First Official Podcast 
About a week ago, I made a podcast and was successful in getting listed in the iTunes Music Store. That first podcast wasn’t really an “official” cast, though–I just needed something to fill the space, and so I read the post I made about podcasting and uploaded it. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the right topic to start the real series of podcasts. Alberto Gonzales seemed to be a good topic. As may be the case with a lot of the casts I may do, this was not just a quickie with little detail; I tried to make it fairly extensive, without getting too gabby or getting into boring detail. Still, it runs just shy of ten minutes. But hopefully it’ll give you a good idea about a man who might be a Supreme Court nominee.
So I’ve uploaded the podcast (and deleted the first episode from the RSS feed). However, iTunes is of two minds on podcasts: they have the searchable listing in the Music Store, and then there’s the subscription in your podcasts window. The subscription can be updated immediately, and will show you the new podcast. However, the searchable listing in the Music Store may take a day or more to update. You can still search for “BlogD” or “The Blog from Another Dimension” and find me, but you won’t hear the Gonzales podcast unless you subscribe and go to the Podcast window. More on how that works when I figure it out.
So from now on, I will make a post to announce when I have published a new podcast. The XML feed for the podcasts is here. The episode on Gonzales can be found here (you can either click to listen in your browser, or right-click and download the file to listen with another application). I am also including an iTunes icon into the title of each post with a podcast; you can click the icon to download the podcast. Let me know if the HTML code within the title looks screwy in any way or in any situation.
Sometime soon, though, I’m going to have to buy an actual microphone; I’m using the built-in mic on my Powerbook, and the quality is not what I’d hope for.
Excellent !!!
Do you have any stats on the # of folks that listened to the podcast? The mic seemed fine. Good voice !
46 have downloaded the podcast so far, within 15 hours of it going up. However, keep in mind that this specific podcast is not searchable in iTunes–only those who have subscribed to the blog in general can see it.
Do you have any info on how long they listened?
The file must be downloaded all or not at all. It’s a single file. No stats on how much people listen, that’s enclosed on their own computers after the download.
Heh. Nice to hear what you sound like! Very American. The world just got that little bit smaller.
Sounded fine, the only imperfection would be a continuous background of ‘white noise’. Hey! 6 minutes in the noise just cut out suddenly. Whups … half a minute later it starts up again. Machinery in the background? Air conditioner? Cut out again. I’ll be quiet now.
Brad
The noise variations haqve to do with the way I record the podcast. This was actually recorded over the span of a few hours on three different days–not that I plan to divide the recording so much in future attempts. I also pause frequently to collect thoughts, revise wording, and do a little extra research. And when I make a mistake, I stop recording, go back to the last pause in my speech before the error, and pick up from there. The difference in white noise was the difference between late night silence and midday background noise, and very likely also between times the cooling fan in my laptop was on or off. Until I get an external mic that’ll work with my laptop, it’ll be hard to controil that effect.
Part of the reason I downloaded the podcast was to hear what you sounded like. It does make the world smaller no doubt.. There audio quality was not bad at all considering that you are using the built in powerbook mic. I did listen to the entire podcast.
It is a sad state when the best we can hope for a a judge who is just slightly far right. I realized this myself when watching a recent news broadcast and feeling relieved that a moderate right wing might be nomiated. While the right controls the presidency, senate and congress they still do not have all the power they want and threaten changes to the constition at any time they cannot get their way.
Lets hope that whoever takes the bench decides to put the law above right wing political activism.
Believe me, Luis, if you’re going to be in the broadcast business get yourself a radioShack mic. “Sound of Literati”
witness the powerful experience of the spoken word Xplosion
playing now on MP3tunes.com.