What I've Seen

Sparks!, Odeo, Podshow – the phoney war continues

4 Comments

screenshot of sparks 2.0

This conversation is getting interesting – but it’s still the “phoney war”.

A couple of hours after I posted on Odeo yesterday, I got a mail from David Janes at BlogMatrix suggesting I try out his new tool Sparks! (not my exclamation mark!) which is an integrated podcatcher, rss aggregator, blogging tool, media player and podcast creation tool (at least those are the elements that I could discern, there may be even more…) and which is going for an official launch next week.

For these tools, it’s early days and the field’s wide open, and as AC keeps saying on the DSC they can only compete on quality and time to market. Well my initial reaction to the BlogMatrix offering is congratulations on getting to market quickly – and engaging in the conversation with little guys like me – not quite full marks yet on the quality of the product. So quick to market with a product like this isn’t quite kicking someone in the nuts.

I found it straightforward, but I’m not good at thinking out of my own experience. I couldn’t get my head around the podcast recording/mixing bit. Your file gets posted in .torrent format – which is fine if you know what it is and you’ve figured out how to get bittorrent to work efficiently behind your firewall etc. etc. I think overall the missing bit is documentation – David tells me there is a support page up now, but it’s still very bare.

This is what I said to David by e-mail:

“1. Easy to set up and get going – I understood most of the things
that i needed to do, but I’m used to aggregators and I’ve been
podcasting already for ooooh a couple of months! I liked that I
didn’t have to give you gazillions of bits of information in order to
register – free hosting doesn’t hurt any either…!.

2. So far I have recorded all of my podcasts on minidisc, transferred
them to PC and then done some post-production in audacity which I’ve
also used for mp3 encoding. With sparks! I just tried uploading a
previously published file of around 3 megs – went up very easily,
though I could have done with a status bar to see how far it had got.
I also mixed something from scratch, but I don’t have a good mic with
me and I don’t really think in that mixing way – dunno need to play
with it a bit more – I kind of worked out what I was supposed to do,
and I could see it working for a daily source code type show, but for
me it was too complicated.

3. Not sure about the .torrent format – I can understand the
rationale, but it’s still a bit bleeding edge for me and it shuts out
a lot of my listeners many of whom have taken a long time to get used
to downloading mp3s! I also sit behind a variety of firewalls myself
and so I don’t always get the full benefit. I think it’s a risky
strategy is all – I’m sure you’ve thought about it.

4. I struggled to find my blog page to download and listen without
sparks! I’m sure I’ll find it again… but this was the only annoying
moment – perhaps it could be signposted or put in the registration
confirmation email – “once you’ve published something it will show up
at http: //www. etc” that kind of thing.”

This morning Doc points out that it’s currently only available as a Windows .exe, which is the kind of thing that Doc notices but I don’t. I think though that I would like it better if the UI were simpler – perhaps browser based or if it has to be a client-app, then as with Ipodder Lemon 2.0 a bunch of tabbed sub-screens.

Doc also hints that we might see something from Odeo soon – I’m sure there’ll be some more detailed Podshow announcement as well, so then perhaps we can start comparing real features rather than going on about what we haven’t heard yet.

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What I've Seen

Odeo, integrity and credibility

4 Comments

Dave reminds us of what we still don’t know about Odeo. And Adam talks about advertising and making money in podcasting.

What bugs me about Odeo is that they’re a “podcasting” company without any podcasts! How much credibility does that show – would you have bought blogging from Evan if he didn’t have a blog – ? To me, every day that that continues is more evidence that all it’s about is sucking cash out of a market that other people have built. And what’s annoying about that is not that people are making money – I love seeing people make money, I have my own company, I’m a capitalist – but that people who already are millionaires use their position of power to make even more money out of something that someone else has put the slog into – that’s capitalism that sucks. I know that this is projection, I don’t know what is in the Odeo grand master plan, but not having audio available on your site when that seems to be fundamental to your product doesn’t fill me with optimism – how does this fit with Dave’s definition of integrity? We shall see. Perhaps Evan’s presentation to etech will be on IT Conversations in six month’s time…

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Podcasts

The podwalker returns

The Great Court

OK, this was recorded on 20th February just after podwalk 6 but it’s been sitting “in the can” since then as I’ve been doing all sorts of other things.

You can hear me walk and talk my way from the Great Court of the British Museum over to Kingsway, down High Holborn, over Holborn viaduct into the City, along Newgate St and down Cheapside to the Bank of England – where I disappear underground. There was more, but it got boring underground (I think I was tired). By the way, this was the first time I used my Sony MZ-NH700 Hi-MD player/recorder and while I wasn’t too thrilled about it at this stage it has really come into it’s own with longer recordings – the tests I talk about in this cast were too short to show the benefit, I’m a happy user now (now if Sony could do something to speed up the transfer and conversion process, I would be a super happy bunny). Oh yeah, and I’m sorry about the intro and the lack of pics (there are 3 on flickr with the tag podwalk007).

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What I've Been Doing

Great wi-fi, cool music, hot coffee in London’s West End

rays

Just a quick plug for the Cafe in Ray’s Jazz Shop within Foyles in the Charing Cross Road.

Excellent coffee, great atmosphere, really cool music and a guy behind the bar who doesn’t really mind having his picture taken, I’m sure.

Plus free wifi for customers – way to go Ray! (contrast with Borders over the road who have a money-grubbing Starbucks wifi place on their first floor)

[Update] Well the guy didn’t say anything, but the woman (in black behind him) wasn’t too keen on me taking her photograph and popping it on my weblog without asking her permission – so I apologised, I forgot that I wasn’t really in a public place – another lesson in online living learned.

What I've Been Doing

Oh yes it is….or is it?

4 Comments

I just posted a comment on one of the threads around the Google Autolink debate, thusly:

“Is there another way of looking at this? It seems to me that the debate has only been framed so far in either…or terms, ie of the web either being read/writeable or read-only whereas actually it’s been both for some time. Some bits are information served up that could be enriched in any number of ways. Some bits need to be kept sacred. Some bits need to keep the original intact while comments and modifications can be added in an explicit way.

Would it be too complicated for those people who are happy for their content to be ripped, mixed and burned to insert some sort of flag or licence (heard this before somewhere?) in their html that allows for that and for those who wish to only have their stuff read and perhaps re-presented in an aggregator to have a different kind of licence?

Then if I get really pissed off with Dave ‘cos his content doesn’t get “enriched” in the way I like it, I can raise it with him, and he can ignore me if he wants to or change if he wants to – isn’t that a more grown up conversation than “This is evil!”, “Oh, no it’s not!”, “Oh yes it is!”…. ”

My gut is with Dave and Scoble on this, but I have this nagging feeling that saying “Autolinks is bad for the web” sounds too much like “P2P is bad for the recording industry”

What I've Seen

Be alert… your country needs lerts

I feel much safer now

I’ve been using these inkernets for more than ten years now, so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and not in the target audience, but I can’t actually see anything of use in the UK Government’s launch of ITsafe.

  • It looks like someone’s GCSE coursework project
  • It has very little information – None of its publications have been launched yet – certainly nothing here to make me say “Wow, I must sign up for their alerts”
  • The information it does have is presented in interlinked mini-chunks which means that you lose interest before you’ve learned anything
  • It has that trippy picture of Hazel Blears (why is her desk outside?)
  • It has no RSS feed – you have to give them information about yourself to get their updates (like that’s so tempting)
  • It has those stupid made up FAQs – did anybody outside of your press office/web team think these up?

    I do think there’s an important point here that Government has still not realised that authority is not its right in this space. Authority comes from having something interesting and useful to say, not from being able to legitimately use a crown as your logo.

    And the presentation is so naff that it undermines the central aim, which is surely to build trust. This site says “We don’t know what we’re doing, but hey you will trust us anyway ‘cos we’re the government” Another pointless bit of public spending.

    F-


    • Podcasts

    Podwalk 006

    Right, no pictures, no music, just more sound of some nutcase, wandering around London on a Sunday afternoon.

    Starting in Piccadilly outside the RA, I walk through Piccadilly Circus, up through Soho, along Oxford Street, across Tottenham Court Road and along to the British Museum.

    I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.