics (or maybe what some would label “hacking”), and probably very little political-type discussions, just because I don’t think that format really supports the kind of open dialog that that type of subject requires. I was asking Dan if he could do reviews on all the tech stuff he buys all the time and then turns around and sells on ebay (just kidding) and also he could talk about any Mac-related issues, so that I can poke fun at them. It might be entertaining.
Of course, it wouldn’t be limited to that either, we could talk about anything that came up: blog culture and technology, movie & music reviews, showcasing free music artists, etc. (maybe we could get Nathan to do the music reviews) My main question is whether anyone would listen, and whether it would be worth the time. I suspect that it would actually end up drawing more traffic here, since (at least right now) podcasts (like blogs) always start small, but seem to get popular much more quickly than blogs, just because there are fewer of them out there. What do you think?