At DailySplice we do 7 podcast reviews in 7 minutes every day! Today we’ve got a lot of interesting stories including a plane crash, balloon tree and NASCAR. Here are the links to all the podcasts we talked about today:
If your Interested in business communications in any way, add this podcast to your splice! I’ve just found this one and listened to a 20 minute episode on show notes for podcasts, and I must say it was one of the best I’ve come across. I’m really looking forward to listening to more of these, it is really helpful. Here’s the website: http://trafcom.typepad.com/podcast/.
At DailySplice we do 7 podcast reviews in 7 minutes every day! Today we’ve got a lot of interesting stories including a plane crash, balloon tree and NASCAR. Here are the links to all the podcasts we talked about today:
At DailySplice we do 7 podcast reviews in 7 minutes every day! Today we chat about a podcast contest, healthy seafood recipes, and writing show notes… which is why we’ve written more show notes than usual today! Here are the links to all the podcasts we talked about today:
I’ve noticed a few stories this week out on the web talking about putting ridiculous amounts of music on an iPod. Podcasting News reported that IBM has developed a chip that can hold 500,000 songs. Ya, that’s a lot, but if I listen 8 hours per day I’m going to run out of music in 12 years… and heaven forbid I have to listen to the same song twice. But not to worry, the Scottish Scientists can do better. How about… 100 Million songs [insert Dr. Evil style smirk here]. Now you can have enough music to keep you going for 100 lifetimes, all on 1 iPod. Since I plan to live 100 lifetimes, this is good news to me. I think it’s only fair that the warrenty should last as long too.
But according to the Scottish Scientists, if you plan to live more than 100 lifetimes and want to listen to non-stop music on your iPod for the entire time, your going to be out of luck. Apparently at that point we will have reached the limits of what is physically possible. We can only PREY that by the year 3000 we will have reliable and affordable wireless globally so that we don’t have to store our music on our iPods anymore.
Now, I’m not just trying to be facetious, but I think the Ninja’s definition is the only one that captures the true meaning of podcasting. The dictionary suggests that you’ve got to have web-based audio on an RSS feed and you have to distribute it to subscribers to say you have a “podcast.” About’s definition is a little more loose, saying it need’s only to an audio file on an RSS feed, also mentioning that the RSS feed is just a means to “broadcast” the audio over the Internet. Wikipedia’s broadens the definition even more by saying it’s just got to be a digital-media file on a syndication feed.What all these definitions lack is the concept of repeated publications; the “factory” in the Ninja’s definition. If someone made a weekly media update of his travels around the world and sent it out to anyone who asked for it every Friday at 12:01am via an automated email mailing list… that would fail all the formal definitions. But the Ninja would say that someone is publishing some interesting media and distributing it on a regular basis over the Internet, so it’s a podcast. And I’d have to agree.
Here’s an example of a student who recorded a single interview session as a class project, listed it in a xml file dedicated solely to that mp3, and submit it into our directory without the intention of ever releasing any other episode. According to the formal definitions, that’s a podcast. The Ninja would probably call that “brine,” and I would tend to agree with the him again. That is not a podcast.
The formal definitions get deep into the technical requirements of a podcast and ignore the true concept of what makes a podcast a podcast. Unfortunately, computer’s have a lot easier time understanding technical definitions, and so the formal definitions also define what directories will call podcasts… including DailySplice. The problem we’re having is the same problem all the other directories have, we don’t really have a “podcast directory,” we have a directory of xml documents that contain media enclosures. If you wrap your media file in an RSS feed like the above mentioned student did, we’ll list it.
What we can do though is analyze the publishing habits of a “podcaster” and, over time, determine if that RSS feed is really a podcast or just an mp3 file wrapped into an xml document. This is exactly what we try to do. Our podcasts are ordered by something we call “PodRank,” which, in part, is a measure the “podcastness” of an RSS feed based on the non-technical aspects of what constitutes a true podcast.
Of course, as soon as you steer away from the formal technical definitions you start to get a lot of grey area and everyone starts to develop their own opinions. One of our goals is to make it easy for you to find podcasts that match your own criteria. Our advanced search is one feature we’ve included on our site to help make this possible. Here you can define criteria like number of episodes per week or average duration to ensure search results meet your own definition. Please leave feedback on how this is working for you and what factors you think are most important. We look forward to bring you the most real “podcast” directory soon!
Being part of an internet startup, we’re keenly interested in the goings-on of new technology ventures. ReadWriteTalk has very informative one-on-one discussions with leaders from emerging web 2.0 companies. I make sure I listen to this one as soon as possible. Every discussion tweaks my perspective on the industry and sheds some light on many opportunities out there. If you love the web, this one is a must-hear.
