Apple Rock the World

Well that is how I feel at any rate. I have often wonderewd if I would like a Mac. Watching Steve Jobs and his keynote presentation makes you want one. Huge announcements and the biggest (if the blogosphere is anything to go by) being the iPhone.

If you have not watched the keynote then I suggest that you do, for the whole effect and demo’s of the devices that are presented. The streaming video is about two hours. However, for those of you that might be a bit bandwidth impaired there is a blow by blow written account of the presentation with photos on Engadget.

I have watched it and I was indeed blown away. But there have been enough people blog about what Steve has said so I am not going to repeat it. But from another angle, I was reading through my feeds and came across an entry made on 37 Signals and I would have to say that it is a nice “prediction” of what the “Apple Phone” was going to be. As it was written before the announcement it is an interesting reflection and not far from the truth.

No doubt the details of the keynote will provide weeks of blogging material for a lot of people and then some. The details make for much more interesting reading this is mainly hype at the moment. I don’t see Microsoft anywhere, I do think they have reason to worry. I want a Mac.

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Apple Story Crashes Servers

This is a good kind of crash. The Apple story that Cameron Reilly ran on The Podcast Network ended up on Digg and managed to attract enough traffic so that it went down for a while. Tops. I was pleased to hear that it made the front page of Digg, so I guess that will put a strain on any network.

At six am this morning Cam was onto it and had the tech guys working on a solution. They managed to throw some more bandwidth at it and restored order. Thank you to the team at The Podcast Network for their quick action. The connection sometimes fails still but just hit the reload button.

I appologise to the listeners of other shows on the network that could not access the shows that they listen to and their respective hosts. Thanks to Cam for covering the story.

Apple Authorize the Term “Podcast”

About two months ago I wrote to Steve Jobs and sent him a cheque for one dollar for the use of the term “podcast”. I did not expect a reply, I got one.

This is a story that I originally carried on The Global Geek Podcast Blog and I do not normally cross post but I thought this was worth a mention. I arrived home yesterday and I found a big yellow DHL envelope waiting for me. I had no idea what it was. Upon opening it I found that I had received a reply from Apple Trademark Department regarding my letter and payment. They were returning the payment and my letter. They also added that:

“Apple does not licence the term “podcast”.”

When this controversy started it was said that Apple stated that they had no objection to the use of the term. However, I think that this is the first time that it has been put in writing. In addition this is not a “rubber stamp” type letter, it is signed in pen by human hand. So it is official then that we can use the term.

I am not sure if this helps Podcast Ready, but I hope it does.

There were a few people out there that thought the original post was a stunt and I did not really send the letter. Well I did, Cam could not believe it when I told him I got a reply from them. Just goes to show that when I say I have done something, I have and will.

Go and check out the full story and the original article. Given the news at the time it was fairly amusing. We are still laughing about it. While you are there check out the latest show for The Global Geek Podcast, it was a blast. Knightwise had way too much coffee, he is still making apologies.

Or you might like to download the show right here.

Podcasting History… It is Short

The last two days in the car; I have been listening to a podcast from IT Conversations. It was an interview with Doug Kaye the founder of IT Conversations by Michael Geoghegan on the Podcast Academy Channel. Doug talks about the history of podcasting on IT Conversations. If you have listened to podcasts from IT Conversations you will enjoy the interview. But I was thinking about my current predicament of trying to replace a co-host for The Global Geek Podcast and the history of podcasting.

A History Lesson

As mentioned in the interview the first “podcast” was accomplished by Dave Weiner the developer of the RSS format. He demonstrated the concept on his blog on the 11th of January 2001 after defining a new element called an “enclosure“. By the way he did this by “enclosing” a song by Grateful Dead on his blog feed of Scripting News.

For the first two years there were very few users of enclosures in RSS feeds. In September 2003 Weiner gradually released to his feed a series of 25 interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures. Weiner announced these audio features on his blog as they were released. This threw out the challenge to other aggregator developers to support enclosures. As up until this point most feeds were text only.

In October of 2003 the first BloggerCon provided the platform for a demonstration by Kevin Marks of a script that enabled RSS feeds and pass the enclosures to iTunes for transfer to an iPod. Marks and Adam Curry discuss collaborating. After the conference Curry offers readers of his blog a script called RSStoiPod a script that moved mp3 files from on-line to iTunes, he encouraged developers to further the concept. Initial efforts were based in the command line. The first podcasting client with a user interface was iPodderX (now Transistr). The name change was due to the threat of legal action by Apple and trademark issues, obviously related to the iPod. From here the development of “podcatchers” or aggrregators was fast and mainly resided in the open source community with the show of Juice, CastPodder and PodNova. There are many aggregators now on offer and go from the simple to the highly sophisticated.

In September 2004 the term “Podcasting” was referred to as one possible; out of multiple terms for to listening to audio blogs, as coined by Ben Hammersley:

“…all the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?”

In the same month Dannie Gregoire used the term to describe the automatic download and syncrinisation of audio content. The name stuck and entered into common usage. Note the absence of anything related to an iPod? No it had nothing to do with iPods or Apple. In hind sight the association of the iPod with podcasting and podcasts has been detrimental in my opinion. As many people still to this day believe that you need an iPod to listen to podcasts and until I investigated the medium I too thought that the case. Or at least an association.

In September 2004 Adam Curry launched the ipodder-dev mailing list. A huge 100+ message conversation on Slashdot resulted in more attention in the development project. October of 2004 saw detailed “how-to-podcast” articles on-line. Then November 2004 saw the launch of Liberated Syndication, which offered storage, bandwidth and RSS creation tools. LibSyn for short, still provides the service to this day at some of the cheapest prices on the Internet.

As a final point, in February 2005 out rolled the first of the podcasting networks. The first was The Podcast Network, created by Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic. The Podcast Network was and is the first Commercial Network. PodTech was founded in May 2005. Many others have followed and I think this is only the begining! I have every reason to be proud that The Global Geek Podcast lives at The Podcast Network.

So What has that got to do with Me?

Do you notice the dates in our history review? I use the word history very loosely as we can only say that it refers to past tense regarding podcasting and it’s past. Podcasting is a very new technology! In many respects the technology is still rapidly evolving and very dynamically at that. So being new it offers great challengers to the new user.

I would not say that subscribing and listening to podcasts is easy for the average user. In brief the user has to take the following steps:

1. Realise what these strange links called RSS are (in addition to not writing it off immediately after seeing a page of RSS!)
2. Source and install an RSS Aggregator
3. Figure out how to subscribe to a feed, and realise that it is free.
4. Know that not all aggregators are built equal (some support enclosures and some do not)
5. Actually download a podcast using their tricked out aggregator
6. Find some application to listen to it with or
7. Figure out how to transfer the mp3 file to a portable mp3 player
8. Enjoy

Phew! Now that is an effort. In reality most people probably start by right clicking and saving a podcast directly rather than use an aggregator. To try and explain to somebody exactly how to do all of the above is difficult and you generally loose the individual as soon as you mention aggregator. If you keep them that long.

Then I realised today, in light of listening to the interview with Doug Kaye that I can not expect every user that surfs by the Rooster’s Rail to know what podcasting is or what a podcast is. Given that; no wonder I have had bugger all responses to my plea for a new co-host. No wonder they might think that it is hard and intimidating or that they are not cut out for it. Or even that they have any idea what so ever and think I have a screw loose!

I think that the next huge leap in exposure to podcasting will be the simplification of the subscribing, downloading, transferring and listening process. It won’t be long until the manual procedure described above becomes a seamless automated process that the “average” user will be unaware of. Much of this I believe will come about when it is built into something like Windows Media Player. While that might disgust some people, the fact remains that most users use Windows! So it stands to reason. In addition to this factor will be the ever connected Generation Y, podcasts for them will be a thing that they have intergrated into their lives as a part of it rather than something they have to introduce.

So I have resolved myself to my crusade to expose as many people as I can to a medium that while young is transforming the global media landscape. In Cameron Reilly’s words “…this is something I have to do”.

Welcome to the revolution… For the rest of us that means hardcore brain cell re-programming.

[History of Podcasting Sourced from Wikipedia]

I Too Thought this to Be Ironic

To set the scene, last week saw two major DRM protocols hacked; the Apple iTunes and the PlaysForSure DRM. Not sure if the Apple DRM is still open but fairly sure that it is however, the Windows version is all wrapped up again.

Ironic? Yes ironic. I saw in the RSS feeds the news that the Windows DRM was hacked, almost straight away I found another post that said it was patched and secure again. So what happened? What happened was that Windows rushed out an update patch labelled as critical in order to close the loop-hole down. That is ironic because usually patches released once a month “Patch Tuesday“. So that means that if a vulnerability is found the day after Patch Tuesday then we have to wait a month to get it fixed! Unless there is something so critical that an exception is made…

“If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don’t look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond’s DRM.”

So in this instance Microsoft was quick off the mark to protect it’s own interests rather than those of their users. This is also evident in the fact that they pushed the patch out as a “critical”. See what I mean?

Just wait for the patch that is coming labeled as a “high Priority security update” ; that will be Internet Explorer 7. They certainly have loose definitions there at Microsoft. All this when trying to make up for all the badness they have caused and consumer trust.

Ironic.