Newsday has an interesting article on bloggers generating revenue from their blogs. Great opening paragraph:
The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.
Another interesting audio application from the folks at Rogue Amoeba: Detour allows you to send audio to different output devices on an application-specific basis. So you can send iTunes to your headphones, and Quicktime Player to external audio for example…
Make Room for Podcasting is a nice summary of the phenomenon of Podcasting.
Also, Jon Gordon has posted a succinct definition of podcasting:
A podcast is a talk or music radio show that’s sent directly to an iPod or other digital music player through your computer. It’s a new take on the growing technology called RSS that pushes text-based Web content to computers. But with podcasting, a listener subscribes to audio feeds.
A new service called BlogFlix has been released, which apparently is able to take your digital images and build a movie-like (think Ken Burns effect) Flash presentation for inserting into your weblog. Here’s a snippet from their press release:
Transvector releases BlogFlix, an online service that creates and delivers videos for blog entries. BlogFlix users can convert their online photo galleries into movies, displaying them along with regular digital video clips within a small frame in a blog. Running in the Flash player found in 95% of browsers worldwide, BlogFlix movies are fully compatible with the most popular blog software hosts.
The BlogFlix authoring tool launches directly from the service’s web site
(http://www.blogflix.net). With its simple interface users can add zoom and pan movements to photographs along with text captions and audio. The tool generates a snippet of HTML text that is pasted into any blog entry to make the movie appear there.
iZotope Vinyl is a free app (requires registration) which resamples your audio as if it were being played on a record player. From the site:
The ultimate lo-fi weapon, iZotope Vinyl uses 64-bit processing and advanced filtering, modeling and resampling to create authentic “vinyl” simulation, as if the audio was a record being played on a record player.
And with Vinyl 1.7, we now provide support for Mac OS X as well as Windows. This adds the MAS and Audio Unit formats to our list which already includes HTDM, RTAS, AudioSuite, VST, and DirectX.
Ross: The real magic here is that this isn’t limited to iPod users -podcasting is limited to internet users with media devices. Podcasting builds on and extends the internet platform – the RSS/Syndication platform. Podcasting brings timeshifting to user generated content.
A few people have pointed out that the term podcasting is a bit narrow since you don’t necessarily have to have an iPod to receive a podcast, you could be using some other kind of portable mp3 player. Sure, makes sense.
What surprises me is that people think this is about portable mp3 players at all. It’s not. It’s cool to be able to take these mp3 files along with you wherever you go on a portable player, but is that really necessary or just a neat byproduct of the mp3 delivery method?
Since the iPod itself is not network enabled, a computer connected to the network is required to pull the mp3 file. While there are a great number of owners of iPod and portable mp3 players out there, they are just a small subset of the number of computer users who also happen to have a portable media player.
Why should podcasting be limited to Internet users with media devices? Radio is radio whether or not I listen to it in my car, on the porch, or in the house. Why should the definition of this new medium be limited by defining it as requiring some kind of portable media device? Is a laptop a portable media device? Is it not a podcast if I listen to the mp3 file on my desktop?
The key is that the content can be consumed wherever the user wants to. It may well be on an iPod. It could also be at the office with a pair of headphones or at home over the speakers while cleaning the house…
The color scheme generator is a killer tool that all interface designers will want to keep handy…
Another article on the tech details of podcasting: How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own) from Engadget. Similar to the Hugo Schotman instructions I linked to a few days ago.
From the website: BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on LG VX4400/VX6000 and many Sanyo Sprint cell phones. This includes the PhoneBook, Calendar, WallPapers, RingTones and the Filesystem for most Qualcomm CDMA chipset based phones.
I just got the VX6000… Why this model? Well, mainly since it was not expensive and was able to take pictures. I wasn’t looking for a handheld/celphone, since I don’t really use a phone that way. I mainly use it to make calls, not schedule my day or keep track of contact information. Though this software might make me change my mind…
Yellow Dog Linux 4.0, a Linux distribution for PowerPC-based computers, has been released. I tried Yellow Dog a while back and it installed and ran nicely on my Pismo G3 Powerbook. One of the things that would have gotten me to consider moving to it would have been dual-head support, which means in the Linux world support for multiple monitors, something I am pretty much addicted to when it is available. This new version offers dual-head support for ATI PowerBooks and Power Macs along with a whole bunch of other cool stuff for running Linux on Apple hardware.
What is an iPodder? Dave Winer asks you to tell him… He thinks it works like this:
- There’s a list of feeds the user is subscribed to, just like a feed reader or aggregator.
- Periodically the iPodder reads the feeds, looks for items with enclosures that it hasn’t seen. Each such enclosure is added to a queue.
- Another thread watches the queue, if it’s empty it goes back to sleep; if there’s something on it, it reads the first one.
- When an enclosure is successfully read, it’s saved in a folder (user-configurable) and an Apple Event (on the Mac) or a COM message (Windows) is sent to iTunes telling it to add the file to the library.
- The iPodder tell iTunes to synch with the iPod.
Some interesting things…
WireTap, according to their site: is a free product for MacOS X 10.2 or later that allows you to record any audio playing on your Mac, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. This allows you to record news from Internet radio stations such as the BBC News, sound snippets from your favorite DVD movie, record the audio from a game, or even iChatAV conversations.
Audacity is a free audio editor running on Mac, WIn, or Linux. The website says: You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST and LADSPA plug-in effects.
RadioSHARK is a USB AM/FM Radio with Time Shift Recording for Mac or PC. Lists for $69.99. The web site says: The RadioSHARK can record any AM or FM radio broadcast in real time. You can also program it to record a scheduled show, or to ‘pause’ live radio so you can return right where you left off moments or even hours before.