This blog is now a Web cobweb, Part 2

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:29:45 GMT

It's done. I am no longer actively blogging at this radio.weblogs.com address.

A copy of all posts before this one is now at http://www.stepno.com/oldblog

My current blog is at http://www.stepno.com/blog

-- and if I move to another blogging system, I'll make that address bounce to my currently most-used blog, as well as updating the background information on my home page at http://stepno.com

This blog is now a Web cobweb

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:11:57 GMT

As indicated in the previous post, for seven years this blog was hosted at radio.weblogs.com, which is being discontinued. So I am posting an archive of all the site's files, going back to 2002, in this subsection of stepno.com.

The conversion to the new site is not perfect. For one thing, there was no way to preserve reader comments on the site, including some good conversations. I'm sorry about that.

If you encounter non-functioning links, look for their contents at the corresponding address on this new server. For example, the page formerly at http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/2007/01/14.html
now should be at http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/2007/01/14.html

For my more recent blog entries, see http://stepno.com/blog

Video blogs IN the Times; Podcasts FROM the Times...

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 17:15:00 GMT

Now that everyone but me has DSL at home, video weblogs are probably going to take off the way audio podcasts did earlier this year. (OK, so Apple's video iPod might have something to do with it, too.)

Sunday's New York Times has Amanda Congdon's name up in caps, featuring her and Rocketboom.com under the headline, TV Stardom on $20 a Day. That's a reference to both Rocketboom's being featured in Apple's video iPod introduction and its cutting a deal with TiVo... So now Amanda (and presumably Rocketboom correspondents like Steve Garfield) will reach audiences who prefer their video on a bigger screen with a remote control. That combination is something fans of TiVo have been talking about hacking together for months.

Sidebar: If you haven't seen them yet, here are Rocketboom's "about" page, and Amanda's informative intro to blogs and vlogs. Also, Steve Garfield was showing how to do this "video podcast" stuff a year before Apple got into the act.

Meanwhile, I just noticed that the Times website has started offering its own podcasts: A "come into the tent" sample is free, but most of the audio is part of the "Times Select" subscription service. "Every Monday, an audio version of one Op-Ed column will be podcast for free," the Times says, but you apparently won't have Maureen Dowd herself whispering sweet nothings into your ear -- professional announcers are recording the columns through a Times deal with Audible.com.

There's also evidence that the Times is "getting clueful about blogging, sort of,"as Corante's Stowe Boyd put it. See the L.A. Observer story with a Times memo on the topic, and "Carpetbagger," the Times movie- related blog, complete with bloggish features like an RSS feed and comment links.

By the way, like the rest of us, the Times still has trouble sometimes keeping up with changes in the technology scene: One of the Times's links on its podcast page, labelled "ipodder (PC)," goes to the "million-seller" (free, donations accepted) project that started under that name and adopted a lemon as its icon last year... until a computer company with another fruit for its name apparently started telling podcast-software developers to find names less like its iPod trademark. The lemon group chose "Juice" (short for Juice Receiver).

The parenthetical "PC" in the Times is wrong, too. From the beginning, there has been a Macintosh version as well as a Windows version... and a "GNU/Linux Soon" sign. In fact, every program mentioned here is available for both Mac and Windows.

Another Mac-and-Windows podcast collector, iPodderX, is having a contest to find itself a new name. "Exaggerator" might be a good one, since it claims to be "the world's very first Media Aggregator." Thousands of us were able to collect "podcast" style media files with Radio Userland (which we use to write our blogs and aggregate RSS feeds) for a couple of years before podcasting got its name, as my pod/vlog history page explains in ridiculous detail. (Unlike the Wikipedia podcasting page, which I've also contributed to, I'm the only one responsible for mistakes on my own page -- and I'll fix any you tell me about.)

The first podcast receivers were simple scripts that dragged the media files from Radio's in-basket into iTunes, to be played or loaded on an iPod. Earlier this year, Apple added aggregating ability to iTunes itself, but all of these "middleman" applications are hardly obsolete. They don't have the commercial distractions of Apple's iTunes Music Store, and they are adding features left and right to compete. Fireant, on the other hand, focused on being an aggregator for video feeds before Apple got into that business.

I still love the fact that the "ANT" in its name stands for "Ant is Not TV," even if the Fireant developers' friends at Rocketboom are being seen on old-fashioned TV via TiVo now... thanks to that deal that caught the attention of the Times... which neatly puts this blog entry back where it started.

Bob Stepno: Boblog Podcast

This blog is now a Web cobweb, Part 2

This blog is now a Web cobweb

Video blogs IN the Times; Podcasts FROM the Times...