podcasting

Two weeks ago I sat down with Tim Pritlove and he interviewed me about Plone and Zope for his Chaosradio Express podcast.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, largely due to the fact that Tim proved to be an excellent host. He gave me enough leeway to ramble while at the same time providing enough structure for the process to let me relax and be myself. Thanks Tim!

In the end we talked over one and a half hours and I can only assume that one has to have a genuine interest in the content matter to listen to it all the way through but afterwards I still felt that I had left much unsaid.

I tried to be honest and upfront about Zope and Plone's weaknesses while still conveying that they both are truly great systems with even greater communities. The interview was conducted in German, though, so I figure the percentage of the audience of this blog that will find it interesting is probably rather small, but nonetheless, here's the link to the episode.

So, iTunes 4.9 came and went and despite the initial splash it created due to its built-in podcasting support everything seems to have calmed down again. For me however, the process was somewhat reversed. My first reaction was "Nice, but not really important for me personally - afterall I got Netnewswire!". But then - in conjunction with the iPod Firmware update - it began to sink in: those two updates really changed (and enhanced!) the way I use my iPod. While I used to use it soley as a fancy walkman replacement (although I never actually owned any sort of mobile music player prior to it) I now use it almost exclusively as a podcast player.

The main reason behind that is: increased convenience. There seems to be some sort of critical level of convenience that needs to be achieved before a technology really catches on (think refrigirator) and Apple has once again pulled it off. Here's how it works (for me):

I subscribe to podcasts that interest me and iTunes takes care of the rest. It deletes old episodes for me (so I won't fill up my precious 4Gb with stale stuff) and of course it downloads new ones for me and syncs them to the iPod. All I need to do is pop it into the cradle every once and a while (which I need to do anyway in order to charge it.) That's it - no extra effort beyond subscribing to feeds (literally one click) And now, whenever I'm on the go I always find myself with fresh shows.

And on the iPod firmware level things have gotten nice, as well. Now that it "knows" about podcasts it can intelligently display information such as episode number without it being cut off, as it used to. One particular nice feature is, that when I start to listen to a podcast on the desktop machine and then sync it and listen to it on the go it continues exactly at the point where I stopped listening on the desktop machine - sweet. This is also true for any podcast listened to on the iPod - when I get back to it playback continues where I last stopped. (Although, I do agree, that these features seem to have been rushed - but I think they are useful enough as they are.)

The reason why I hardly listen to non-podcast content is simply that I've got enough of podcasts to fill my travels - and let's be honest: which podcast would you really want to listen to at home? When I'm at my desk I'm in work-mode and I can't use any distractions. I'm in the zone (or try to be, anyway).  But on the train (or even on the way to the train) it's a different story. And it really can be quite trippy to walk through Berlin listening to Adam Curry walking through San Francisco and to experience the audioblend of two different cities, i.e. Adam talking to a homeless person in San Francisco while a busker is asking for food and money on the S-Bahn.

...but still lovin' it. Where to start? I've (finally) got myself an iPod. Last week I was up late at the shop repairing iBooks rather than having a beer with friends and out of frustration I decided then and there at 2 a.m. that I'd go home listening to some music ;-)

Luckily we had a silver iPod mini in store, because that was pretty much the model I had decided on previously already (strictly hypothetically at the time, of course!)

Well, since then I've been busy tidying up my music collection with proper ID3 tags and spending a lot of my outdoor time grinning like an imbecile and nodding my head (semi-) rhythmically to complete strangers - great fun!

See, I've never had any kind of mobile music device whatsoever. So suddenly having an iPod is really letting me rediscover my whole relationship with music. Currently I'm mostly listening to stuff that I bought on vinyl as a teenager (I did bring the records with me to Berlin but not the player - and somehow never got around to getting one here...)

But apart from reveling in the "good ol' times"[tm] together with the Beastie Boys, Mr. Bungle, King Missile, Body Count, The Cure, Deee-Lite, LL Cool J, Front 242, Grandmaster Flash, Run D.M.C., Primus and Yello I'm also catching on to a rather current development in the area of personal listening, namely Podcasting.

And while this entry was really supposed to more about podcasting and the iPod theme just a runner up, I spent so much time googling for the artists above just to find crappy corporate, flash-based monstrosities and then doing the search all over again at wikipedia (there's a lesson for all of us there, I think) that now I've plain run out of steam. I'll leave you with the (mental) image of me hanging up the laundry while listening to Adam Curry over headphones ;-)