So I know I’ve mentioned Adam Curry a few times. I really enjoy his show The Daily Source Code. They’ve got a number where you can leave comments and I’ve put the phone number in my phone a while back. I don’t think I’ve ever left a comment until this week (and I think I’ve left three).

Today I was listening and about 8 minutes in his was finishing this story about him flying a plane today (he flew solo from Belguim to England). At the end of the story I was wondering if everything in aviation was in feet (or maybe meters), his story used feet and he lives in England (although they use miles) but it seemed like there would be an international standard. So I called and left a voice mail as I hung up I thought, “Whenever I have something to say, I’m going to leave an message until he plays one of my comments”. So then I resumed playing the show and not 90 seconds later I hear my voice!!!! It was the comment I had left on Tuesday!!!

It was a really long comment and I’m pretty sure he played the whole thing. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention my blog address in the message, that would have probably picked up some traffic here. But then that’s not why I left the comment but extra traffic is always nice. I’ve been pretty geeked about being on the show all evening…

Here’s a link to the specific episode (and straight to the mp3), I’m about nine minutes in, shortly after the plane flying story at the beginning.

FYI, I got my flu shot but forgot mention that also. Duh!

I’ve been listening more often now that I’ve got my Treo. I’ve got a decent way to to get the podcasts on my Treo, and I can play those through the stereo on my car. It’s actually a notch harder than putting it on my iPod but my iPod doesn’t come into the house every night, the Treo does. Generally if I’ve got my PowerBook I’ve got the Treo with me, so I can do it easily at anytime.

So here’s my question:
Doesn’t the flu vaccine vary based on your location (they mix a different flu cocktail). I swear I’ve heard this before (and while it never made sense to me) I pretty sure it was more than once. I was certain of this when I left the comment but I can’t find anything to back it up. But searching for “flu vaccine” and “location” just tells me where I can get one…

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I’ve seen Profcast demoed and it’s pretty cool. In essence you talk while doing your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation (Mac only) and creates an enhanced Podcast with the images in it! The site says: “ProfCast is the ideal tool for recording and publishing your live Keynote or PowerPoint presentation. All elements of your presentation, including slide timing and voice narration, are recorded. You can then publish your complete presentation on the Web as a Podcast, complete with RSS support.”

I’ve been meaning to buy it and I finally did this week, why you ask? Because they’re having the “Happy Birthday Apple Sale!” and only charging 30% of the price (30 years of Apple) so it’s only $10.50!

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So I’ve got this podcast with the enhanced images working!

Two kinds of podcasts:
this is the “better” enhanced AAC podcast (for iTunes, iPods and Quicktime).
this is the mp3 podcast (for everything else).

The enhanced file is a AAC/MP4 (m4a) file so you probably need an iPod or iTunes (or Quicktime) to see the images. The MP3 will just be on it’s own for any software/hardware player.

I now have both a Enhanced RSS Feed and a MP3 RSS Feed set up.

(If you get goofy characters you’ll need to save it to the computer first, sorry. This should be fixed, but you never know…)

I apologize to those using feed software, this (and the feed from the next podcast or two) will be goofy as revise and work out the bugs…

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Here is an audio file of me talking on the way home from the Aimee Mann concert (it’s got a slight disclaimer on the quality at the start). It’s not polished nor is it what I plan to have as a podcast once I get there. It’s me talking over Aimee playing on the car stereo, I’m recoding it on my digital camera.

So I’m testing audio enclosures with MovableType and MT-Enclosures. I’m just playing with it (it’s only supposed to be in the RSS 2.0 feed as of now, does anyone else use MT-Enclosures in other feeds?). The file is too big, but it should have good ID3 tags (names and info) including album art. Can anyone tell me if it’s working? (In your feed, with your podcast downloader or anything?)

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So TiVo rolled out (started rolling out) their new features in the music, photos and more section. These new features I think will pave the way for what you have to look forward to from your home entertainment center. They now have (without you having to install anything on your home computer) movie listings, traffic, weather, photos (Yahoo!), streaming Internet audio (Live 365), games (yes, I said games) and you can listen to podcasts. This is very cool stuff! I especially like SameGame, it’s a fun game you’ll just have to try. This all assumes you have your TiVo hooked up to the network (and not the phone).

So the weather and movies (you can purchase tickets on-line too). Are tied to your My Yahoo! account (or you can put in your zip manually). The photos are also tied to your Yahoo account. You can view photos of others on-line but you have to type in their Yahoo name. My Yahoo Photos name is “garylapointe”, try it if you get a chance I’ve got photos of a trip to Costa Rica and a few from when a family of ducks was wandering around the high school.

Typing text for the with the remote is awful (can I hook up a USB keyboard yet?) they need to work on that, it always seems as if I need the farthest letter (and you can’t go off the right of the screen and come back on the left). Please fix this…

The podcasts are cool but it just seems to be streaming it. No decent way to build a playlist. They only have a list of 30 or so podcasts that you can add to your favorites. You can specify any podcast but as I criticized “the typing” above it’s even more awful for the typing of podcast addresses.

There’s a lot with the Live 365 streaming and you can subscribe to get more (not sure on the costs).

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Let me start with me saying, “If I had to put two names to the success of Podcasting it’d have to be Dave Winer and Adam Curry.” But this story is a little more about Adam. This is not really a “history” it’s an offshoot of my previous post on memory but it got too long to stick in as part of that post (it started as a just few sentences).

To me, Adam has been one of the biggest proponents of podcasting and moving items onto iPod-like players. He’s not the creator of podcasting or even the word “podcasting”, he’s not the creator of attaching files to RSS feeds (though I think he suggested it to Dave Winer who did do it), he’s said he couldn’t even get people to do some of the work he needed to make this work, I’ve heard him say “I couldn’t get people to ‘do my homework’ for me”. He makes it sound as if the original program for receiving podcasts was parts that he found and cobbled together and had to learn applescript to do it (I may not be giving AC enough credit here).

Adam Green editing parts of Adam Curry and Dave Winer podcasts into a 35 minute history (I haven’t listened to it yet, I found it after I posted this and just added it).

A podcast that he and Dave Winer did (Trade Secrets, I think?) often gets credit as the first podcast and he denies it (although says they did earlier shows). So it seems to me it’s not like he’s just trying to get credit (he’s getting it for that item, but still denying it), it really seems as if he’s just trying to get some of it straight. During some of this the rival to RSS, RDF, already supported audio attachments but no one really utilized it.

He’s certainly one of the biggest proponents of podcasting out there and he’s always said he wants to somehow figure out how to make money off it. He’s not going to make money off of the actual concept, that’s done and gone and that’s where the history so it really doesn’t matter that much from a monetary standpoint. It seems like it’s just a history thing. Apple’s stuck it in iTunes and there are a million other pieces of software out there. His money is probably going to be from selling tools, space, advertisements and maybe his own shows (I’m guessing). I don’t know if you can really make money off the talk show network? and interviews? Oh and he does a great show and is very entertaining! This is probably key in the whole process.

It’s possible I’m getting some of this wrong (especially the RDF part, I’ve only seen that written once and maybe heard it once). But AC comes off as pretty charismatic and people who generally disagree with him seem to come off more like grunters/complainers (at least the stuff I read) and that’s always going to make things fall in his favor. Without Adam podcasting would have happened (no doubt in my mind), but he had a big part in it and people like him since he’s the old Mtv face. I’m not aware of any of the other “big names” out there trying to make money on the scale that he is and a lot of the “big names” out there have jumped on board of what he’s trying to do. In an alternate universe where Adam had nothing to do with podcasting I think he’d still have jumped on the bandwagon and be doing stuff awfully similar to what he’s doing now; he’s got the connections, history, money(?) and motivation to do this kind of project.

As I said, if I had to put two names to the success of Podcasting it’d have to be Dave Winer and Adam Curry. I’m not saying others weren’t there but those two seem to be the big push no matter where you look.

All this “stuff” just builds on previous technology. Web browsers were after Gopher browsers (I don’t think University of Minnesota ever gets credit for that) which was after WAIS, FTP and any other processes that it used and tapped into. All most of it was doing was putting a nice front end on “stuff” that was already out there. It’s possible that Gopher was concurrent with the original web stuff, but the web certainly wasn’t more popular until images was added and NCSA Mosaic was out (although no one remembers Mosaic, they remember Netscape).

Another way to look at market and getting credit: Apple didn’t create music files or create music players. They just took a idea and built on it on it and ended up with a huge percentage of the market of the MP3 players and a great on-line store. Now iPod is synonymous with music player.

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