Podcasting. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps you haven’t. For the latter, here is a succinct definition: Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. (definition from the Wikipedia). Having been asked many times over the years to explain the mystery and voodoo that is the weblog, I offer to the humble reader this treatise on podcasting.

“Podcasting” — I’ve been hearing this term for some time, specifically starting with Warren Ellis’ Bad Signal list. Ellis, a prolific science-fiction/futurist/whatever writer is always on the lookout for the newest of the new trends in communications, and he picked up the term sometime last year. He had this to say about it:

“Podcasting is a very interesting idea.
You record your own little radio
show to mp3, release it off your
website as a RSS enclosure, and a
little bit of software like iPodder
sucks it on to your computer for
shunting into your mp3 player.
Podcasting is just a few months old,
and most of it is very bad — but
there weren’t any good blogs in
the first six months of blogging,
either. This could be very interesting.”

{more}

While the term podcasting is reasonably new (and while it’s usage has doubled/tripled as of late), and while it could have a very bright and interesting future, don’t be fooled: this technology and this very idea have been around almost since the dawn of the Internet — perhaps even time. It’s nothing new, but as much as anything on the Intarweb, you can sprinkle an idea with technology-dust, slap a new name on it and web-denizens will lap it up.

The analogues between podcasting and the now-debunked mystery of the weblog are many and similar. A weblog ain’t nothing but a diary, but on the Internet! It’s just as simple as that. Do not be fooled by the high-wizardry of the Internet. There is still some dude on his couch banging out his latest political commentary or his recipe for chicken sauce piquant. Anyone can do it. Back in the days before the glorious intarweb, this was limited to those with access either to a mailing list or the school newspaper. With barriers such as those, only the determined were published, and fewer were even read.

In the same way, podcasting has been around for years. In the days before there was an FCC, all you needed was a radio to get on the air. Crank up your spark-gap transmitter and read off your recipes and/or political commentary! The FCC decided that it was better to save the airwaves for emergencys, radio payola and advertisements, so away that went. How is a man to rouse rabble or read his manic break-up poetry now?! Tell me that, Uncle Sam! If only there was some medium with no boundaries or limits…

Well, along comes the Internet. Complete and total unfettered global access to any and all with a computer. Imagine it! A thousand thousand thousand political hacks, diary writers and wannabe Yeats’ publishing at the same time! Well, that future is here and now — we call it blogging. Take a vast and vastly mediocre group of publishers, and give them an infinite media, add splash of technology, and voila! Total information overload.

Whereas weblogs are nothing but words and the occassional picture, podcasting is the next natural step (just add audio). It’s not like you couldn’t cast a pod before, but now it’s just easier. Before there was such a thing as MP3 (compressed audio) it was unfeasable to put up a 30-minute 300 meg radio show on the web. Even then — did you really expect people to download and listen to your drivel whilst chained to their desks? But then — oh, then — the iPod! The portable, digital music vault! Combine small audio files, the increase in bandwidth for the average user, the availability of portable music devices, and man’s insatiable desire to be heard and there you have it — podcasting.

I really wish there was a word to describe the phenomenon of re-labeling something, but for the Internet. It was sort of done with the “e” and “i”, like “e-Commerce” and “i-Pod”, but “podcasting” and “weblog” are of a different sort. They are not technologies, per se, but really re-inventions of current, perhaps even mundane, activities. Prestiwebitating, perhaps, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not looking far enough ahead. (What? You mean like vidblogging or holocasting? YES — that far!)

Do not fear the Internet. It is only there to confuse and annoy.

Further: Come One, Come All: The Rise of Podcasting at NPR.org. Also, the earliest mention of “podcast” on Google Groups appears to be October 2004, linked to this article. This American Life has been podcasting for years and years now, releasing each of it’s episodes (webisodes?) the week after they air on NPR. Finally, that photo of ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry up there is due to his involvement with the genesis of podcasting as a syndicatable/auto-updating thing (see his Adam Curry’s Wikipedia article).

In short, it is rad radness that in many ways redeems the previous two films.

Go see it.

I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats. Seriously.

Whilst looking for info on today’s All Things Considered (who, oddly enough are hosting the aforementioned The Decemberists), I happened to notice an article by NPR’s Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin entitled “When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News“. The crux of the story is in regards to a Defense Department PDF obtained and posted by NPR detailing the unfortunate death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari due to US fire at a checkpoint in Iraq. Some “bloggers” downloaded this PDF, and using some publically known unredacting techniques, released a “clean” version of the document to the internet at large. The information revealed, among other things, the US service personnel involved in the shooting.

In light of that fiasco, it is understandable for Ombudsman Dvorkin to take offsense. That aside, Dvorkin seems, with his occassionally dismissive remarks regarding the “blogosphere” to have some thinly veiled contempt for bloggers and “amoral place with few rules” that they habitate. That underlying current is what originally seeded my interest in his column, and upon further research it would seem that he has just recently provided a “mea culpa” on the subject of blogs. So, perhaps my hunch was right. But, that salacious point is not really the reason I’m writing.

I think Dvorkin’s underlying (though admirably publically displayed) contempt/concern for bloggers’ journalistic meddle is understandable from someone in his position. However, I do believe that bloggers and their “misbehavior” are a necessary evil. For each unredacted piece of information that might “endanger lives”, there are a handful of blog entries with substantive opinion and fact that would not have come to light save for this “lawless West” (my words, not his). It’s not as black and white or as unchangeable as some may think.

The Internet, and the “blogosphere” as sub-universe is a frightfully organic beast by its very design, so Dvorkin’s statement that “bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact” is, I believe, uncharacteristically one-sided. For every loud, obnoxious, factsimile-spewing blogger, there is an equal and opposite blogger that does value the same journalistic ethics that he stands for. Being a living, breathing organism, the Internet does not just create new ideas, but also ingests them as well. The blogosphere has taken a cue from the sound-and-fury news channels of the world and makes blogs in that image. I imagine that anti-drug commercial from the 80s with the kid saying to his coked-up father “I learned it from watching you!”.

In the end of Dvorkin’s article, he concedes that the mainstream media may be “the King Canutes of latter-day media, hoping that we can order the tide to recede at our command”. I don’t think you can order this tide to recede, necessarily, but I do think that you can certainly make it work for you. I applaud Dvorkin for his frank remarks regarding the interaction between blogs and the mainstream media, but I truly hope they realize that the blogosphere is what you make it. After all, it isn’t a big machine sitting in a bunker 30 floors below sea-level — it’s people like you, me, Dvorkin and Drudge.

Also, just as an aside — Dvorkin reported back in January on emails received by NPR between mid-October 2004 and Janunary 2005, giving tallies by subject. “Criticisms of NPR as too leftwing”: 210. “Critiques that NPR is too rightwing”: 484. Heh.

Lately, I’ve been more interested in a previous pseudo-hobby of mine — kite flying. Specifically, I was spurred on by O’Reilly’s new MAKE Magazine which I recently subscribed to. In their premier issue, they had a good spread on kite-aerial-photography (KAP for short). I have already done some aerial videography with my RC camera so I already had half of the rig.

Back in the day, Art Black and I used to fly kites during the summer, and I had nice old 6-foot rip-stop delta kite from Go Fly A Kite. Recently, Target was selling some decent rip-stop nylon kites for under $10, so I picked up a nice little parafoil kite. Parafoils are neat because they are A) very stable and B) have no hard parts to them. They just fill up with wind and won’t shatter into a billion pieces if you cram it into the ground.

Last Sunday, Charlie and Dalton joined me out at Charlie Vettiner Park (after the wind-cancelled LASS soaring contest) to fly some kites. Much fun! Charlie and Dalton brought along a cool little stunt kite made from rip-stop and carbon fiber tubes. You could crash that little bastard into the ground all day long and it wouldn’t break! Not bad for less that $10!

Anyway, I’m planning on making a rig for my wireless video camera soon. More on this later. In the meantime, check out the NASA Interactive Kite Modeler. Your tax dollars at work!

I’m rarely lacking for a indie-music metaphor, so here goes…

What do you get when you cross Sunny Day Real Estate with “Good Morning, Captain”-esque Slint story-telling with a tasty pinch of Belle and Sebastian and the general musicianship of a Sufjan Stevens and/or the assembled Matt Pond PA?

Well, I’m not sure either, but I think it lands somewhere in the vicinity of The Decemberist’s Picaresque. Good ol’ Jackson Cooper turned me onto them in a veritable landside of indie-music suggestions a couple weeks back. Now that I have had the time to digest the onslaught, I’ve come to the same realization that they are good and should be listened to.

And on the visual front, I suggest this video for their single 16 Military Wives (which borrows unapologetically from Wes Anderson’s Rushmore down to a model U.N.).