Public radio: No Webcast changes for us for now
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Blog: National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting say they expect no disruptions in their music streams thanks to a temporary agreement with the music industry over elevated fees set to kick in Sunday.
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WASHINGTONâThe 700 MHz spectrum situation just got worse. The Senate Commerce Committee voted 13-9 Wednesday to possibly never require TV broadcasters to return spectrum in the 700 MHz band.
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Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble. A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it. First, here's how it works. 1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763. 2. Talk. 3. Hangup. There will be a new recording here.  http://drop.io/tradesecrets  Looks good!  But there are two problems. 1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file. 2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss. A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild. Interesting stuff!!  Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.
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As I said above I'm glued to the TV, but I'm also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I'm subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I've been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They're all getting started, and eventually I'm pretty sure they'll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he's on Twitter and sometimes I'm watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn't it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there's no doubt that soon we'll be doing that. We're finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long. With the help of a few members of the community Yahoo can get there first. BTW, I read on the NY Times site that Yahoo is going to open up more to developers. Hmmm. If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run it in MSM. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don't seem very serious about it.
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By TIM CUPRISIN  Consider today's column a warning.  If nothing changes, your old TV may not be working two years from today, thanks to a Feb. 17, 2009, federal deadline for TV stations to switch from the traditional analog method of broadcasting to digital technology.
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AM and FM radio broadcasters are set to convert to HD, their reply to satellite. Also: Sirius plans with Microsoft to make video channels for backseat passengers & hellip;.  HP jumps on the home-entertainment bandwagon & hellip;. and more.
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The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.
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The FCC is being cut out of the loop (thank God) via Sirius, its management, Howard Stern and the legendary Mel Karmazin. XM Radio is playing a leading role now, but the real noise is being generated by Sirius.
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The Internet doesn't have time zones, and while my colleagues in the blogosphere who happen to be located in the Eastern or Central time zones were watching the debate live on TV, we in the western states were left to either wait three hours, or DIY a Ustream webcast of the debate, which we did. About half way through we figured out how to make the local New Hampshire ABC affiliate webcast work on a Mac, and it was a little easier to understand what was going on. In 2008, sixteen years into the web, there's no excuse for not broadcasting a political event live to the world. If ABC News hasn't got the ability to do it, then ABC News shouldn't be running it. That Facebook lent its name and reputation to this fiasco is amazing. Why didn't they speak up?  BTW, otoh, Charles Gibson was a great moderator and the format was, in every way, fantastic. What a shame we all couldn't experience at the same time.
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Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.  Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere." Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages. And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?  The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.
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By Dave Larsen Staff Writer  CINCINNATI -- It's the end of the world as we know it for WOXY.com.   The Internet radio broadcaster that formerly was Oxford alternative radio station 97X announced Thursday that it will cease broadcasting on Sept. 15.
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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It seems  PubSub.com is offering a bounty  on an HTTP Delta implementation of RFC 3229.  This seems in response to the current meme  of RSS and Atom syndication bloat.   First off this is certainly *very* generous of them.  I'd like to see this happen more.  Good for you guys!  I myself  have thought that HTTP Deltas were a viable solution but I was wrong.  Of course most people aren't familiar with HTTP deltas.  Eseentially what an HTTP delta enables is a client/server differential protocol that can exchange a patch from the server to the client.  The client is then patched and it will then have the updated version without having to transfer the *entire* document again.  For example say you ...
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In the coming weeks and months you'll probably see me writing about issues of podcatchers here, because I'm working on one. It's the third one I've written, so this time maybe I'll get it right.  A lot of things have changed since I wrote my first podcatcher back in 2001. 1. Back then there were no podcasts, so it was a proof of concept, a chicken without an egg (or an egg with no chicken), a step in a bootstrap. Today there are lots of podcasts. An embarassment of riches. 2. Back then implementing a podcatcher was simple, there was exactly one format to support, RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Today, luckily, it's still fairly simple, as far as the format goes. The only variability is the iTunes namespace, which complicates things, just a little.  3. Today there are enough users to make it possible to support lists of podcasts published by fans, and instead of just subscribing to the podcast feeds, you can subscribe to lists of feeds. I will publish one of these lists, in OPML 2.0 format, as a proof of concept.  4. The first version of this new podcatcher will run in the OPML Editor because that's where all my software runs at first. But the goal is to port it to run in other environments, some with millions of users. I want to provide a popular alternative to the one that Apple publishes which currently dominates the market. (Note: I'm generally pleased with the way Apple dominates, they've been very fair about allowing users to export their subscription lists. But if we want to create the opportunity for others to innovate in the area of podcast players, there has to be choice at the podcatcher level. That's my main motive for revisiting this area.) There probably are some other changes, and I'll write about them as the project moves forward. Now.... To people who say that Apple has the market sewn up, I say Bah! I think iPods are great, but they're designed to play music, not podcasts. Every bit of music is something you want to keep forever, a podcast loses almost all its value after you've listened to it once. You have to pay for music (in theory at least) but podcasts are free.  Podcasts beg to have a player that can download them without synching with a desktop computer. Okay that's something podcasts have in common with music.  I buy Apple products all the time. I've gone from resenting Apple so much that I wouldn't buy their products, as recently as 2005, to today when not only do I only use Macs, but I'm constantly telling people why they'd be better off using Macs. I can't help but evangelize the products, I think they're that much better than Windows PCs.  But as much as I love Apple (can't believe I actually said that) I still don't trust them with a whole medium. We need them to have competition. The rest of the tech industry seems to think they're immune to it, that creates a huge opportunity with someone with enough chutzpah to think they can do it. Yours truly, Dave Winer
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Google and Earthlink tried, and failed, disappearing in a sea of bureaucratic red tape. Now a startup hopes to persuade San Franciscans to voluntarily put radio repeaters on their rooftops. Good luck with that.
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There have always been problems with distributing urgent public safety information. These problems show up, over and over, with every hurricane, tornado, flood and wildfire. At this moment in history, problems fall in three areas of responsibility (and, for that matter, responsiveness):  The old official channels (radio, TV, newspapers) are scaling back on live news coverage (or on news coverage, period) The new official channels (web sites and services, &quot;reverse 911&quot;) are still, as we've been saying since 1995, &quot;under construction&quot;.  The new unofficial channels (cell phones, blogs, RSS feeds, phone trees) are still no substitute for the Real Thing, whatever it will become. \
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There has been a lot of talk  recently about the problem of RSS feeds which include full content on high bandwidth sites such as MSDN blogs.  When RSS is used for a site with both a great amount of users, and with frequent updates, the bandwidth required to deliver realtime events can be problematic.  Its a real problem.  The RSS model requires clients to download the ENTIRE feed if even ONE item has been modified/added.  This means that if you have 55k subscribers, with 15 RSS items in your feed, and you want to publish one more post, all 14 additional posts need to be re-downloaded by the client.  There are a lot of potential solutions. HTTP deltas are one solution but too difficult to imp ...