In celebration of Apple thinking we were smart, and finally catching on to our great idea of last year, I present to you, the complete RasterWeb! Audio RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures! Now featuring every episode ever released…
That’s right, over 30 episodes from the original series! Hear the world of podcasting as it existed back in the dark days of Summer 2004, when the podcasts were few, and the clients even fewer! No ads, no networks of similar podcasts, no proper web site, poor quality audio.. What more could you want!?
iTunes, do your worst!
(Dear Apple, please send me an iPod now.)
Dave, Dave, Dave… There seems to be some confusion. Licenses are like women, they are beautiful, but very hard to understand… Many men have tried, many men have failed…
In a recent podcast, Dave stared that his new software would be GPL and that you could do what you wanted with it, but that “you’re not free to make it commercial, because it’s GPL.”
The GNU General Public License does not restrict software to being non-commercial!
So I present to you today’s reading, courtesy of Richard Stallman and gnu.org. Follow these links, do the reading, and then come back and tell me that the GPL restricts you from using code in commercial software.
- IP: The GPL and commercial development
- Categories of Free and Non-Free Software
- Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding
Here’s a bit more reading: Open Source Licensing. Choose a license that does what you want it to do, and make sure it does what you think it does…
I really shouldn’t complain so much. I mean, I get an email from Martijn Venrooy, and he says the iPodder Lemon Team wants to know if I have a PayPal account. I figure it’s a scam (just kidding!) but in the spirit of open-source and giving back and all that, he says the team has picked a bunch of podcasts they like and wanted to show some appreciation. Here’s what they said:
We work on iPodder because we love listening to podcasts. That’s where you come in, your podcast was part of the reason to develop iPodder. We asked everyone on the team who they’d like to donate to, and you were on the list. Keep up your great work!
Best regards, iPodder Lemon Team.
Thanks iPodder Lemon Team!
Slacker that I am, or have been, you can be pretty sure I’ll be recording at least one podcast this week. Nothing motivates like guilt! ;)
It hurts… it hurts! See, it’s all just a popularity contest! If I was an international jetset techie-nerd who went to conferences, people might actually listen to me… But Nooooo, no no no…
Even Brent, yes, Brent, who I conversed with on mailing lists and the like back in the mid-1990’s… Witness this:
It was Adam who convinced us to add support for enclosures and podcasts to NetNewsWire. It was a major feature request last fall, lots of people were asking for it, but it was finally a short email from Adam that was the tipping point. He said it seemed like it would be a “slam-dunk” for us. Who could resist that? Not me.
That’s from June 2005, but let’s go back to August 2004, where I said in regards to podcasting and NetNewsWire:
(Honestly, I think NetNewsWire could kick butt in this area, it’s a Mac OS X application that could tie directly into iTunes quite easily, and Brent could do it all with a great interface… Brent, you listening?)
Oh wait, gosh - what is that? I also mention the idea of enclosures in Atom!
Oh, both Adam and Dave wondered about enclosures in Atom and assumed Atom must have something similar, but every time I ask, no one seems to have a good answer. Maybe this will help poke the Atom folks a bit.
That link to the Atom mailing list is dated March 2004, well before what would widely be considered the “birth of podcasting” probably because I was already running my own code to download enclosures from the (very) few RSS 2.0 Feeds (with enclosures) that existed at the time… I was amazed that no one influencial in the Atom community thought enclosures would be important or useful enough to follow up on. Over a year later I’m still asking about enclosures in Atom with no clear answers.
Some days it just doesn’t pay to start typing.
(P.S. Can I have my pony now?)
Sheesh… (In the name of shameless self-promotion) those videobloggers are crazy!
I mean, crazy in a good way…
Those of us in Wisconsin who do not watch the Packers usually just pretend Green Bay does not exist: Self-defense claimed by both parties in area biting, stabbing
Police were called to the couple’s Dousman Street apartment about 3 a.m. for reports of a disturbance. Inside they found the man with minor stab wounds to the back and neck and found the woman to have human bite marks on her neck and face.
Both claimed self-defense, alleging the other drew first blood, said Green Bay police Lt. Bill Galvin.
Hurm…
I tried reading up on Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions Specification but the page would not validate!
I mean, come on guys! How can I take this seriously when you can’t even write valid HTML!
(Warning: This post may or may not contain some form of humor…)
We all know it’s easy to geotag a web page and geotagging photos is pretty common. In fact the geo-wankers think that every camera should geotag photos as they are taken, which is cool with me (and some manufacturers are doing this already) but as I’ve been working more with audio and video, I wonder how geotagging should work. The reason for this is because while a photo easily represents a moment in time at a specific location, audio and video are time-based media, which may have starting points, ending points, and many points in between.
On RasterWeb! we tag each post with lat/lon values and those values also appear in the RSS 2.0 feed. This more or less works, unless I post an entry about traveling from one place to another.
Anyway, this came up because in the videoblogging group there were some thoughts about geotagging the RSS 2.0 feeds so that the items, which also contain enclosures which are videos, could be geotagged. The problem again lies in the fact that you can easily start shooting a video and start driving and end up 30 miles from where you started. Or you could shoot video with footage from many locations and prsent it all as one. Does the geodata need to be embedded within the audio/video stream?
This seems like one of those problems that we can’t easily bootstrap ourselves without manufacturers of equipment building the features into the products they design. I could be wrong on this (and hope I am) and maybe there is a hack to do it, I’m just not the one to do it right now. Still, I think it’s an interesting problem…
Remember last week? It was my birthday! Rather than post any photos from the birthday party, I’ll just show you photos from Flickr taken on June 18, 2005 that match the word “party”, ok?
I guess that Gnomedex thing is going on, but of course, I’m not actually there, so I don’t know.
My idea for the day though was this: I’ve got cell phone numbers for at least three people there, and could possibly even dig up a few more. I thought about calling some of them and saying “Hey, meet me at the Citizen Media session…” or whatever. (If you want to get really tricky scour Flickr for Gnomedex photos of places/things you can reference.) I would then hope that people would mention that I was there but failed to actually find me. One must be elusive, like the unicorn!
Obviously I’ve blown my cover by writing about this. None the less, feel free to borrow my plan…
Ha! Look at that! blood and mathowie discuss me… (I said “discuss” not “disgust” mind you!)
But if that were the case, then all the early bloggers would be well known. RasterWeb (b. 1997), Now This (b. 1997), and the Bradlands (b. 1998) should have much more traffic than you…
The funny thing is, it’s sort of like “Hey, they’ve been around forever and are still unpopular! Which happens to be just fine with me, as popularity has never really been a goal of RasterWeb! or a goal of mine either…
For the record (not that anyone will read this, since, you know, I am unpopular and have no readers even though I’ve been at it for nearly 8 years…) Where was I? Rambling again, maybe that’s my problem… Ah yes, To give back to the internet, to share what I know, to open ports of communication and all that, to discuss with like-minded freak, geeks, and nerds the things I find fascinating, to write, and rant, and make cool things… I love the internet! Creative people need an outlet. Need it! Without that they go insane. This is one of my outlets…
I also think that what Matt overlooks is that he created or was involved with some very high-profile web sites, and was employed by high-profile companies, and of course does not live in the midwest. I also don’t really go to conferences or hang out with the cool kids of blogging, so few people really know me that well outside of this site. Crap, I’ve known Dave Winer on mailing lists and the web for like 10 years now, and last fall he thought I lived in Denmark or something!
Highlight of my day, mathowie says:
I still read RasterWeb…
Thanks Matt!
(BTW, the proper spelling is RasterWeb! but I’ll let it go, as I certainly don’t expect people to remember such minute details… I truly will claim the title of “toiling away in obscurity longer than anyone else…” Foo!)
(Update: rebecca fixed the spelling, except for the ! but I’m all Yahoo!-like with that anyway…)
Being someone who has not followed Atom as much as the next super-geek, I’m clueless as to how enclosures are handled… I mean, I could have sworn someone was just namespacing in RSS 2.0 and using the <enclosure> element, but I find no docs on that… (And since Mark ain’t around to help with this…)
I guess there are “Atom enclosures” in the 0.8 draft…
Should I be using this?
<content type="audio/mpeg" src="http://foo.com/foo.mp3" />
Or perhaps this?
<link rel="related" type="audio/mpeg" href="http://foo.com/foo.mp3" />
I think they both pass the validator fine, but that doesn’t tell me what I should really be using or doing.
Searching gave no good results, and IM to smart people gave no solid answers… Argh… (Maybe in another 10 months I’ll have an answer.)
Oh yeah, it looks like the WordPress solution was to just use a function named rss_enclosure in the wp-atom.php file, which as you might guess, does the RSS 2.0 thing with <enclosure> in an Atom 0.3 file. I think I’d call that a bug…
Update: My (test) Atom 0.3 Feed with Enclosures.
The videobloggers (and Freevlog) get my thanks on this one. I figured I should make a post on this since I’ve made two comments on it recently…
The Internet Archive will provide storage for your files, because they are “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form” and the chances of the Internet Archive sticking around seems pretty good… The problem is that the time between uploading a file and having it available can be 24 hours. That’s where Ourmedia comes in. Ourmedia provides “free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches” and your files are actually stored in the Internet Archive, but the time between upload and having your file available is much faster. How much faster? My last 2.4 mb upload to Ourmedia took about 10 minutes. Yes, in 10 minutes the file was uploaded and I had the URL for it from the Internet Archive. Sweet!
Ourmedia also makes it really easy to license your work, choosing a Creative Commons license, or whatever other license you might want. They’ve been working on improvements and even in the last two weeks I’ve seen things getting better.
So, the bottom line: free hosting for your podcast or videoblog files (as well as other files.) This sort of solves that bandwidth problem… (It works for tinkernet.)
Are there any downsides? Well, if you really like the raw log data and stats, you may need to do a little extra hacking to get what you need. In theory you could get the URL of your media file on archive.org, and then create redirects on your own site so that requests go to your site, get logged, and the clients get the file via redirect to the actual URL. I imagine a nice little web app or WordPress plugin could do that quite easily…
Update: See JD Lasica’s post on Ourmedia…
What if I wanted to get 100 t-shirts with a simple logo to show up in Seattle on Thursday, and didn’t mind spending some money to do it. Do you think there’s a way to do it? Seems for enough money there must be a way to do it.
Man, where were people like you 12 years ago! I mean, this is pretty much the kind of question people would ask me, though there was never any mention of money, and I occasionally I had more than 4 days to do it.
This is what you do: Find someone with time on their hands, who happens to be a friend, or likes you, or wants money. Give them the design, or have them do the design, burn a screen, get the shirts, ink, etc. (it will help if they have a screen-printing machine, homemade or not) and then help them print the shirts, hang ‘em to dry, take ‘em all to a laundromat and throw ‘em in the dryer for a cycle. (It worked for All You Can Eat.)
If you don’t like the DIY method I’m sure there are companies that could do it. I say that because I used to work for one, and if someone showed up and said “for enough money there must be a way to do it” we’d sure as hell git ‘er dun.
