Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Since February E-Learning Lab at Aalborg University has been podcasting. They have eight podcasts available right now. The topics are broad, but of course the focus is on ICT and learning. Some of the podcasts are in English, but it's a bit hard to see which ones. The website also seems to be missing permalinks for the individual episodes making further conversation in the blogosphere impossible. I'm a bit bummed about that.

In similar news AAU-TV had their release party on Friday. AAU-TV is a student-run tv-station at Aalborg University. There are promotional videos online at the moment and production will start sooner rather than later. If you are student or faculty at AAU and have something to say AAU-TV have cameras and know-how. Everything is in Danish at the moment, but if you're an exchange student you will also be welcomed with open arms.

Social Media is all the rage these days. Blogging, wikis, podcasting, everything 37signals touches, conversations at the hotdog stand gets lumped into this category of media that are social. Podcasting is probably included because it brings audio production to the masses, but that alone doesn't make a media social. After I posted my first tirade against podcasting Adrian Miles pointed out that the revolution in podcasting lies in access, not dialogue:

Otherwise it is nonbroadcast radio and the revolution is that community access is now equivalent to network access.

I'm actually listening to podcasts regularily now. I found a couple of Danish ones I like (Rasmus Rasmussen and Jakob Bøtter) and from there I've expanded into English language podcasts as well. All podcasters seem to have entered this competition to see how accurately they can make a representation of radio on the computer. Which is all fine of course — community access is nice — but community access doesn't automatically make the media social.

Almost two months ago Jakob Bøtter made an interview with Neville Hobson. I have been wanting to comment on it since I heard it, but I haven't because podcasts don't foster conversation:

• Podcasts are long (>5 minutes). Once I'm at the end I've forgotten half of the stuff I wanted to comment on.
• Podcasts don't contain links only occasional links in the accompanying blog post, which I may or may not see (see below).
• Long audio files are hard to quote. Just finding the right spot takes forever. I end up having to listen to the whole podcast again.
• The most popular podcasting subscription software (well, the one I use) don't give me a way to come from the podcast to the blog post where I can comment.

Obviously there is conversation going on around the podcasts so someone is talking. But podcasts are not social because of the way they use audio. Podcasts are social despite the way they use audio. Just as text had to rethought to become social, audio has to be rethought to become a social medium. Otherwise you just have radio on-demand. Taking the points above we can make a starting list:

• Short is easier to “do stuff” with. If you can't do stuff like comment, quote or reuse it's hard to be social.
• Links branch out the conversation.
• Subscription software needs to prominently displace a permalink. The permalink anchors the conversation in one spot. Without it there can be no commenting, quoting, reusing, social interaction.

Podcasting is well on it's way to become well established as a community-driven on-demand radio experience, and as such it's placed solidly as an offline medium. For that reason I suspect that the social version of audio will be known under a different name.

Previous installments in my podcasting saga:

• Podcasting Sucks
• Podcasting Still Sucks

Yesterday I listened to my second podcast, ever. It was the B&O Pilot episode from Jesper Balslev and Joachim Oschlag. The two of them have decided to make their podcast into a cross-cast, meaning that they each have the episode posted on their blogs. It also means that the episode has two permalinks instead of one. So I can't link to the location of the episode, I have to link both to Jesper's post and Joachim's post. It also means that comments on the podcast are collected in two different places. Not cool at all.

Anyway, I transferred the show to my portable mp3-player and listened to it while biking into the city. At 22 minutes the B&O Pilot had the perfect length. It takes me 25 minutes to bike to the downtown area. Five minutes longer and I would not hear the final part of the podcast. On the other hand the volume of the podcast was way too low. Once I hit the more busy streets it was hard to follow the conversation even though I had the volume all the way up.

Talking about online material in an offline medium like a podcast is always hard. You can't just click links to find additional information. B&O could have introduced their topics a bit better for those of us who didn't happen to click through before listening.

I don't get why podcasts are distributed as one big file. I would much rather have the shows broken up into smaller pieces which I could synch to my iPod. That would make it much easier to find a given section again later (if I want to quote it) and it would make it easier to stop the podcast and pick up where I left off later. It can't be hard to do technically — it would be the same as having an ‘album’. Each podcast would just be an album in iTunes.

Oh, and as for the content? Very good. I hope they do more episodes in the future.

As a response to my last post I recieved an e-mail from Doug Kaye. He pointed out that you can create your own audio quotes of any audio file at IT Conversations. Just click any “clip” link to start. It's a pretty sweet feature.

For the first time I listened to a podcast all the way through. While it wasn't as bad as the first time, I still think podcasting sucks. It's radio for the sake of being radio, and whoever thought it up decided not to try and use the advantages available when you're using the web as distribution instead of airwaves. In short podcasting still sucks for the reasons radio sucks.

The podcast I listened to was an episode of the Gillmor Gang. It was a pretty interesting show, and I wanted to write about some of the topics covered on this blog. But because podcasting is the way it is that was impossible.

What I have is one huge audio file, and the permalink to that particular show. This is fine and dandy if I want to talk about the episode as a whole. In that case I can just link to the permalink and be done with it. Podcasts aren't good blog content though. The Gillmor Gang episode ran about an hour. It's impossible to reference just part of the show. The content is as granular as a radio show, instead of being as granular as a blog entry. The only solution I have is saying something like Download the episode and fast-forward to 30:12 into the file.

Not cool at all. I can't blog you if I can't link to you. And If I can't blog you, I can't talk about you and that's sad.

The solution as I see it is in playlists. Instead of publishing one huge audio file, you break it up into many smaller parts. Think of them as chapters. Each published as their own blog entry. Then publish a playlist which points to all of these chapters. Your podcatcher would download the playlist, and then download each chapter in order and transfer them to your iPod or whatever.

For the iPod user the end result would be the same — an on-demand radio show. The difference would be that it would be easier to find your place if you pause/stop playback, and it would be possible to skip boring chunks (like the intro). As an added bonus it would be possible for bloggers to link to exactly the part of your podcast that they want to talk about. It's not perfect, but it's better.

After that we can start talking about adding links inside the podcasts, so we can get rid of this whole spelling out URLs nonsense.

Podcasting sucks. There I said it. What I mean is that Podcasting sucks because it's radio. Or rather that it sucks because it doesn't try to be more than radio. Pre-recorded radio, but still radio. Doc Searls claims that Podcasting isn't radio, but his argument is a legal one. From a media point of view Podcasting is radio. Not that there's anything bad with radio per se. It's just that audio delievered via the world wide web has potential to be so much much more than on-demand radio.

I've only listened to two online radio shows from the recent Podcast developement. Earlier this year I did also listen to the Blogradio.dk shows. At least they called a spade a spade. This time around I downloaded the Morning Coffee Notes from October 16. by Dave Winer and the first installment of the Dawn and Drew Show by (tada) Dawn and Drew. Before I continue I must admit that I didn't make it through either show. I stayed with Dave Winer for the longest at just over 12 minutes.

Anyway, both these shows are great examples of something that should have been conveyed using a hypermedia approach, and not the traditional broadcast approach they actually used. Dawn and Drew has a link in their blog post to a photo they talk about in their radio show, something that should be a link in the audio file itself when the photo is mentioned. It's painfully apparent in Dave Winer's radio show when he more than once spells out the URLs of the websites he is talking about.

The problem is that we need a new file format to enable hyperaudio. MP3 files can't contain links. SMIL is the obvious answer, but audio players don't support SMIL files (and that sucks too).

Podcasting is regular people who now get to make their own radio shows. Despite the poor microphone experience compared to regular radio it's certainly interesting. It is, however, only a media revolution. It's not a new media revolution. That's what I anticipated, and that's why I was disappointed to be met with an amatuer radio show. There is room for independent radio shows too, of course. It's just not nearly as cool as a hypermedia revolution.

Videoblogging has the exact same ‘problem’ — it too has not embraced the hypermedia nature of the world wide web. The difference is that portable tvs has never been widespread so people haven't mistaken videoblogging for amatuer tv yet. This is what Adrian Miles mean when he claims that A vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television) and a part of A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog.

All links in this entry are in Danish.

The Danish Blogosphere is buzzing today, because at midnight the broadcast from Blogradio.dk was put online. Blogradio.dk is radio broadcasting on blogging by bloggers. And you thought just blogging about blogging was navel gazing. The first show was on the topic of blog comments with the guests Kathrine and /many. I listened to the one hour long show this morning as I was getting ready to face the day. Blogradio is very very nerdy. That's not a bad thing, it's just something to keep in mind. When I say nerdy I mean geeky in the way ESPN is (sports) nerdy. Blogradio.dk is centered around the Danish blogging community and im my opinion it helps to know your way around the Danish blogs before you listen. The obvious example being the competition where you are supposed to guess the mystery blogger.

With that being said I was very impressed with the first Blogradio.dk show. The technical quality was professional in my ears, the hosts (Rasmus and Mikkel) were in high spirits and entertaining. One hour might be a bit longer than I would like, but the show had nice breaks from dalager's mikrofiktion, Grith and Randi.

The concept of having a blog radio appeals to me. Radio programs with specials topics are hardly a new thing. The new thing as I see it is a) That it's a topic I'm interested in and b) it's not broadcast like normal radio, but online so I can listen to it when I want. I don't know what kind of technical demands there are when you create a radio show like this, but I would love to see all kinds of special topic radio shows pop up on the internet. Thumbs up, Blogradio.dk!

I will be tuning in when the next show is up for listening in a couple of weeks (even if everyone sounds like Copenhageners). You can even download the show as an mp3 file. That means I can listen to it while I bike to the city — a definite advantage.