Radio UserLand Notes

In case anyone is keeping track at home, I'll be heading to Stanford for BloggerCon III in November. Plane tickets were purchased on Monday, flying in to San Jose. I'm thinking of renting a car since I've never driven in urban California and I'm always looking for an adventure. Also, I'll be meeting with UserLand and seeing some of them "face to face" for the first time.

If anyone can point out some good hotel/car deals, let me know. When I have a better idea of where I'll be, I'll post some contact and location info. I'd love to meet some Radio users "face to face" too.

I wrote a two line script to automatically post the results of my onThisDay script to my weblog each day. Yum. Watch for new "On this day" entries soon...

The >podcasting meme is spreading like wildfire and that's good. I imagine that the iPodder software floating around will become a bit like a TiVo, service schedules, content "channels" and more. Directory services are lacking--Dave Winer had a subsection of weblogs.com for audio posts at one time--so we need a technology to step up in stick a flag in the ground. I'm voting for RSS/OPML. It's a natural and easy to generate and it's lightweight and powerful (like an iPod).

Content generation tools are barely past the sticks and rocks stage, but moving rapidly forward. The killer app will be a software audio router that does a good bit for you, walking you through the process. There will be themes, presets for the software that optimize the apps settings: talk show, soliloquy, radio show, etc. It will also generate 30 second previews for the store (see below) or the preview can be replaced by an ad (for sponsored content) or a self-description by the author. Combine Skype, iPodder and an audio router/multiplexer and you see what I mean.

Personally, I'm ready to pay for a product using the iPodder codebase that's well executed, will deliver content to iTunes and has it's directory built in. I want to be able to shop the podcasts like the iTunes music store, that is, get a 30 second preview of content before I subscribe.

Like Russ mentioned, moblie phones need to be able to party with developers and the audio quality might not be there yet easily. A version of iPodder for the SymbianOS phones seems trivial (I am not a programmer, hence everthing is easy) and inevitable.

In summary, I'm waving my money in the air for this--who's going to take it?

Update: Dave Winer pointed to the Wikipedia entry for podcasting, so I updated my link above.

On a tip from Matt, I added his Bloglines Citations macro. He's also the author of the postCosmos macro that snags a similar set of items from Technorati.

Update: Donovan weighs in. FYI, Matt's given UserLand permission to include both macros in the next version of Radio. Look for them in a new table: user.macros

If you have stuff you want to include in Radio, let us know...

Since I've started with UserLand, I've found it a bit hard to write.  I spend a good amount of time self-censoring content--especially about blogging, Radio UserLand and programming.  I have to be careful that I don't portray and opinion about something that could be attributed to UserLand.  With that said...

Radio UserLand is alive again

To all of us, it was very apparent that Radio had died as a product, with only a minor update around this time last year.  To those of us with current licenses, we've seen a flurry of updates in the last two weeks, including some logging fixes last night.  It's been one of the most exciting and rewarding times of my life.  Imagine if you were a carpenter and you were given the chance help restore a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  That's what I'm feeling.

What I (the user) want to do with Radio

• Improve the aggregator with more features and flexibility.  I'm thinking of a way to select subscriptions and have them rendered to a page on the public server.
• Flag an item in the aggregator and then select an action to perform automatically.  Think "linkblog".
• Make Radio less sensitive to changes in installation locations.
• Easy restores from backups.
• Auto maintenance of the database
• Online scripting training sessions.