Carrying the Lantern

Purpose is to tell you about my 2 minutes of fame (sort of). Here's how it happened.

Background: What's a Weblog?

I've been blogging off and on for some time now; started over in Paris. Its like keeping a sporadic on-line journal. Without spending too much time on this, let me set the ground work a bit. Blogging has basically two sides to it: writing and reading.

The writing side is done with a blogging application. There are lots available both for PCs and Mac computers (I use RadioUserland). What they do is give you a simple word processor integrated with the smarts to upload your words to your website 'tout de suite'; automatically creating and updating your weblog (i.e., posting.) From the audience perspective, they just go to your web site (i.e., weblog) and read what you've written, and maybe respond with a comment or e-mail. Most all weblog applications let you include an enclosure with your post. So, for instance, you can include a graphic file, or photograph, or MP3 audio file (hint - keep this in mind.) Blogging started about five years ago and is now very common. There are thousands of weblogs on the internet. They range from the personal to the professional. But another aspect of weblogs that is critical to the most successful weblogs is linking to others.

This is true since the weblogs are about some topic that a community of interest focuses on; like photography or software development or politics, or Montclair Virginia, or the Riski's, etc. This, by the nature of the internet, means the weblog entries are rich with URL links to related weblogs, or news articles or... anything available on-line. Makes the weblogs fun to read, cause you can just click on the hot link and go read what triggered the bloggers journal entry. Think of weblogs as entertainment channels that you might subscribe to on a TV, or channels on a radio that you might tune to.

To read a weblog, anyone with a browser can just go to the web site. But this gets tedious, cause you don't want to go there if nothing new has been posted. That's why weblogs revolve around an underlying technology called RSS. Don't worry about what RSS stands for. What it means to you is you can subscribe to the weblog of interest with an application usually called a news aggregator. The aggregator goes out to the weblog automatically and checks for new content whenever you schedule or ask it too. If present, it brings the new post to you, sort-off like receiving an e-mail. What you typically have then is a set of weblogs you subscribe to, and your news aggregator presents each weblog (channel) and the new postings. You read through the postings (usually short - one to two paragraphs) then delete them. Or go to the website and read more, or click on links in the posting, or whatever.

Independent of blogging, the idea of RSS feeds or channels has taken off. Most news sites today have RSS feeds you can subscribe to. So the postings you read are not limited to just 'from weblogs', they can come from thousands of sources. For instance, both The New York Times and The Washington Post have RSS feeds.

As you can imagine, it would be nice to be able to read through the postings, pause at one of particular interest, then post it on your own weblog with (or without) your own comments. So most weblog applications have the writing and reading side integrated into one application. But just like with other media, you don't have to be an author to read a book. There are plenty of people who just buy a news aggregator and only read RSS postings. But let's talk about the 'next best thing'; podcasting.

Next Step: What's Podcasting?

Remember earlier I said most all weblog applications let you include an enclosure with your post, including MP3 files. Some bloggers have experimented over the years with audio enclosures. The readers get a post which identifies the fact that an audio enclosure is available. If you choose, you download the MP3 (file) and listen to it. But until recently, this usually meant you sat at your computer and did all this. So what happened? In a word, iPods.

A few pioneers (notably Steve Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Adam Curry) started to talk about the benefits of combining RSS audio enclosures with portable MP3 'music' players; music in quotes cause these devices of course play whatever audio is in the MP3 file, whether it be music or merely someone talking. To make a long story short, some programmers got together and created several free software applications that work like a news aggregator but only deal with the MP3 files. So you subscribe to a weblog or any internet site that provides MP3 files in RSS feeds, it finds the files and downloads them, moves them over to iTunes (available on both Macs and PCs) and the next time you sync with your iPod the MP3 files end up there.

Imagine this; someone (anyone!) can create an audio file containing their daily/weekly talk show or rants & raves or technology summary or whatever, and you just subscribe to their site and it magically shows up on your iPod each morning to listen to, when and where you want! You can still of course list to the podcasts on your PC or Mac if you don't have an iPod.

This is so popular, that it went from the first podcast done in mid August this year (on the 12th by Dave Winer and 13th by Adam Curry) to hundreds of podcasts only 60 days later - including some from public radio stations like WGBH in Boston!

What's this have to do with Bill?

Aside from the fact that the timing was right for this idea - broadband is pretty widely available to support uploading and downloading the large MP3 files and lots of iPods are in circulation, the word spread like wildfire about the concept through the already established weblogging communities. Talk about the stars being in alignment, it was through Dave Winer's Scripting News weblog (which I've subscribed to for years) that I was reading about the 'audio blogging' concept in early August (the term podcast had not been invented yet!) In addition, I had recently changed jobs and was using public transportation. I started with, and quickly dropped, listening to radio due to the poor reception on small mobile radios. The alternative was an iPod. Bought one (iPod mini, actually), worked great, but the music was getting pretty repetitive. Along comes audio blogging. I started listening on my iPod immediately. Dave's 'Morning Coffee Notes' is not really daily, but Adam's 'Daily Source Code' is pretty reliably produced on a daily basis.

So after two months of enjoying the growing variety of podcasts, I was inspired one evening to send an audio 'thank you' note to Dave and Adam. Both of these guys are pioneers in their own right (starting their own companies, etc.), so I certainly did not expect any reply. But the podcasting community is relatively small. Dave sent back an e-mail thanks and then came my two minutes of fame.

Adam Curry actually used my two minute audio clip in his Daily Source Code podcast of October 21st. Given that his is the Number One Podcast today (probably several thousand listeners daily), it represented my little bit of fame - or at least 'Geek of the Week' award among my family and friends. You can listen for yourself by downloading the Daily Source Code podcast for Oct 21 from Adam's weblog; I show up at minute 23:10 into the 40 minute episode.

Post Script: Is Podcasting just a fad?

I don't think so. On the one hand, it is pretty geeky today. For example, its is not easy for the average person to either produce a podcast or figure out how to subscribe and receive them. (Glad to help anyone with this if you want.) Even for us geeks that are doing it today, too many of the podcasts contain material about podcasting, rather than informative or entertaining stuff. But this is quickly fading, as it should.

On the other hand, this concept has really interesting possibilities. Just like video is often more compelling than audio alone, so audio is more compelling than text alone. And podcasts can be produced by anyone, anywhere. On recent technology podcasts, I've heard people recording their shows while driving (on a laptop) and recording (wherever) using just a mobile phone! And on the audience side, the ability to listen to these podcasts when and where you want is great. Some have commented on podcasting being roughly the equivalent of a 'mobile TiVo for radio'.

Put all this together and the possibilities are very, very interesting. Just one recent idea: imagine if your favorite Presidential candidate had a daily podcast lasting 10 minutes on his/her position on a recent event! Do you think a few Democrats or Republicans (or news reporters!) would subscribe, particularly if it was likely to be a close election? I think so. Why should the candidates care about this? Look who owns iPods!

This Washington Post article (registration required - ugh!) had a great quote from Ted Koppel about Jon Stewart.

Ted Koppel said about Jon Stewart: "He is to television news, what a really great editorial cartoonist is to a newspaper."

Their article begins, ...

"The Campaign of a Comedian: Jon Stewart's Fake Journalism Enjoys Real Political Impact

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A01

Jon Stewart, fake journalist and proud of it, keeps insisting he's just a comedian.

Night after night, "The Daily Show" host lampoons President Bush as a tongue-tied bumbler, Donald Rumsfeld as a mad ranter who resembles "Pete the crazy guy outside my apartment," the war in Iraq as a giant "Mess O' Potamia" and the reporters who cover the presidential race as self-important clods. ..."