Podcast NYC - Blog: November 2005

Podding From The Far Side

Get A Leg Up and take your ears over to Mark Forman's podcast at http://legup.blogspot.com. He's coming straight outta Taiwan and this week he's featuring Brother Love with a nice, extended skyper-view and plenty of good music. Happy Thanksgiving to the Brooklyn Bluesman!

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Got Some Press

Via a New York Daily News podcasting story that ran while I was away at the expo. The link to my New York Minute Show podcast was completely screwed up. The addy was mentioned as http://www.newyorkminute.show. Ever heard of a .show address?

A similar thing happened with the New York Newsday story this past spring. A conspiracy? Who knows... I didn't see the print edition but I wouldn't be surprised is that one was messed up as well. Hope it wasn't though.

Meanwhile, blog-star Steve Rubel got the url correct in his link blog post for November 12th (also my birthday!) A very welcome gift. I've seen a nice jump in traffic since that one. Steve's a fellow NY'er from Long Island who produces the Across The Sound podcast along with Joseph Jaffe.

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Portable Media And Podcast Expo

Yes I'm here. I know because I'm hungover from the PodTrac party last night. Yahoo threw a party too, but we got their after the bar was closed and so we brought some people back up to the PodTrac party. Oh yeah the Expo.

I've got a ton of audio (and some video), including Leo Laporte's keynote speech and the panel on the licensing of music, plus great stuff from the live acoustic show with Chance and Brother Love. And a ton more.

The trade floor has been buzzing with lots of new companies and announcements. Audible has a big new podcast offering that I'm pretty sure won't work because among other things it forces producers to use the Audible proprietary format. LibSyn has a prom going on over at their booth. Their Libsyn Lovers service is free and the coolest thing since unmetered hosting. Can the Libbers now be forgiven for all of those outages? Lots of other companies and folks. You'll see and here more soon.

An I did not go to the podcasting awards gathering. I took myself a well needed nap. From what I heard from other folks I didn't miss a thing.

Ciao from Ontario.

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Increased Exposure

For musicians. That's what it's all about with my Alley Cuts show. I must be doing something right because I recently had an inquiry from KYOU Radio about submitting the podcast for airplay on their station. And while I'm not a fan of giving up my personal works to radio stations. I do want the artists to get the maximum exposure possible. So I appreciate them for adding the show to the lineup and helping to give independent music a voice in the traditional radio space.

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Let The Trash Talking Begin

Tomorrow I head off to the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California. This is going to be an interesting one. Lots of folks will be there, more than I expected. Including some folks I'd care not to see or hear from. I'm boycotting the awards ceremony on Friday. I've never thought the "awards" had an ounce of merit. The voting was merely an exercise in stuffing the digital ballot box. Some of the podcasts that "won" are of dubious content quality and I happen to know that there are other podcasts in those categories that are much better produced. Then there are the two awards announced last week, person of the year and podcast of the year. Some anonymous group of "influential" folks have decided on their favorite podcasts. It's a total sham. There are thousands of fun, excellent podcasts out there and they try to jam Eat Feed down my throat as podcast of the year. I'd go in for Eat Feed as arcane marketer of the year but nothing more. You won't see me at the proceedings.

I'm not the only one with a beef or two. Adam Curry is at war with the organizers of the Expo over what he says are attempts to extort sponsorship from PodShow. Adam plans to be there but is threatening to hold some kind of competing event at the last minute. This one could get ugly.

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It's A Syn

Since this morning my podcast file host LibSyn, has been having "problems" with their servers. Hence, all media delivery from Podcast NYC, save a number of files hosted with my other provider has been ground to a halt. This just sucks. According to our friends in Pittsburgh, "We are having a DNS issue that may be out of our hands." Completely unacceptable.

We're not talking minutes here or even an hour. We're talking SEVERAL HOURS! In Web 2.0 time that's like a year. Any new listener coming to the site or subscribing to the feed must think that this was all a big joke. There are no real podcasts here. It's just a myth. Ugh :(

So if you've been lucky enough to find this post then heres what you do. If you want to download an individual file then you can do that if you change the libsyn.com address in the url to libsyn.org and that should do the trick. I'm going to wait and see how much longer this lasts and then start rekeying the urls to media files in my feeds.

I can understand outages, but this is poor service. To the folks at LibSyn I'd like to say that you have a great service with an excellent business model. I've been very happy save for a few hiccups. But one more catastrophic outage like this and I will have to start looking for another host, as painful as that will be.

***UPDATE***

As of 6:20PM Eastern time it looks like things are coming back up online. That's a relief.

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Reading Podio Books is FUNdamental

It's great to see good entertainment and information getting new legs as a result of podcasting and other forms of social media. Back in February I started a Welcome To The Beehive podcast, releasing one chapter a week of the book that I wrote and recorded to audio in the summer/fall of 2004. I've continued the series as an occasional podcast that I hope will form the basis of a second book.

In the meantime, Evo Terra has started a venture called Podio Books that serializes audio books and delivers new chapters weekly to subscribers. It's a great idea. Evo asked me to participate some months back and it's been great to see the many additions and site improvements since then. I recommend that you give it a try. And of course, why not try it out by subscribing to Welcome To The Beehive on the Podio Books site? Just a friendly suggestion of course ;)

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