bitdepth

More Bad Metaphors

John and I have been busy with things, but we have managed to create two more Bad Metaphor podcasts and you’re more than welcome to listen to them. The next two in the series are Number 4: Sunday, and Number 5: Technology. We’re working on others now and should bring down the time between them a bit as well. It’s a lot of fun doing the podcasts and it’s great to get feedback. Thanks to everyone for listening and if you haven’t listened yet, maybe take a listen. If you go to Bad Metaphor on Odeo, you can also send us an audio message.

April 22, 2006 badmetaphor, podcast, technology

Bad Metaphor 3

I’ve uploaded the third Bad Metaphor podcast by John and myself today. It’s about publicity this time and John and I talk about being famous as well as famous people we’ve met (or not). It’s fun to do a podcast and I’m trying to figure out ways to do it more quickly, but I find I always need time to edit and craft these things. A little secret about the podcast for loyal readers: up to this point we’ve put up only about half of the podcasts. Some other topics haven’t worked out, so we decided not to use them. I think that’s a good thing since it’s more important to have quality than quantity. I’m following the advice from the Frogbody blog (by Carson McComas) which has a superb list of 20 Ideas for a Great Podcast.

February 19, 2006 badmetaphor, podcast, publicity

My iPod With Video

I’ve had my new 30 GB iPod with video for about a month and a half now and I’m a bit surprised at how different it is from the iPod Shuffle that I used previously. The obvious difference comes from having a screen and being able to play video. But what I wasn’t expecting was that I’d listen to a lot more music. With the Shuffle I occasionally would use autofill, but most of the time I would have a few albums and favourite tracks and have most of it filled with podcasts. I’d carefully choose the podcasts and would regularly rotate them.
Now I don’t have to choose a limited selection with all of my music on the iPod and my podcast subscriptions have grown dramatically. In the early days of podcasting when I didn’t have an iPod I would carefully choose 80 minutes of podcasts or music and burn a CD for the drive to Halifax each day. With the Shuffle I’d always have something to listen to, but now with the bigger iPod I have much more than enough to listen to. The increased choice is both good and bad. Sometimes it takes me longer to choose what to listen to, but overall I love have a queue that is always full of something to enjoy.
I’m listening to a lot more music and watching a bit more video, but most of the time with the white earbuds is spent on music. I’m buying more music now (from both iTunes and Bleep), but I’m also listening to a great deal more Creative Commons music as well. My current favourite podcasts now are Vu d’Ici / Seen From Here (music), CC365 – Creative Commons 2006 Calendar (which provides a new CC licensed song every day!), The Revolution (CC licensed music and interviews), Big Shed (audio documentary), KCRW’s The Treatment and The Business (two shows about the film and tv industry), 43 Folders (productivity tips), The Ricky Gervais Podcast (comedy) and my newest discovery, Inside the Net (interviews and discussion of new Web trends). On the video side there are only two vidcasts (vodcasts?) that I never miss and they are the daily Rocketboom and the weekly Command-N (that I’ve helped tape a few segments for) and they both feature tech news. An odd thing is that I prefer watching them on the iPod’s small screen better than on the computer screen. Maybe it’s because it’s more personal and connected to me. The context that media is consumed within is very important and it seems that tiny video on a tiny screen isn’t as bad as tiny video on a larger screen.
tags: podcasts, ipod, vlog, vidcasts

January 29, 2006 commandn, ipod, podcasts, vidcasts, video, vlog

Bad Metaphor

I’m very happy to announce the launch of the Bad Metaphor podcast. I’ve been playing with all of the parts of it for a while and it’s time to release it into the world. The process was slow, but there was a lot of learning along the way which was very fun. The podcast means that I have yet another domain, which is at the logically named badmetaphor.com and I’m running that site with the wonderful and powerful blogging system known as Typo on Textpattern‘s servers. It’s cool to be on the cutting edge with things that are changing quickly.
The podcast itself has slowly evolved over the last few months and now it’s a collaboration between me and my son, John, who is 9. The final push came during a podcaster meetup in Halifax when I was able to meet and talk with podcasters from the area. Tod Maffin was intrigued by the possibilities of a 9 year old asking questions. That made it click for me so, John and I recorded the podcast and now it’s launched.
The earlier inspiration for the podcast came from m-c Turgeon who does the Vu d’Ici / Seen From Here podcast. It made me realize that what’s important isn’t creating an elaborate production, but to have fun and share your voice. It’s taken me back a bit to my earlier days when I was able to host a few radio shows on a college radio station. But now it’s a lot more exciting because it’s getting easier and easier to share what you create and that’s going to change the world. So check out Beginnings and subscribe to follow us on the journey.

January 14, 2006 badmetaphor, podcast, typo

Podcasting

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.

November 27, 2005 commandn, halifax, podcasting, spinecx, todmaffin, vudici, zedcast

Podcasting, iTunes and Odeo

I’ve been listening to podcasts since last Fall and now that I have an iPod Shuffle, I’m listening to podcasts in a pod-like way instead of via burned CDs in the car or through the computer speakers. While I’ve been telling people about podcasting for a while, my less technologically experimental friends haven’t taken the time to download beta software and dig around to find things to listen to. With the introduction of podcast support in iTunes, things have changed dramatically.
Podcasting makes a lot more sense to more people all of a sudden. The podcasts that I love are personal and are done by people who care. Passion is the key ingredient. Many of the podcasts that I listen to I found through blogs or from mentions somewhere, and not through a guide. In the iTunes guide to podcasting there doesn’t seem to be a lot of independent stuff. In fact, there is a lot of Disney there with ABC or ESPN (both Disney properties) in all of the news slots. One of my favourite podcasts – Vu d’ici – Seen From Here by M-C Turgeon – is classified as an “Audio Blog”, but if I had to narrow it down, I’d probably put it under “Music”. M-C is annoyed at the iTunes thing and doesn’t want those commercial, slick and boring podcasts.
A really interesting thing that I noticed is that after listening to podcasts via the iTunes guide, a friend of mine asked where he could find the real indie podcasts made by people in their basements. I think that people will want to wander outside of the slick guides and find things that really connect with them. The iTunes guide is a good place to start and I hope that more people go outside of it (or even realize that they can add whatever feeds they want).
A very encouraging development is Odeo, which just opened up a bit more today. At first they’re providing a guide and a way to subscribe to podcasts. Later they’ll be providing podcasting tools to let you create your own podcasts. I’m testing the beta subscription thing now and I like it. You can listen to podcasts on pages on the site and add comments about podcasts which can help you figure out whether you’ll like the podcast or not. I didn’t use it for a while after the new version of iTunes came out, but now I’m back to use it. A very good sign is that they’re changing things quickly at Odeo and it’s very easy to add your Odeo subscriptions into iTunes through an RSS feed that is generated. So now I have the best of both worlds.
What makes me more excited about Odeo are the possibilities of community and more feedback that it provides. The other thing that will help people find podcasts that they like is the support of tagging in Odeo. Tagging and folksonomies are what allow many connections to be made in systems like del.icio.us and Flickr, and it will help a lot with podcasting. Instead of a gatekeeper coming up with a way to categorize podcasts (hmmm… “music” or “audio blog”…) the people who produce and listen to the podcasts add tags to categorize it themselves. That’s the way to do it. Down the road another feature for Odeo that I can see is people subscribing to certain tags via RSS feeds to be able to find new and interesting things.
We’re moving out of the first stages of podcasting much as independent film did a few years ago. While now there are films with massive, multimillion dollar budgets that are called “independent”, there still is a difference between a film with a marketing budget of several millions and a film made by people with a passion to tell a story and little or no money. That’s not to say that people can’t do good work for money in either podocasts or filmmaking, but the key is striking a balance and telling a story or creating something that connects with people on a personal level. Without passion you don’t have much and that’s what interests me in anything I consume.

July 9, 2005 itunes, music, odeo, podcasting

2 / 2