Things don't always turn out the way that you plan which most of the time is a good thing. Hitting a home run every time would start to get boring after a while as Buck 65 says. The big Summer of adventures that John and I planned changed a lot, but we've had some fun. I wrote about our rainy day in Fundy and our abbreviated adventure on my Vox blog, but we also recording some audio that has made it into our eighth Bad Metaphor, which is about Camping. You can see the pictures from our camping and hiking in Fundy on Flickr and I may be uploading some video snippets from the still camera to my blip.tv blog.
tags: badmetaphor, podcast, fundy, camping, summer
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The 58th episode of the video podcast commandN is live and ready for download now. I've been helping tape the segments from Halifax and have made a few appearances as well. Since it's the Summer and I've been on vacation, it's been possible to spend a bit more time working on the segments and that means that we've gone to some interesting locations and continue to shoot in ways that are more fun. If you haven't looked at commandN yet, it may be a good time to check it out to get caught up with technology trends with a Mac flavour. In this episode Jeff and I did the webPICKS segment from Halifax where I talked about Dabble, which is a great way to find and share video. We shot it in the Hydrostone neighbourhood, which has some neat views of the city through the trees.
tags: commandn, video, technology, news
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It's Summer and it's time to hit the road and do some camping and Bad Metaphor podcasting too. John and I will be camping in Fundy National Park and you can follow along by checking out my Vox blog as well as the Odeo Bad Metaphor page where we may podcast from the phone. Full podcasts will follow later, but for now it will be brief.
tags: badmetaphor, camping, summer, vacation
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Last month I took John in to work and we recorded a podcast at the Halifax Downtown Site of the Nova Scotia Community College where I work. Bad Metaphor 6 - Work is finally edited and uploaded and you can listen to it now. I give John a tour and we talk about work. If you haven't checked out Bad Metaphor yet, you should take a listen and subscribe to it as we'll be making more podcasts during the summer in an attempt to document our adventures.
tags: badmetaphor, podcast, work
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John and I have been busy with things, but we have managed to create two more Bad Metaphor podcasts and you're more than welcome to listen to them. The next two in the series are Number 4: Sunday, and Number 5: Technology. We're working on others now and should bring down the time between them a bit as well. It's a lot of fun doing the podcasts and it's great to get feedback. Thanks to everyone for listening and if you haven't listened yet, maybe take a listen. If you go to Bad Metaphor on Odeo, you can also send us an audio message.
tags: podcast, badmetaphor, talk
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I've uploaded the third Bad Metaphor podcast by John and myself today. It's about publicity this time and John and I talk about being famous as well as famous people we've met (or not). It's fun to do a podcast and I'm trying to figure out ways to do it more quickly, but I find I always need time to edit and craft these things. A little secret about the podcast for loyal readers: up to this point we've put up only about half of the podcasts. Some other topics haven't worked out, so we decided not to use them. I think that's a good thing since it's more important to have quality than quantity. I'm following the advice from the Frogbody blog (by Carson McComas) which has a superb list of 20 Ideas for a Great Podcast.
tags: badmetaphor, podcast, publicity
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I've had my new 30 GB iPod with video for about a month and a half now and I'm a bit surprised at how different it is from the iPod Shuffle that I used previously. The obvious difference comes from having a screen and being able to play video. But what I wasn't expecting was that I'd listen to a lot more music. With the Shuffle I occasionally would use autofill, but most of the time I would have a few albums and favourite tracks and have most of it filled with podcasts. I'd carefully choose the podcasts and would regularly rotate them.
Now I don't have to choose a limited selection with all of my music on the iPod and my podcast subscriptions have grown dramatically. In the early days of podcasting when I didn't have an iPod I would carefully choose 80 minutes of podcasts or music and burn a CD for the drive to Halifax each day. With the Shuffle I'd always have something to listen to, but now with the bigger iPod I have much more than enough to listen to. The increased choice is both good and bad. Sometimes it takes me longer to choose what to listen to, but overall I love have a queue that is always full of something to enjoy.
I'm listening to a lot more music and watching a bit more video, but most of the time with the white earbuds is spent on music. I'm buying more music now (from both iTunes and Bleep), but I'm also listening to a great deal more Creative Commons music as well. My current favourite podcasts now are Vu d'Ici / Seen From Here (music), CC365 - Creative Commons 2006 Calendar (which provides a new CC licensed song every day!), The Revolution (CC licensed music and interviews), Big Shed (audio documentary), KCRW's The Treatment and The Business (two shows about the film and tv industry), 43 Folders (productivity tips), The Ricky Gervais Podcast (comedy) and my newest discovery, Inside the Net (interviews and discussion of new Web trends). On the video side there are only two vidcasts (vodcasts?) that I never miss and they are the daily Rocketboom and the weekly Command-N (that I've helped tape a few segments for) and they both feature tech news. An odd thing is that I prefer watching them on the iPod's small screen better than on the computer screen. Maybe it's because it's more personal and connected to me. The context that media is consumed within is very important and it seems that tiny video on a tiny screen isn't as bad as tiny video on a larger screen.
tags: podcasts, ipod, vlog, vidcasts
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It's odd, but I realize now that I haven't written very much about podcasting here. It's been over a year since I started regularly listening to podcasts and now is a very good time to contextualize it all.
While I'm pretty good at staying near the leading edge of trends, I'm not as quick in creating things that are part of those trends. While I followed blogging for a long while, my domain and online presence didn't include a blog until I launched bitdepth in May of 2002. Soon I'll be launching a podcast along with a new site (but I'll save that for another time), so let me lay the groundwork here.
The first podcast that I listened to was Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, which is still one of the highest-profile podcasts out there. I used the beta of iPodderX to download the files and listen to them on my computer (since I didn't have an iPod) or to burn them on to CD to listen in the car during my 1 hour plus commute twice a day. Some time around December of last year I found Marie-Chantale Turgeon's Vu d'Ici / Seen From Here podcast and I really liked it. The combination of her unpretentious voice and great music exemplified all of the promise and magic of podcasting and she's still an inspiration to me. Another early inspiration was Tod Maffin who has been covering technology and the web for the CBC for quite a while. When I saw that he was going on a podcasting meetup tour across Canada and was stopping in Halifax, I knew that I had to go. Tod's site is filled with great resources and information about audio and he's a driving force within the CBC and will hopefully transform the corporation into a more relevant public broadcaster in the podcasting sphere.
The meetup was a lot of fun (with 10 people) and it was very cool to meet people who I had listened to and watched for a while in person. I also was embarrassed to admit that I hadn't listened to some of th epodcasts from the province, but now I think I'm up to speed with the local activity.
I arrived a bit early and realized that maybe it wasn't a good idea to meet at the Economy Shoe Shop unless you identified an area earlier to meet. It's a great bar, but it's made up of many smaller rooms. I knew that I'd recognize two of the people since I've seen Tod on tv and in photos as well as Jeff MacArthur from commandN (a great vidcast). As I wandered around the bar, someone guessed that I was looking for the meeting and I met Howard Harawitz (who I later realized that he wrote the first HTML editor that I used!). In talking with Howard I found out that he worked for the College and that we knew a lot of the same people. It's a very small world.
The new discoveries that I made were of the Spine.cx podcast with Steve Dinn along with Jeannine McNeil (who did a live version of the podcast) and Bruce Murray of the Zedcast, who recorded part of the evening. While I brought my minidisc recorder, I didn't record much, but decided to ask Tod for an ID at the end of the night outside. It became more complicated as a fairly intoxicated woman showed up with her friend and started talking with us. Of course, I kept rolling (and I may be able to work it into something later), and eventually got the IDs from Tod (who rescued me by moving away, which gave me a way to get out of the situation).
As I drove home late at night I was determined to get my podcast going, so it will show up very soon. I was tired the next morning, but I found that m-c had a new Vu d'Ici up. Driving in to Halifax while listening to m-c's voice, the warm blanket of the internet surrounded me as I remembered again that podcasting allows people to connect and share their stories, which is the most wonderful thing of all.
tags: podcasting, halifax, todmaffin, commandn, vudici, zedcast, spinecx
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