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It’s odd, but I realize now that I haven’t written very much about podcasting here. It’s been over a year since I started regularly listening to podcasts and now is a very good time to contextualize it all.
While I’m pretty good at staying near the leading edge of trends, I’m not as quick in creating things that are part of those trends. While I followed blogging for a long while, my domain and online presence didn’t include a blog until I launched bitdepth in May of 2002. Soon I’ll be launching a podcast along with a new site (but I’ll save that for another time), so let me lay the groundwork here.
The first podcast that I listened to was Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, which is still one of the highest-profile podcasts out there. I used the beta of iPodderX to download the files and listen to them on my computer (since I didn’t have an iPod) or to burn them on to CD to listen in the car during my 1 hour plus commute twice a day. Some time around December of last year I found Marie-Chantale Turgeon’s Vu d’Ici / Seen From Here podcast and I really liked it. The combination of her unpretentious voice and great music exemplified all of the promise and magic of podcasting and she’s still an inspiration to me. Another early inspiration was Tod Maffin who has been covering technology and the web for the CBC for quite a while. When I saw that he was going on a podcasting meetup tour across Canada and was stopping in Halifax, I knew that I had to go. Tod’s site is filled with great resources and information about audio and he’s a driving force within the CBC and will hopefully transform the corporation into a more relevant public broadcaster in the podcasting sphere.
The meetup was a lot of fun (with 10 people) and it was very cool to meet people who I had listened to and watched for a while in person. I also was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t listened to some of th epodcasts from the province, but now I think I’m up to speed with the local activity.
I arrived a bit early and realized that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to meet at the Economy Shoe Shop unless you identified an area earlier to meet. It’s a great bar, but it’s made up of many smaller rooms. I knew that I’d recognize two of the people since I’ve seen Tod on tv and in photos as well as Jeff MacArthur from commandN (a great vidcast). As I wandered around the bar, someone guessed that I was looking for the meeting and I met Howard Harawitz (who I later realized that he wrote the first HTML editor that I used!). In talking with Howard I found out that he worked for the College and that we knew a lot of the same people. It’s a very small world.
The new discoveries that I made were of the Spine.cx podcast with Steve Dinn along with Jeannine McNeil (who did a live version of the podcast) and Bruce Murray of the Zedcast, who recorded part of the evening. While I brought my minidisc recorder, I didn’t record much, but decided to ask Tod for an ID at the end of the night outside. It became more complicated as a fairly intoxicated woman showed up with her friend and started talking with us. Of course, I kept rolling (and I may be able to work it into something later), and eventually got the IDs from Tod (who rescued me by moving away, which gave me a way to get out of the situation).
As I drove home late at night I was determined to get my podcast going, so it will show up very soon. I was tired the next morning, but I found that m-c had a new Vu d’Ici up. Driving in to Halifax while listening to m-c’s voice, the warm blanket of the internet surrounded me as I remembered again that podcasting allows people to connect and share their stories, which is the most wonderful thing of all.
