podcasting

I’ve been listening to tons of great public broadcasting on earideas.com.

And here’s a different view about why “good” public broadcasting is important: with the web, and podcasts, the CBC becomes a calling card for Canada. Ditto Deutsche-Welle for Germany and ARN for Australia etc. The broadcaster becomes a marketing tool and a builder of prestige. This is becoming more important in the networked world, where - for many of my peers, for instance - we can be anywhere in the world to do the work we do. Ditto businesses, scientists, writers and other “elites.” We want them here, in Canada, in Montreal, because really smart people make a country more vibrant and innovative.

I believe that a strong public broadcaster with excellent, thought-provoking content, helps build Canada’s image in the world.

While this isn’t all a public broadcaster should do, this is a new kind of rationale, I believe, brought on by the web; and one that might be more compelling to the business-only decision-making that runs our governments these days.

Note, this applies as well to universities: all universities should put a chunk of their marketing budget towards producing a weekly, high-quality podcast that interviews professors doing exciting research (whether in arts, humanities, or sciences and professional disciplines). I’m thinking of a weekly podcast with content as varied and wonderful as the TEDTalks. That is the gold standard for thought-provoking web content … and should be emulated by anyone who wants to build an image as a place of exciting innovation.

I was just talking with Mitch and Julien about this at lunch the other day; and commented on Mat’s blog to this effect.

PodMtl, a monthly meet-up for podcasters and the podcast-curious, as well as friends and family-members of podcasters. PodMtl is a welcoming, non-judgmental gathering in an open, non-threatening environment, to talk about issues that affect podcasters and those around them.

So join us on November 29th starting at 19:30. Here’s the address :

* Sergent Recruteur
* 4801 St-Laurent blvd, Montreal
* 514.287.1412

I’m going to try to make it, but I am training back from Ottawa that day.

Thanks for organizing this, to: Sylvain and Bob.

I love when I discover richer and more varied uses for podcasts. Jim Mowatt, a long-time LibriVox guy, and a retired force behind the LibriVox community podcast, has just launched a podcast about history. He did wonderful work on the LV podcast, so I’ll bet this one will be a goodie, for you History buffs. Have not listened yet, but just queuing it up.

Check out: historyzine.com … or:
* Subscribe by RSS
* Subscribe in iTunes

After a whole lot of work, the Collectik Team is very happy to announce the official (soft) launch, of the Canadian Cultural Podcast Directory, a project of the National Arts Centre, and Culture.ca (a site run by the Department of Canadian Heritage) … coding, design and implementation by Collectik.

Here is the about:

Welcome to Culture.ca’s cultural podcast listing. This unique collection, curated with the expertise of the National Arts Centre, brings together Canadian audio and video podcasts that reflect Canada’s vibrant arts and culture scene. We collect podcasts produced by Canadians in French, English, and other languages on a variety of cultural topics.

We strive to be a complete collection, and if you feel your podcast qualifies for inclusion, please let us know through our submit form.

Big thanks to Chris (the programming maestro), Marie-Eve (the graphic wrangler with the eyes of gold), and Madeline (the html artiste/pound-IE-into-submissioner).

More projects to come soon! Stay tuned…

i participated a while ago on Michel Dumais’ Citoyen Numerique. you have to listen through the little player, it’s:

2007 10 11 01citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 02citoyennumnerique-ballado
2007 10 11 03citoyennumnerique-ballado

the main librivox part is 03, at minute: 15:15ish. the rest is about podcasting, podcasting in quebec, digital music downloads etc … i make a couple of comments in those parts but not much.

other participants are my montreal podmates: bob goyetche & sylvain grand’maison, as well as journalist Tristan Péloquin.

Sort of a strange podcamp boston. I wasn’t crazy about many of the sessions, too much focus on marketing etc (not that there’s anything wrong with that, just not my bag; marketing is important, but I’d like to see more people talking about exciting things they are doing with podcasting & new media); I gave a presentation that didn’t go very well … or at least took a while to get going. It was a very small crowd - should have ditched the slides…

But I did meet some cool people … and I didn’t get much of a chance to talk with many of them:

• Brian Conley of the amazing (and in great need of financial support) Alive in Baghdad.
  

  Alive in Baghdad employs Iraqi journalists to produce video packages each week about a variety of topics on daily life in Iraq. Through the work of a team of Americans and Iraqi correspondents on the ground, Alive in Baghdad shows the conflict through the voices of Iraqis. Alive in Baghdad brings testimonies from individual Iraqis, footage of daily life in Iraq, and short news segments from Iraq to you.

  This project pretty much defines what’s important about the new media revolution.

• Heather Gorringe of Wiggly Wigglers, a really wonderful podcast about farming, organic stuff, food, etc out of the UK.
• Kabren Levinson of NerdNewsRadio …a teen who’s been podcasting for two years, since he was 15.

I also had a good time riffing with the usual canpod suspects, Neil Toaster Gorman, meeting Anita of LibriVox (a bunch of us had a great dinner on Sat night); and meeting and hanging out with Fred the founder of Select Records, (one of) the first hip hop label in the world (and publisher of the Jerky Boys), who’s sweating bullets over non-paying mp3 downloads.

I’m watching a session at Podcamp Boston on teen podcasting, by kabren levinson of nerdnewsradio.com (started when he was 15, 2 years ago)… the intro was pretty interesting, about Kabren’s experience of NOT getting his session accepted in the original schedule (read his blog post here and the follow-up here… Podcamp, being run by good folks, addressed the issue and gave him a slot).

Did you know there’s a TeenPodcastNetwork.

Quote: “How come teens are never involved in planning teen centres?” … good question. Cool kid.

for various reasons, I just landed on this page by Will Johnston, from August 17, 2004. thoughts on the ipod:

This brings up a topic for discussion that I’ve been contemplating lately. What is the ‘hype’ with the iPOD about. Some say it’s the design, some say the memory capacity and others say it’s the cachet of being seen with one. From what I understand the Sony equivalent has it beat in all of these areas. Steve Jobs is a brilliant marketeer, but I really don’t see the incredible innovation with iTunes/iPod. Where I would see great consumer value and utility is with the storage + PVR type functionality for radio/Internet. There is a lot of broadcast radio (Al Franken, NPR, Gilmour Gang…) which would be great to pre-program recording and then be able to listen when I want and skip ads. Give me that kind of functionality and I’ll buy one right away.

two things: ancient history is funny; and we still have yet to produce an ipod that’ll do what he wants without the hassle of having to plug into your computer.

Whoa. CBC podcasts have advertisement bumpers. Our public broadcaster is selling cars with our podcasts. What do you think of that?

And not a peep on Inside the CBC. Nothing on Teamakers. Nothing on CBC.ca (of course).

For instance, on .

Wondering what to think of it.

La Presse has an article on the state of podcasting in Quebec, concluding, basically, it’s not too good. The focus is on Radio Canada’s offerings (called baladodifusions in Quebecois), and this sort of shocked me:

la version podcast de Christiane Charette, une des émissions-phares de la Première Chaîne, est laissée à l’abandon. Personne ne l’a mise à jour depuis le début de la saison; le dernier fichier date du 22 juin. «Personne dans l’équipe de Christiane n’a eu le temps de s’en occuper. Ils ont manqué de ressources», explique Marie Tétreault, chef des communications aux nouveaux médias à la société d’État.

Talk about commitment.

Que/franco podcast evangelist Sylvain Grandmaison gets quoted in the article, expressing some frustration, and he writes up what he *really* said here: Ce que la presse ne vous a pas dit.

I had some drinks with Sylvain at the last PodMtl (hey, how come that page is in English only?? it automatically detects browser language)… and we talked about why Quebec is “behind.”

One thing I think is that anglos - because of language - just have quicker access to developments in a wider swath of world population. We are connected directly via the web to everything that happens in the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, … etc. And since much innovation is happening on mobile data etc there, especially US and UK, it means were are getting (english) “data” inputs, meaning quicker uptake of innovation elsewhere.

The CBC may look good compared with Radio Canada, but they were pushed by the successes of NPR in the US, and BBC in the UK - and CBC was probably behind them by a year or 2 on podcasting. (See what I had to say about CBC and podcasting in November 2005) Whereas RadioCanada is pushed by … well by CBC certainly, and possibly? I presume? public broadcasting in France and elsewhere in Francophonie? Who does Radio Canada look to as the “competition” or at least as colleagues?

Does anyone know how much public broadcasters are podcasting in other francophone countries? UPDATE: Radio France, for instance, is podcasting like crazy, see: RF Podcast.

Anyway, would be nice to see more in Quebec, no doubt.

The fabulous Nora Young has just launched a new podcast (that also happens to be a CBC Radio* show), called Spark. Covering technology, art, society, it also aims to get more interactive feedback from the net. Comments, participation, stories and the like. As with all of Nora’s radio work, it’s good good stuff.

The next episode has a segment about the Warbike:

Did you know that almost anywhere that you go in a city you’ll be sharing space with someone’s private wireless computer network? All of their personal communication—e-mail, love messages, bank passwords, credit card numbers, and bizarre surfing habits—will be passing through your body without your awareness. Who are they, and how do you feel about sharing space with their personal life?

The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?

So, have a listen, and go comment on their blog (to help show CBC management that people on the web care about content).

UPDATE: also forgot to mention, they’re using podsafe/creative commons music on the show. sweet.

*NOTE: Radio shows are just like podcasts, except that you have to listen to them at specific times (often based on a “schedule” that a small group of people determine arbitrarily), and instead of being able to hear them on your computer, or put them on your portable mp3 player, you have to buy a special “radio receiver.” Radio receivers are devices that pick up radio signals (much like wifi), but are usually single-purpose machines - ie for audio only, no email, internet etc.

The New Yorker has a fascinating story, about the “discovery” of a 75 year old virtuoso, genius pianist, Joyce Hatto, that turns out to be a hoax. What’s so interesting - to me anyway - is how the internet - and brilliant grassroots marketing, fraudulent tho it was - created the myth bought by many mainstream music journalists.

The whole thing, rather than being tawdry, is somehow touching, romantic, sad, and beautiful in a perverse sort of way.

Here a podcast interview with the writer of the story.

This presentation is not actually about podcasting, it’s about data…but it was presented at podcastersacrossborders, and LibriVox is the inspiration for these thoughts.

Radio Open Source is one of my favourite shows available by podcast. They talk about anything, in depth, ranging from arts to politics, boxing, and countless other wonderful subjects. They are in some financial trouble, and need your help.

I’ve always been a big fan of Jon Udell’s stuff - he writes not just about tech things that interest me, but he’s also got a great sense that web technology ought to be good for society as well. Jon was one of the first “famous” people I contacted when I started LibriVox, and he’s been a fan, and written about the project a number of times. So I was really happy when he asked me to join him on his IT Conversations podcast, Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators (you might need to register to see that page). This was a long (47 mins) and great interview, really getting into the meat and bones of how and why LibriVox works, but also touching on much other interesting stuff as well.

Here’s the page.

Listen here:

***

In other exciting news, Jon whipped up a script (tweaked and built on by the ever-effective Chris), that allows you to add a LibriVox book directly to iTunes. Here’s how Kri describes the new addition to the site:

Thanks to Jon Udell and our resident catalog development guru tis (Chris Goringe) we have a new feature that has been added to all catalog pages. Check out the most recent Short Poetry Collection to see an example of the following…

1. A “Subscribe in iTunes” link. If you regularly use iTunes for podcasts, or would like to, this link will be very helpful to you. Just click on the link, and allow it to launch the external application (iTunes) if it asks

2. An RSS feed for the 64kbps files. What’s the point of this? For some this makes it easier to download all of the 64kbps MP3 files at once. For example, if you listen to podcasts and have a podcatcher, use this link to download them all more easily.

I did a podcast interview with Jon Udell about LibriVox, for ITConversations (I’ll let you know when it’s available). Was a great talk, and part of our discussions were about the still-significant barriers to accessing good audio on the net. There is great stuff out there, but for many not-so-net-savvy people there exist many problems with knowing about audio, finding it, choosing it, downloading it, getting it into a media player (and then getting it into a portable media device).

all of these processes are harder than they should be still (collectik is an effort to solve some of them), and I’d wager that the main audience for audio (especially the LibriVox, public interest, public radio type) is not as tech savvy as most net video watchers. Yet this is an important market - in part because of the value of the information available this way. This is a new sphere for public discourse, and should be made as simple as possible.

With LibriVox we often get people wondering how to get the mp3s they have downloaded into their ipod. A simple task for most of you, but not obvious to many people who would like to listen to LibriVox books. There’s an easy solution to this problem: generate an xml file of our catalog pages, that will be read as a podcast feed by iTunes, and allow for the one-click iTunes “subscription” to that book.

So Jon whipped up a python script that can do the job, eg. click on this:
itpc://jonudell.net/librivox/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles-by-arthur-conan-doyle.xml

iTunes will open, & you’ll get subscribed to this book - you may have to “get” all the files to download them. This eliminates some complication for people.

We’ll have to figure out how to integrate this - ideally the script could work in tandem with a wordpress plugin, that would work in our catalog page template. So that each page would generate the right link.

Evan did something similar a while back, with his PodPager… but the tool seems to be disabled.

I have been touring the net of late looking at podcast sites, and I have a few suggestions (some of this is relevant for bloggers too). I’m not talking about what you do in audio, but what your site looks like. Chances are I’ll come to your site before I hear your stuff, so what you do on your website is as important as what you do in audio. Here goes:

1. about. please, put an “about” section on your page. If I land on your page and I don’t know what it’s about, I’m gonna leave. Gimme a sentence at least: “music and talk,” “sports and politics”… just tell me where I am.
2. flash player. one of the most interesting things I learned at Podcamp, was that by far the majority of website visitors will press a “listen-now” button, rather than downloading, or subscribing (RSS or iTunes). Here is a great free plugin player if you are using wordpress: podpress
3. feeds. this drives me nuts. make subscribing to your podcast obvious and easy. put those subscription icons right at the top of the page where I can see them. See here for a good description of podcast icons… and here is where you get your nice orange RSS icons.
4. itunes & rss. also drives me nuts. not everyone uses itunes. so please, give me the option to subscribe in iTunes, but also give me the plain vanilla RSS feed. don’t let apple own your distribution. the RSS format is open for a reason, and that apple has closed it off in the iTunes-only feed format should jab you in your freedom-loving heart. Give me both.
5. rss icon. the organge RSS icon is for one thing: a link to your RSS feed. It is NOT for:
   a) a link to mp3 files
   b) a link to an iTunes store feed
   c) anything other than an RSS feed
6. no flash. if you have a flash site, kill it. or at least set up a nice CMS site in parallel - wordpress or something - and make it clear how to get there away from your stupid flash site.

Dammit. I don’t even have a phone. I can’t get it into my sidebar for some reason. But, in any case, here I am:
http://twitter.com/hughmcguire

God help me now.

(PS thank you Mitch; and can I make a suggestion for a killer business?: digital rehab centres, to cure people of addiction to digital information).

(PPS: Mitch is doing a new podcast with Harper Collins, about business books, called: Foreward Thinking; which makes two people I know doing podcasts for Harper Collins, the other is Cathi Bond, who does interviews with fiction writers at the Prosecast.)

First, Ira Glass, the force behind This American Life, is, to me, something like a proto podcaster. That NPR radio show is just what I imagined podcasting would become, a collection of the stories of the world told in the voices of real people. And that was before I had ever heard This American Life (though I had heard Wiretap, done by Jonathan Goldstein, who worked with Ira on TAL). Here are some videos, that any artist interested in story, should absorb.
(thanks maurizio)

Next, Freebase.com, which is “an open, shared data-base of the world’s knowledge.” I have not looked yet, but seems interesting.
(via chris)

Sylvain has launched the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur $100 Challenge. He’s calling on Montreall tech entrepreneurs to donate $100 to the Atwater Digital Literacy Project (name change coming, I think):

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their communities.

If you are interested, you can find out how to donate here. $100 would be great. $10 would be great too. You can also help out in outher ways.

I’m on the board at the Atwater Library, and I’ve been pushing for this digital project for a couple of years (Sylvain was around in the early days).

We should make this a quarterly thing: 4 times a year get the Montreal Tech community to ralley around a particular cause and try to raise some money for something.

I was at podcamp in Toronto last weekend (check out the archive of videos of the presentations), and ran into a number of people doing great things. From the start I was excited by podcasting not because of the obvious things it would do, but the things that aren’t so obvious. The obvious thing is to create an army of radio hosts who imitate other radio hosts. The non-obvious things are happening and more and more is going to be rolling out in the coming years. Such an exciting time if you think that communicating ideas is an important thing for humans to do. So, here are a few people who were at the unconference whose projects impressed me:

• Sonya Buyting: Sonya is the Sassy Scientist, a science journalist and newly-minted podcaster she’s worked as a broadcaster for Discovery Channel among other things. I personally like my science podcasting dry and academic, or at least in the sober public radio mode. Sonya’s stuff is a lot more bouncy (music + science = sassy) … so I think her market is not so much stuffy 32-year-old grouches like me, but a younger audience. Which is laudable, considering the questionable state of science education, and declining interest among the young in that stuff that happens to allow us to live the way we do. In any case this is a sharp and professionally-produced podcast, and you’ve got to hand it to her: the first episode includes an interview with Sir Richard Branson, playboy billionaire owner of Virgin Airlines and recently announced climate-philantropist; and, even better, an interview with Seth Lloyd, writer of the best book I’ve read so far in 2007, Programming the Universe. Sonya is not a Montrealer. But she IS from New Brunswick, which gets her some extra points.
• Casey McKinnon & Rudy Jahchan: Galacticast is one of the most-watched vidcasts, certainly the top in Canada. Their take on making it in mainstream was pretty great: basically, bring it on, but we’re keeping all the rights to our stuff. That represents such a huge shift in the way broadcasting is going - and why music cos, and mainstream broadcasters are worried. Because the mainstream disseminators have less and less of a role to play: distribution channels aren’t limited anymore, so broadcasters and music companies haven’t figured out what they’ll be good for when art and media can sell itself. In the mean time, people like Rudy and Casey are out on the edge figuring out how this will work. Rudy and Casey are Montrealers.
• Julien Smith: Julian is a good friend and I see him pretty regularly, and I’ve probably posted about him a fair bit here. But still: I am always impressed by how well he understands the back-end of the net and how net-relationships are changing the way we do things. I understand all these things, but he lives them in a way that I don’t. He’s the longest-running and most popular podcaster in Canada, not by accident. It’s been interesting, too, to listen to his stuff evolve over the past year or so, and get more heavy, but still stay raw, and somehow fun. It’s an odd and compelling mix. He bares his soul online as a matter of course, which has some interesting by-products. He’s also got this other fantastic project that he’s nudging along to success, Listen to Your Kids. It hasn’t quite picked up yet with the kids, but it will. It’s just too cool an idea, and the sort of thing that makes me smile about podcasting. Julien is a Montrealer.
• jim milles: jim runs the really great UB Law Podcast, that “features conversations with University at Buffalo Law School faculty and other prominent scholars on cutting-edge research and important ideas in law and society.” This is such an obvious use of podcasting, and every university should have something similar. UC Berkeley, and many other universities, podcast course lectures, but that format doesn’t quite work for the general public (I’ve tried a number of lectures and though I’ve liked them, they don’t quite grab me). Better to do as Jim has done, get scholars to talk about their areas of expertise, in a conversational format, and record it. A perfect way to get this knowledge outside the walled world of academia, and to the rest of us. Jim is not a Montrealer.
• Matt Forsythe: Matt is an artist who works at the National Film Board, on a number of things including the almost-excellent CitizenShift. He’s also involved with the Schwartz movie, (check the fantastic trailer on Youtube). We had a long talk about digital media and analog institutions like the NFB. There seems to be such resistance to freeing all this content that sits collecting dust in the basement, watched by no one. It’s very puzzling to me that makers of media — especially non-commercial, publicly-funded media makers - are not clamouring to get all their media out to the wold in digital format. Any worries they might have had about bandwidth etc in the old days has been killed by all the vid services out there: blip.tv, googlevideo, youtube, not to mention the non-commercial options like Internet Archive and iBiblio. Yet all the wonderful wonderful work done by the NFB is inaccessible to me because so little of it is online. How great would it be for everyone - NFB included - if everything they made was available online. Matt is a Montrealer.
• mitch joel: I kept hearing about Mitch from different directions, and we kept missing each other at events. He works for digital marketing/branding company Twist Image, but it was funny, the thing that won me over was when he told me he worked for fifteen years writing music columns for Hour. I guess I have a natural mistrust for the corporate world, but when I hear that someone has put so much energy into something like writing music for a small community paper, it puts me at ease. Anyway, Mitch gave what was the slickest and most impressive presentation(.mov) I saw at podcamp. maybe I say that because the topic - more or less, branding you - is something i have been scratching my head over for the past month or so. I have been circling around doing so many things, and I need to start thinking about focusing my professional life better, and sorting out just what the hell I am going to do when I grow up. Mitch is a Montrealer.

I’m going to toss LibriVox into the ring, and suggest there is some hot stuff happening in Montreal.

But the million-dollar question I had coming out of podcamp was: how do I monetize my grouchiness?

(for those counting: 2 women, 5 men.)

…fantastic organization, kudos to the putters-togetherers, and I’ll point out some cool projects shortly.

But please, please, please make this phrase disappear.

(PS, thanks for the ride home Bob).

UPDATE: you can see vids of the event, including some footage of me, here.