Monday, January 3, 2005

Podcasts and NetNewsWire Podcasts and NetNewsWire. The new beta of NetNewsWire (my favorite RSS reader) supports podcasting, among other things. I don't have an iPod (when I was going to buy one a year or so back, I also really needed high-quality recording for band practices, so I went for a Sharp MiniDisc recorder instead), so I wasn't all that interested in being able to download music and audio clips to listen to offline (the purported primary market for podcasting). But since I downloaded the NNW beta to use, I decided to check this option out. Surprisingly, I really like it. NNW (like many other RSS browsers) periodically downloads new posts to weblogs so I can read them without connecting to the actual website. With podcasting support, I can essentially sign up for periodic updates of small (or even large) chunks of audio I might not normally track down the streams for. And my DSL connection... [datacloud] 9:30:19 PM

'The Cartoonist' Enters Podcasting Waters This is a Test. Alright, I'm now trying my luck with podcasting, thanks to Gary, who told me how to do it. Wonder if this is going to work - something should be happening right now. At least with my RSS feed. Is it working? Oh - I forgot the enclosure - here's The Neat with Flattermann! It seems to be working - now just wait until I've changed the podcast icon! (Ted: Hä, Hä...) :-) [The Cartoonist] 5:28:23 PM

Saw You on Taggle Uber Tag Search?. Brian Dear imagines a search engine where all user-generated tag information is searchable - an engine that confederates the various nations of Flickr, iTunes, etc. Neat idea, and certainly another step toward the semantic web vision. . . . if more and more services in 2005 add user-generated tagging, will "federated tagging" be far behind? And if someone were to index all the tags from these various sites.... would the result be Taggle? Imagine: a service where you type in a keyword, and you get back all the hits that have that word as a tag. If Flickr, del.icio.us, and umpteen other sites cooperated, then an uber-tag-search service might just work . . .... [John Battelle's Searchblog] 5:20:36 PM

EOG 2005 Back With the Schwag. Aloha. I have returned from not-so-sunny California where, despite the pouring rain, gale-force winds, and a relatively wimpy tornado or two, we had an absolutely tiki-riffic time. Highlights of the trip included Christmas dinner on the Queen Mary, dining at the fabulous Bali Hai Restaurant, sipping Bahooka Bowls with those lovable kids from Los Feliz, Eddie and Lili, browsing through Oceanic Arts, and scoring a couple of fantastic faux-polynesian tschotkes at a nearby antique mall, along with some very cool Mexican folk art on Olvera Street. Photos (such as they are) can be seen here. I hope to resume regular blogging soon, work permitting. [Eye of the Goof] 5:14:38 PM

From Northwest Noise Subscription Model = Ripping and Stealing. Via MacNN, iTunes rivals push subscription model. A comment currently posted for iTunes rivals push subscription model i pay the 10 bucks a month with rhapsody and then rip the high quality stream if i find something i like One of the only reasons people are paying for subscription music services like Napster and Rhapsody is the ability to rip or record the audio stream on their computer. They pay their $10 a month and get unlimited access to the streams - you have to pay another $1a song to get that transfered to your mobile MP3 player. Customers of these services see this as a holy grail because they only have to pay $10 a month, have decent bandwidth and time on their hands to rip all the streams of music they could every want. Then they take those ripped songs and copy them to their MP3 player. I know there are legitimate reasons for the subscription model - Audible.com's ability to re-download audio files if you lost or accidently deleted one - but currently the only boon consumers are seeing from Napster and Real is the ability to rip quality music off for cheap. Will the subscription model breakout in 2005? I have no idea. [Northwest Noise] 5:08:49 PM

'05 Baltimore 2005 bursts over Baltimore's Inner Harbor. After Amy decided to go to bed early with Cianna on New Year's Eve, I decided to ride down to the Inner Harbor to see the fireworks. From past experiences, I knew to park away from the harbor area... [curiousLee] 4:47:25 PM

Decreasing Costs The Cost Of Podcasting.. Doug's got a great quick analysis on the cost of delivering a one hour MP3 to a single listener. He concludes it costs between $50 and $100 to deliver a single show to 10,000 listeners. However, most Podcasters deliver one or two shows a week. How do these costs scale if the underlying assumptions change? Doug, if you have the time, I'd like to work with you on a model that would scale these costs. I think this would be a very valuable contribution to the community to help everyone know what it is costing them to Podcast as well as a tool to rank the best hosting plans for Podcasting. This is also an integral calculation in developing a business model for Podcasting. [Dann Sheridan's Weblog] 4:38:56 PM

Etroduce Tiny and Cheap I.T MP3 Player. US based electronics retailer Etroduce offers a tiny low-cost pendant style MP3 Player. The I.T MP3 Player comes in 128MB ($79.99) and 256MB ($99.99) versions. Usually this coin-sized MP3 Players appearing once in a while are OEM versions of t... [bTang reBlog] 4:30:43 PM