Archive for 'Podcasts'
NC wants Gary Vaynerchuk
Posted on June 27, 2008, under Media, Podcasts, Raleigh.
If you are not familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, or his Wine Library TV you should be… so go ahead and make yourself familiar I will wait…
So Gary if you are watching, please come join us. There are a bunch of passionate people here that I know will be willing to help make it happen. I am one of them
Popularity: 26% [?]
No Comments
Amazon’s New MP3 Download Service is a True iTunes Competitor
Posted on October 2, 2007, under Media, Podcasts, Software, Tools and Services.
Many have tried to steal part of the large market share that Apple owns of the digital music market. Many have also failed. Amazon was in a perfect position to take on this challenge, but it’s biggest point of failure could have been itself. Amazon failed with it’s Unboxed service for movies and TV shows, with too much DRM, no mac support, and just a user experience nightmare. So what makes the new MP3 service from Amazon a true iTunes competitor, bottom line it works and works well!
Amazon is not playing any favorites. You have to download a small piece of software just to download the purchased music, after that the music works with iTunes, iPod, Zune, and any other media player or software. It also is available for Mac and Windows.
The prices are good, better than Apple in most cases. I hope that they will continue to be this low. It seems like Amazon might be initially taking a cut of revenue to get their foot in the door. If they do raise prices I can’t see it going higher than other digital music stores out there.
The music is DRM free! Yes, they are watermarked, which really is not a form of DRM just a little meta data that says where it was purchased from. The music is clean, which really would have been a show stopper for this new service and made it unusable for most like Amazon’s Unboxed service.
Amazon has been getting more into the service department, with it’s A9 offerings. These services line them up great for offerings like this new MP3 service. The downloads are fast, taking just about two minutes to download an entire album over broadband.
Amazon integrates the service very well into it’s store, again giving Amazon a leg up on competition and threatening Apples market share.
I have downloaded about three albums from the new service, and honestly it is so well done it might even convert the pirates. I truly hope that the record labelssee this service working and do not try to pull the stunts that they have pulled with Apple. Amazon needs to push back on the MPAA and get it’s Unboxed service working as well.
Popularity: 7% [?]
No Comments
Alternatives to iTunes as a Podcatcher
Posted on September 14, 2007, under Podcasts, Software.
I have had a love hate relationship with iTunes through out its existence. Recently after deciding to go back to iTunes, because surprise it works best with the iPod, I have decided to drop it as a Podcatcher. iTunes for Windows is not as stable as it is on the Mac. I have some 30+ podcasts that I am subscribed to, and on a daily basis when it’s time to download new episodes iTunes locks up. No it’s not the computer, no it’s not my hard drive; I have determined that it is the simple fact that iTunes does not multi thread well on windows. When it is doing intensive downloads, it is just outright not responsive. I contribute part of the problem to the lack of options that iTunes allows you to set for downloading media.
So I have set out to find a better alternative to downloading my podcasts. Here is what I am now using:
- PodNova: I have had a PodNova account from way back when the podcasting boom was happening; you know back when Odeo and others were getting love. They have done a lot with the user interface, and it now serves up a lot of AJAX goodness to make finding and subscribing to podcasts easy. With PodNova, you can take your personalized OPML feed and use it in a Podcatcher to always have an up to date list of your subscriptions.
- Juice: An excellent open source and cross platform Podcatcher. It has all the right features: The ability to tweak download threads, the ability to import directly into iTunes as well as other media players, ID3 tagging, etc. A perfect match.
You can get this up and running in under 10 minutes. Juice has direct support for PodNova and any OPML feed. I have been looking at Google Reader as an alternative as well, but they do not handle all video Podcasts; with the codecs and all.
I am hoping this works out, if you have any other good alternatives i am open for suggestions.
Popularity: 7% [?]
No Comments
Why Didn’t Apple Buy iphone.com?
Posted on June 13, 2007, under Gadgets, Podcasts.
So the iPhone is all over the news lately, and has a launch date coming up soon. The phone is not for me. It looks too delicate, requires iTunes to setup, and is pricey. Non-the-less, cheers to Apple for changing the market yet again. Markets become stale when people find something that works, and innovation is stifled so that companies can continue to have a steady profit. Hopefully Apple will do for the phone market what it did for the music market and dealing with the RIAA.
My only question to Apple, is why did you not buy iphone.com? Seems they have been getting some traffic lately.
Popularity: 5% [?]
No Comments
Ask a Ninja Gone Mainstream
Posted on March 29, 2007, under Podcasts.
The latest Ask a Ninja is extremely funny. They did a special “interview” with Will Ferrell and Jon Heder for the new movies Blades of Glory. It’s great to see a home grown video-cast become large enough to do main stream interviews. This has to be one of the funniest episodes I have seen in a while.
Not much else from here, back from traveling so I am catching up on email and work.
Popularity: 5% [?]
No Comments
Why Digg and Other Sites Should Use Google Search For Their Site
Posted on March 23, 2007, under Podcasts, Search, Tools and Services.
You know it’s bad when you get better results by searching with Google, than searching on a particular site. Take Digg.com. First, let me state I have no problem with Digg. I am a loyal Digg user and loyal Google user, and the symptoms in this article have happened a hand full of times and are not limited to Digg.
I listen to Diggnation and often they have a particular article in the podcast they I want to see on Digg, so I head over to Digg and search for the words I think would bring up the article. But no go, so I type them in Google and more often than not the results are in the first eight results. Let’s take a look at an example. There is an article on Digg that was very popular about a tourist paying $200 to launch a rocket launcher in Cambodia for fun. So I search for “Cambodia rocket launcher” in Digg and Google. I can’t find the results in Digg, here they are. But in Google, the result is #6. If I add $200 to the beginning of the query, it’s #1 in Google and still no where to be found on Digg. And these results are not even site specific using “site: digg.com” in Google. So why is this?
Well for Digg there are several problem:
- The “quick” search box in the header of Digg by default only searches through the last 7 days. I understand that this is probably done for performance reasons, but the chances are what I am looking for is further back than a week.
- The second problem I spy is Digg search is not a smart as Google’s search. There five options when searching through Digg stories. That’s too many, by now users are use to the search engine doing the thinking for them. And if worse comes to worse have search shortcuts like to set the search parameters in the query. That way with one query I can specify I want to search further back than 1 week, without having to first search and then set my options.
Digg is not alone on this island, many sites have clunky search that do not return the wanted results most of the time. I find myself searching with Google the majority of the time. So why should sites use Google Search for their site, well here are a couple reason I could think of.
- Saved resource: I can’t even imagine the CPU resource nightmare that Digg has. I have heard Kevin Rose speak of their server growth rate. Every time Digg orders a server from their provider they get a little foam Linux penguin, Kevin states that the Digg office is littered with the little squeezable guys. which gives on a good idea that they are always needing more power. If you offload search to Google, you can save a good chunk of resources on your server. Furthermore you will not have to set restrictive default parameters, like 1 week with Digg.
- Google is good at search: By now it’s obvious that Google is very good at search, and can return better results than what most services can. It’s as simple as that. There is not need to reinvent the wheel, when the wheel is already really good.
- Get some extra bling: With Google search on your site you can generate income on the ads that Google displays. The page is completely brand able, so the look and feel can be the same as all of your other pages. With the amount of page hits and search queries that I can only imagine Digg serves up on a daily basis, they could generate some serious income.
Yes there are some pitfalls to using Google search:
- Competitor ads and search results if the user is not searching site specific.
- For services like Digg, you will not be able to search through comments, members name, etc. These service specific options are useful in some cases.
- General lack of control can also be a problem, it’s not home brewed so there are limitations on what you can do with the search.
With the type of traffic that some of these services bring in, I am sure they might be able to strike a deal with Google for a more fluent and controllable search. I may be wrong, but in the mean time I have setup Firefox search extensions for services like Digg that use Google for searching as a pose to Digg. No harm no foul.
Popularity: 6% [?]
No Comments
