nineball media

From the latest Newsweek… Gone, Without a Trace

On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well. My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin.
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As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.

Yikes. For the record, my girlfriend has a MacBook Air, and I can totally see something like this happening…

Form time to time I like to sprinkle in a bit of the law here on the blog (which is only a slight hat tip to my other life as an honest-to-goodness lawyer). I only do it when we need to, and only when I stumble upon good stuff like this great resource… last summer’s Podcast & new Media Expo panel on music licensing. One of the panelists is Colette Vogele, an expert on IP law in this area (and author of the Podcasting Legal Guide… an indispensable resource).

It covers the four different types of licenses and a primer on copyright law. Check it out here.

I just spent the morning cursing Feedburner.

While working on a client’s premium podcast, the service that has always been a really nice way of creating a welcome interface for users (play now buttons, choice of subscribe options, etc.) totally rebuffed any attempt to make episode #1 be recognized in an mp3 enclosure. That’s fancy talk for “it didn’t work, and iTunes wouldn’t see a podcast.” I still can’t figure out if it was a Blogger problem or not, but it was officially not working… despite all the elements being there.

So, it was back to the olden days of podcasting… yep all the way back to 2004. I had to code my own source RSS feed and plug that into Feedburner. Lo and behold it worked. I wonder what people who weren’t mucking with hand rolled RSS feeds do when presented with this issue? I suspect they throw their hands in the air and give up… that’s a shame, and it shows how we have a ways to go in the industry to truly make it simple when a Blogger-Feedburner handshake won’t work on the first, second or even third try…

BTW, if you’re in the same boat I was this morning, check out the podcast feed generator. It’ll get your feed parsed out for episode one. Beyond that you have to write your own code in addition to what it spits out. Still, a handy resource in a pinch.

The International Olympic Committee has just made NBC and other rights holders (who give them lots and lots of money) very happy. Athletes are banned from podcasting from the Olympics according to Podcasting News. Their take on the IOC guidelines:

[A]udio podcasting, video podcasting, photoblogging and vlogging are banned for Olympic athletes, media representatives, officials and staff. Anyone violating the guidelines may be banned from the Olympics and sued for damages.

Too bad. Wouldn’t it have been cool to get an insider look at some of the track athletes’ prep? Swimmers’ parties after the final lap’s been swum? This all goes back to my original theory that the Olympics have gone downhill since Lake Placid 1980… but then again, I didn’t exactly get an Eric Heiden podcast or a US Hockey video podcast then either…

The head of Wizzard Media projects significant growth, matching the marketing report from a few days ago:

Well, I’d like to predict that the rest of industry getting better at reporting.

I’d have to guess that, oh, if i had a crystal ball to forecast Wizzard’s statistics, my educated guess is 1.5 – 1.8 billion downloads, and double to four times the ad spending of the past year.

More listeners… more revenue. This medium is growing, despite the doom and gloom predictions (sort of) back at the New Media Expo. Now, do I think tech podcasts are growing? No… those were the realm of the early adopters, and I think (maybe… perhaps) that they’ve maxed out on listeners. Not as good for Leo Laporte, but plenty good for the yoga podcasts, the political podcasts, and everthing else in between.

The Association of Downloadable Media announced that it will be presenting “Advertising and Sponsorship Standards and Guidelines for Traffic Measurement” at the ad:tech Expo in San Francisco, April 15-17. Should be interesting.

Speaking of ratings and other metrics, a recent article suggested that most podcasts are consumed on computer desktops rather than portable media players like iPods. That’s good news if you are a podcaster that spends additional time putting together shownotes and other additions on their webpage…

For you Mac users* of Audacity you may have had a crash and lost your recording. It happens… trust me. I just had a massive crash and turned to my friend, the Audacity Recovery Utility, and it made a very bad problem turn into a blip on the radar… a small bump in the road…

You see, Audacity is always saving your audio in about 10 second chunks. The problem is that in a lengthy recording, you have hundreds of these chunks. You could string them together one by one, but that would take forever and probably not work anyways. Download the program (there’sa version for older PowerPC Macs as well as Intel ones) and make it your friend. The trick is finding the hidden temp files… go into your Audacity preferences tab to find them – it’s usually in a hidden folder you can’t find without going into the finder (Go>Go to Folder). Once you have them, plug that path into the recovery utility and let it roll. It will string these files together into a WAV file in the same place as those temp files.

After that, breathe a sigh of relief.

*PC people, check out a similar option here.

Podcasting host Wizzard Media has been approved to be listed on the American Stock Exchange… kind of the minor leagues of stock, but still a good sign for podcasting’s growth as a business!

Ok, I don’t know about secrets per se, but Michael Geoghegan is releasing a series of professional podcasting tips over on his blog. I plan to check them out… he’s been a pretty big name in the business and assuredly has some interesting things to say.

I’m blogging this as we go along… here’s Apple’s new stuff as announced by elJobso this morning in San Francisco:

9:18 AM – Time Capsule, a new network attached storage device that merges the Airport Extreme with a big old hard drive. Wireless backups for your notebooks… $299/$499 (500GB/1TB)

9:22 AM -iPhone and iPod Touch get a a lot of new goodies, most notably the ability to find yourself on a Google map automatically. Nice feature. The Touch will now include a lot of apps from the iPhone, most notably Mail. Weird part? Apple’s throwing in a $20 fee for upgrading current Touch owners… kind of surprising there.

9:36 AM – iTunes Store now offers rentals… most surprisingly it includes ALL studios, including Universal. Universal owns NBS and we all remember that they yanked TV shows from the iTunes Store this season. You have 30 days to start watching it, and once you start you have 24 hours to watch and finish it. Movies are all transferable to iPods and iPhones. $2.99 for older titles and $3.99 for new titles. HD is also now available for a buck more.

9:44 AM – Apple TV Take 2 – an upgrade of the current allows movie and TV purchases & rentals from the screen. The YouTube offerings have increased as well (presumably for iPhone owners too). All purchases sync back to your computer. More HD podcasts as well… good news for those of you who jumped on this! Also new: Flickr integration. That’s pretty nice… definite upgrades to a product that was coolly received so far. Existing owners get the new software for free, and new units ship in 2 weeks (with a price drop to $229).

10:08 AM – What we’ve all been waiting for (and by “we” I mean me) – the MacBook Air. Jobs describes it as the world’s thinnest notebook… .16 inches thick at its narrowest point, .75 inches at its thickest (!?!). Fits in a manilla envelope. It has a backlit 13″ LED display (that’s lower power consumption… nice touch). The screen trackpad has multi-touch just like an iPhone too. It can be skinny because it’s using iPod hard drives in it. “Ships with 80GB drive, option of 64GB SSD.” So, not a notebook for storing a ton of stuff, but they didn’t compromise on speed… its got a full Intel Core 2 Duo in there that’s slower than the other MacBooks, but it’s probably because it’s 60% smaller than the ones in the MacBook line.

USB port and a headphone jack on one side, but no internal optical drive. Apple has an interesting new system that allows the MacBook Air to “borrow” an optical drive wirelessly from other Macs on network. External USB drives are available too for the people that need to spin a DVD or CD. 5 hour battery life… this sucker ships in 2 weeks… $1799.