Podcast Archive

Victor Cajiao is the host of three great podcasts; Typical Mac User, Typical PC User and Immigration Tales. When I sat down with Victor for a chat at the Podcast & Portable Media Expo, he had just finished a fun and fascinating 40 minute interview with author Tee Morris. We were all inelegantly perched in beanbag

On your latest Bradcast -- a feature interview with Michael Auzenne of the Manager Tools Podcast. Michael, along with podcasting partner and management consultant Mark Horstman, produces one of the most consistently practical, useful and impactful podcasts in the 'sphere today.

Business advice, management consulting and personal coaching topics have been flogged to near extinction in various books, courses and schools. Despite this, Auzenne and Horstman routinely provide fresh conversational insight on these topics. You won't agree with everything these guys say on Manager Tools but more often than not you will find yourself realizing that they have developed a conversational mentoring approach that makes you feel like you're there asking for help at Mark's office door. This is the kind of approach podcasting was built for.

Manager Tools "Time to Party?" episode... Do the right things at this year's office party.

Update: Sorry for the dropped audio file... It has been newly restored and placed back on the server.

manager-tools auzenne

Every project starts with a request. (Click here to play now)

Shout Outs:
Not a lot for this week -- just a reminder that I will be at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo with iPod and TuneTalk in hand. If you want to meet or be interviewed for The Bradcast then drop me a note: thebradcast AAATTT gmail.com

Main Line:
Riffing on a topic I broached a few weeks ago, this podcast looks at those ubiquitous PIM and email clients. I focus on Outlook, of course, because that's the one that now dominates.

Our email clients are dumb. They are not able to relate our commitments to our tasks and they have no ability to derive any context from the stuff that gets entered into them. Sure we have "rules" and routing features but we don't have the ability to provide meaning to data on-the-fly as we reply to emails.

One way we can move toward that goal is to open the proprietary nature of the data in the hope that somebody else will build a tool that does something new. As a result I looked at this blog entry on the "Holy Grail" for synchronization, the ScheduleWorld.com site and this tantalizing peak at something called Taskmaster from PARC.

This show was recorded entirely using the on-board microphones of the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo recorder for gen 5 iPods to give you an idea about the sound quality. I did get pretty aggressive with the low-pass filter and the compression. The sound is okay but it's sibilant and is prone to noise from the hard drive on the iPod. Use an external microphone if you don't want hard drive noise spoiling low volume level sounds on your TuneTalk.

Click here to stream the show through your favourite player.

Notes:
Length:00:35:33
Recorded: 2006/09/25
Bradcast_20060925 is copyright 2006 by Brad Gibson and he is solely responsible for its content. The Bradcast is not associated with any technology blogging group or association. Opinions represented in the podcast are not those of any client, customer or employer organization, past or present.

The CBC lock-out in Canada has made news in many places, largely because of the response of some of the locked-out employees. Faced with an inability to get "on mic" some are now podcasting.

Radio master Tod Maffin has been covering the lock-out in detail and has publicized many of the efforts of the un-CBC podcasts.

In the midst of a major labour upset, triggered by management action, I see a certain irony in the actions of the "rebel" podcasts.

What is this lock-out about? Contract vs. full-time? Staffing levels? Flexibility to designate resources? Response to technology change? Costs in general?

5,500 people are out on the street because the future will not be like the past. Many of the locked-out workers must surely know that. When a crew of a few can post up a podcast, they are pointing to the on-demand future. They are high-lighting the profound delivery adjustments and resource allocation issues that make this event meaningful. In bootstrapping their own broadcasts and distributing them in the form of podcasts, they are fearlessly experimenting with petards at their own breakfast table.

When management and the union finally meet to resolve this dispute will the "solution" be based on a typical 2 or 3 year formula or will there be an opportunity to embrace the future? Imagine a broadcast network scaled back to staffing levels used by private broadcasters, with hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of CBC workers being redeployed to on-demand technologies, new media and local coverage of events. Imagine a public broadcaster responding to technological change by embracing it; imagine the employees having fun again. Imagine a CBC de-centralized and so much a part of the Canadian fabric again that public funding becomes a non-issue.

If the CBC were to integrate its broadcast strategy with an on-line strategy of unlimited download for made-in-Canada video and audio; we would be innovating a creative industry that would be years ahead of others. Imagine a CBC where data centers and servers were just as important as transmitters and towers. Imagine the CBC viewed again as a public service with offerings so diverse it would shatter the watered-down delivery of the thread-bare Country Canada and Newsworld. Imagine a national network involved in developing better, faster delivery mechanisms and think of the sweetness of using broadcast to promote and announce multiple offerings on-line.

Think of the competition it would spawn.

Imagine the CBC drawing so many eyes and ears that advertisers clamoured for exposure. Imagine a network flush with cash and think of profits re-invested in more creative industries throughout the country. Maybe Canadian TV and film wouldn't be a joke anymore. Maybe we could blow up the whole "Hollywood North" apparatchik and make really good stuff. Maybe the phrase "Canadian content" wouldn't spawn bursts of derisive, cynical, quota inspired laughter.

When the time comes, I hope that management and the union see a future full of incredible growth and dynamic possibilities. Or will they only think about what they have and how they'll keep it?

Depending on how you read this site you may see a change in the blog title and RSS feed. You will eventually notice a change in the way Apple iTunes lists this site. Brad Gibson's Current Thinking is now known as The Bradcast: Engineered Thought from Brad Gibson. Why did I do it? iTunes.

Silly old iTunes sticks a blog's name into a podcast's "Album" field. What happens when your podcast is titled differently from your blog? Your podcast name disappears. Now I've invested some time and energy into the "Bradcast" brand and I did not want it to be arbitrarily changed but how the heck is Apple going to figure that out? I caved and changed the name of my blog. Now you will see the Bradcast brand in both print and podcast. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for Apple to change it's directory.

Sometimes you fight, sometimes you switch.

Techpodcasts.com member and primo stream guy, Rob Greenlee, is setting up a 3 microphone remote at Gnomedex 5.0. As he is able to collar guests and luminaries he, along with Todd Cochrane and Andy McCaskey, will be providing some interesting content from Bell Harbor. Check this link on June 24 and 25 after 8:00 AM PDT -- the stream will not be continuous. As soon as Rob can do so he will be setting up a schedule of the streams that will be available.

Apparently there is an announcement coming from Microsoft that will concern podcasting. My bet is a "me too" deal for Windows Media along the lines of Apple's iTunes 4.9 announcement of a few weeks ago.

gnomedex

David Coursey writes that "Podcasting is not the next mass medium". The column has attracted the ire of some podcasters but in the main Coursey is right.

How many people -- worldwide -- are listening to podcasts? I estimate the current number is probably in the area of 1 million people with an optimistic estimate of no more than 5 million. There are somewhere between 5000 and 9000 podcasts available now but most of these have no more than 100-500 listeners. We can dismiss this long tail of podcasting by looking only at the top 100 podcasts. Inevitably at least one of the listeners of a top 100 show also listens to at least one of the tail-enders. So far, nobody has claimed more than 100,000 downloads per show so you don't need a super-computer to come up with a realistic estimate of the total number of podcast listeners in the world. It is not a mass audience.

But hold on to your knickers. In just a few weeks, Apple will unleash a veritable tidal wave of potential listeners on to the podcasting scene by releasing the first main-stream podcasting client in iTunes. There are probably about 20 million regular to semi-regular iTunes users (yeah, yeah I know they claim 38 million...) and this number dwarfs the size of the current audience. It also spells trouble because there may be a bandwidth rush that will cost some podcasters a lot of bucks. Get ready for this second wave because it will be the make or break stage for those of us that take podcasting seriously. Coursey maintains that the medium will become dominated by "professional content". I think he means content by professional broadcasters but there will be a very robust, yet small, market for podcasters that create content focused at professionals. A market of +20 million potential listeners with varied professional and personal tastes is much more attractive to advertisers than the current market of a million early adopters. At 20 million, podcasting may have enough "mass" to attract even larger audiences. Portable device listening should be able to easily out-strip goofy and expensive technologies like satellite radio.

Ethan Johnson has pointed to this Podcast Value Chain Report by Alex Nesbitt and asked for my comments.

I had not heard of digitalpodcast.com before, so after taking a look at the report, I took a look at the site. What I found really disturbed me. Digitalpodcast.com has a feed listed for my podcast that is not mine. Who created it? This is similar to what Odeo tried (Odeo is still in beta, by "invitation" only) but an alert Todd Cochrane called them on it after some sleuthing by a podcasting colleague.

According to digitalpodcast, my site feed is http://Bradcast.podkeyword.com. That is incorrect. My site feed is http://www.bradfordgibson.net/rss.xml. There are a couple of other legacy URL's at this site or feedburner that I also still maintain. If you are downloading the Bradcast from any other feed then please re-direct your client software to the real thing.

Look, I have no objection to people carrying portions or all of my feed on their web sites and I am thrilled when I pick up new readers and new listeners. In fact, I carry feeds from other bloggers myself. If you go to my "News Feeds" section on my web site you will find complete feeds from the likes of Robert Scoble and Thomas Barnett. Those feeds are fully credited and attributed in my compound feed. The difference between that practice and what digitalpodcasting.com is doing has to do with subscriptions. In the world of podcasting you need to use a software client to regularly download a podcast, that's a "subscription" based system. You wouldn't subscribe to Time Magazine in order to read the New York Times would you? Anybody who creates a new feed for subscription containing my content in whole or in part is hijacking my feed. If you want to do me a favour, send those prospective readers and listeners to my site and my feed. You will notice that henceforth my feed will carry a copyright notice describing my allowed use for the contents.

UPDATE: It appears that this may be a mistake on digitalpodcast.com's part. I have checked other feed URL's on the site and they have linked back to the feed's owners. So my new question is: Why is podkeyword.com reconstituting feeds and how the heck did it get on the digitalpodcast.com site?

UPPER UPDATE: Alex writes from digitalpodcast.com that the Podkeyword feed has nothing to do with digitalpodcast.com. (see the comment with this post)

My thanks to Alex for clearing this mattter up. Now I should get around to answering Ethan's comments about Alex's white paper on podcasting...