Podcast

Here's
an interview with Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com on May 16, 2005 talking about the future of media and issues surrounding the military intervention in Iraq. Also features quotes from Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder at the end.

(12:17 / 3.7 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

Over in the comment sections of the Personal Democracy Forum podcasting page, etherson points out that MP3's posted to a website without an RSS feed are not really "podcasts." Podcasting could be better described as catching MP3's on your iPod by subscribing to a RSS syndication feed -- rather than casting MP3's out. The "casting" is really describing the RSS syndication aspect of the MP3 file, and the iPod is there just receiving the file -- you don't even have to have an iPod to receive or listen to podcasts.

As ZDnet's David Berlind says:

The incredibly ironic thing about the term podcasting is that the iPod pretty much stinks as a device that you’d "cast" your audio from. In no way does it come ready to record audio. For that, you need to add third party products to it and even after you do that at some reasonable cost, you’ll end up with limitations in the quality of audio you can record.

So even though there are lots of cool things you can do with an iPod, the fact that the iPod is associated with being able to easily record and "cast" out audio is a bit of a misnomer. It's a bit of a marketing coup for Apple that putting MP3's in RSS feeds is being widely described as "podcasting."

The podcasting revolution really has more to do with other technological innovation that has brought the barrier to entry for broadcasting audio completely down. Doc Searls told me in an intervew at PDF that people now how the power to produce their own culture, and that the centralized points of mass media-produced culture are going away.

The Personal Democracy Forum podcasting operation fell into the trap of posting MP3s on their site without the RSS feed aspect of it, and it caused a bit of a ruckus in the comments section.

I pitched my project to Brian Reich, the official Personal Democracy Forum podcaster, and we sat down for a quick 11-minute chat about the state of the Press and how I plan on applying emerging new media trends to the production of The Echo Chamber documentary.

They're technically unsyndicated MP3s as opposed to RSS-embedded podcasts, but here are links to the interview & MP3 files:

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/610
Kent Bye.mp3 (10.29 MB)

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame did a 15-minute video at Blog Nashville where he primarily focused on gathering thoughts from bloggers about Making Money with Blogging.

From a technical standpoint, he used the on-camera microphone and had the autofocus on the camera turned on, which meant that the sound was a little iffy and his shots were constantly going in and out of focus. But it was well-edited and had a great round-up of some of the current buzz on the blogosphere.

Reynolds perceived that the ">hot topics at the conference were making money with blogging as well as:

I went through my first big blogging dryspell throughout the month of April. I have been writing all of these really long and intellectually dense blog entries in the name of planning out the theories for a new paradigm of journalism.

The lesson? People want to see a proof of concept -- Theory is too abstract and -- well, theoretical. I've had a ton of people say to me, "You know, I try to read you blog, but it's just too confusing. I don't know what you're talking about."

I would usually discard these criticisms by saying, "Well, I'm trying to reach a specialized audience of the movers and shakers of the New Media movement." And then when I actually got to talk face-to-face with a lot of these technologists at SXSW I realized that they understand me when I talk to them face-to-face, but that they still aren't gleaning some of the major ideas from my writing.

What is the best way to manage personal knowledge when you're in the middle of a project that is rapidly evolving? I'm trying to solidify my lessons learned from the SxSW Interactive Conference while still moving the project forward.

I'm am going to experiment by recording some of my thoughts into a audio file, save it as a MP3 and try using Ourmedia.org to save it to archive.org and link it to my site as a podcast. Not sure if I'll have time to figure out all of the nuances of a RSS enclosure to make it a full-blown syndicated podcast, but I hope to figure out how to utilize the free bandwidth of the Internet Archive.