Adam Curry on Podcasting

Random snippets and thoughts from Bloggercon III's podcasting session.

• What is podcasting?
• Everyone uses macs here.
• Everyone's laptops have clean screens. It's embarassing to be here with my windows xp laptop, with its three-months-of-grime on the screen.
• Adam Curry on programming. Adam Curry on programming-- "I went out to google and typed 'RSS Applescript'. And it came back with all these great examples. The entire program is copy/paste."
• How do you create the program you want if you're not a programmer? You seed the system by writing a crappy program. "Asking developers to make something for you is like asking them to do your homework. It just doesn't work." But sending out a crappy program and then setting up a mailing list worked
• Kinda reminiscent of Jason Hunter's open source talk at SDForum
• Lots of people do podcasting. What's Evil Genius Chronicles?
• The guy who does Evil Genius Chronicles wants to make it more like This American Life. I know what he means, but it sounds funny.
• Adam Curry has now said it four times so it must be important: podcasting is about recreating the early days of radio-- low barriers to entry and personal connection.
• "It hit the resonant energy and everything vibrated" (but they need more dilutium crystals?)
• Another podcast: The Gillmor Gang
• Interesting comment: "The iPod Platform"-- that's a cool phrase.
• Downloads outnumber streaming by 2 to 1 for mp3.
• Gillmor Gang will never do transcripts because they want people to listen? That seems rude.
• Next step in Gillmor Gang: tag feeds with Metadata.
• "I see the blogosphere as metadata for the podosphere"-- basically, blogs will provide commentary on podcasts (and that's the tie to search engines)
• Greg Stein just walked in. Doug Kaye is here. Doc Searls is Here. Nick Bradbury is here. Wow.
• "Non RIAA music"-- music you can play without too much hassle. There's a tie in to the creative commons here.
• Adam Curry sells albums on his podcast?
• Adam Curry is talking about replacing the entire music industry distribution infrastructure. Kinda cool.
• Where's the long tail in this?
• Lots of talk about relationships between podcasters and their listeners. Is there a FOAF thing here?
• More importantly, is there a role for reputation systems and recommendation systems here.
• Dave Winer: "The New York Times will be a weblog someday." Yes, for the right definitions of "The New York Times" and "weblog."
• Big important point from Dave. Podcasting growing much faster than blogging, because it bootstraps off blogging (the early bloggers didn't have a publicity mechanism).
• Adam Curry announces song times. Since it's not live, you can skip songs that you don't want to hear (requires me to pay attention; is his podcast "lean forward" or "lean back")
• EarningsCast. A podcast for all the quarterly earnings statements from big companies.
• With podcasts, there are an infinite number of stations? How will we overcome the noise?
• Kieran uses podcasts to replace lame sounds in video games. Grand Theft Auto with Vegan Talk Radio.
• David Marks from Loomia should have come to this.
• "Blogging is an uncensored letter to the editor sort of thing" leads to "Podcasting is sort of like Howard Stern without the FCC"
• Clear need for podcasting software that allows listeners to comment on podcasts, and for other listeners to remix podcasts. Shades of Saffo.
• Need for standards and a way for people develop software on players.
• Next speaker is talking about large number of platforms. Do we need for a PodVM (like the Java VM)?
• Mike Lemon has a podcast. Wants all podcasts to have an RSS feed.
• Apparently John Dvorak has an opinion on podcasting.
• Quoting Dvorak-- "Will this podcasting idea take off? It's essentially the newest form of push technology. While moving audio streams over the Net and onto portable devices is not a new idea, podcasting does stand a chance of becoming popular. The first thing that has to happen, though, is for the technology to be wrested from the Macheads and the James Lipton wannabes and given to the Windows-Linux community, where it will do some good. Until then, it's not ready for prime time." WHOA. That's amazing. The use of "Windows-Linux" at the end is, I think, yet another milestone in the adoption of Linux.
• Something about next generation software carrying metadata and OPML. Cool song-- "The internet is for porn" (sounds like it was sung by muppets).
• Hank Barry talked about the potential vulnerability of the platform (relying on iPods) and the vulnerability of the mp3 file format. Wants open source clients?
• Larry Lessig's summary of the internet "Tech people have great ideas. Lawyers come in with hatchets and cut it apart." Wants to begin constructing the legal architecture for this stuff now.
• "Architecting for Freedom"-- that sounds like a bumper sticker I'd put on my car (better yet-- "Freedom Inside"; a sticker like "Intel Inside"). Lessig is leading a session later today.

William Grosso is a coauthor of Java Enterprise Best Practices.

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