mercredi, décembre 21, 2005
hear the snow crunch, see the kids bunch
Lately I've been making a point of understanding what some of the fancy new technologies are. For instance, "podcasts". Then there's "vlogging", or video blogging. Really Simple Syndication ("RSS"). Syndicated podcasts...!
It's all a little bit crazy, I think, because what these mostly come down to are just new forms of media enabling you to get a lot of the same content. Don't go to blog pages, just RSS them and get an aggregate feed. Don't watch the news or listen to the radio, get the broadcasts automatically downloaded to your computer as podcasts. And video blogging, well, that's another matter altogether. I see Amanda over at RocketBoom is already setting the standard.
The thing is that you still have to listen, watch or read your media of choice. And perhaps content is changing or improving, but as far as I can tell, you still gotta hunt for it. Tonight, just as an experiment, I logged into iTunes and browsed the catalogue of random podcasts uploaded by random people around the world to see what's out there. And the truth is that they are mostly boring c-r-a-p.
A "podcast" is simply an audio file - whether you listen to it on your iPod or other mp3 player is irrelevant, so it actually annoys me that the feature has gotten this cool, impressive name. There's nothing cool or impressive about a lot of the podcasts I've heard so far.
The jury is still out on video blogging. I'm going to do more research before I report back. | ¶ 1:58 a.m.
It's all a little bit crazy, I think, because what these mostly come down to are just new forms of media enabling you to get a lot of the same content. Don't go to blog pages, just RSS them and get an aggregate feed. Don't watch the news or listen to the radio, get the broadcasts automatically downloaded to your computer as podcasts. And video blogging, well, that's another matter altogether. I see Amanda over at RocketBoom is already setting the standard.
The thing is that you still have to listen, watch or read your media of choice. And perhaps content is changing or improving, but as far as I can tell, you still gotta hunt for it. Tonight, just as an experiment, I logged into iTunes and browsed the catalogue of random podcasts uploaded by random people around the world to see what's out there. And the truth is that they are mostly boring c-r-a-p.
"...umm, hi, this is Roger. Welcome to my first ever podcast. I'm sitting here in my basement with my 12-year-old son Kevin. Say hi, Kevin.Why Why Why would we want to download, syndicate, listen to this random nonsense...?? No, now that I kinda have a handle on what it's all about, I'm waiting for word-of-mouth or established entities producing useful and somewhat professional pieces before I go subscribing to anybody's podcast.
'Hi'.
Since this is my first time, I don't really know what I'm going to talk about, so bear with me and I'm sure things will get better..."
A "podcast" is simply an audio file - whether you listen to it on your iPod or other mp3 player is irrelevant, so it actually annoys me that the feature has gotten this cool, impressive name. There's nothing cool or impressive about a lot of the podcasts I've heard so far.
The jury is still out on video blogging. I'm going to do more research before I report back. | ¶ 1:58 a.m.
