Completely ad-hoc and unscripted, OSnews editors Thom Holwerda and Kroc Camen discuss gripes, pet hates and what’s currently on the home page. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken to one another! “Read more” for the link to the .mp3 file, and notes.
On a whim I decided that an unscripted podcast would be a very effective way to express pet hates in an effective manner, and so I (Kroc) have teamed up with Thom Holwerda to produce the first of this hopefully continuing podcast. (Yes, our hopes are that high!)
I think OSNews readers understand that both me and Thom are very strongly opinionated people who have many pet hates and gripes with the computer industry. We don’t even see eye-to-eye on many things too. It’s for that reason that these polar opposites, united by our determination to stick to our guns, makes (or should make) good podcast material.
Absolutely nothing has been planned in what you are about to hear, and this is also the first time we’ve ever spoken to each other outside of email and OSNews comment threads. A few minutes testing equipment and then we went straight to recording with nothing more than the front page of OSNews as our script.
Note that the quality isn’t particularly good, but we’re trying hard to improve that the next time. Next time, we want to record iChat-to-iChat (instead of Thom using the dreaded Windows AOL AIM client), as well as Kroc using a headset. We will also experiment with recording on both ends, and then combining the two audio streams to see if that improves quality. Any suggestions from you would be welcome!
We hope you enjoy the results!
As always, we are open to your feedback. Feel free to discuss the points raised or provide ideas on how we could produce a better show. We would prefer to keep the design overly unscripted, but could include segments in the show for user emails &c. Send any emails to [email protected] with the title “OSNews Podcast 1” or in the comment thread. Thanks.
You guys talk funny. Must be from out east somewhere…
🙂
Dutch. But it is really hard to sound native when you never get to chance to talk in person.
But where is the feed? You can’t call an mp3 on a webpage a podcast.
Kroc’s obviously British, and yes, I’m Dutch.
We will arrange that should another episode come along, don’t worry!
This was just thrown together within the space of 2 hours. Adam does the server side stuff, and he’s not around atm, so we couldn’t get a feed sorted right this minute.
http://www.osnews.com/files/podcast.xml
It’s been there for awhile, just languishing.
If this is to be a regular feature, how ’bout providing a time index by topic? I’m sure there’s some interesting stuff in there (“interesting” varying by each reader), but having to listen for an hour to find it…
I will take this to mind and will produce ‘show notes’ in future episodes listing topics and time. This first episode is very ad-hoc and there’s no underlying theme.
I could of course create a bookmarked AAC file with descriptions, so that people could skip sections if they want, but I’m weary that that would just herald a massive amount of complaints from people about “freedom” and not supporting their preferred OS / Jukebox / MP3 player.
I’m perfectly fine with the MP3 format, but I’m surprised no one has complained that the podcast hasn’t been recorded in the OGG format.
“Where’s the OGG version?” There, are you happy now?
Platform neutral WAV ?
:B
MP3 seems like the most universal format. Virtually everyone can play MP3 files no matter what operating system or player. And they can play the files as-is without having to download or install anything.
Erm….
I’m not sure I understand your “erm…” comment.
Neither the Windows Media Player, nor iTunes, nor the BeOS Media Player, nor the Creative Media Player, nor… can natively play OGG files.
On the other hand, I’ve never encountered a media player on any OS that couldn’t play MP3. Heck, even car radios, home DVD systems, and digital picture frames can play MP3 files.
Simply there are OSes where you can’t play an MP3 file “without having to download or install anything”, mainly most Linux distributions.
Granted, some of them (like Ubuntu) download the needed codecs semi automatically when the need arises, but still the point stands.
Seriously? Ubuntu Linux can’t play MP3 files out of the box?
Even Damn Small Linux plays MP3 files. I’m pretty sure Mandrake could play MP3 files too, like ten years ago.
I’d also mention all of the MP3-capable portable devices: PDAs, cell phones, iPods and other portable music players, GPSes. I wonder how many of those on the market are OGG-capable?
By “virtually everyone,” he must mean Windows users. Oh yeah, and those few Mac users out there. Linux and BSD users? My distro of choice, for example, does not support MP3 by default; it needs to be installed manually. I guess we’re not so lucky in many cases. An ogg vorbis version would be nice. It’d be nice if the damn MP3 patents would expire already.
Edited 2009-04-06 05:21 UTC
To be a real pedant, WAV is a container format, and not all of the containees are ‘platform neutral’ ;P
Thanks, heck, yeah, it does feel better
till thom gets a new soundcard you could record the 2 streams localy and mix them afterwards
I like it but I can’t imagine ever wanting (or being able to take) a whole hour of it. If you could just provide the edited highlights, that’d be sweet. Say five or ten minutes.
To be honest, I haven’t listened to the talk, I closed it when I saw the total time. It’s probably interesting, but I just don’t have the patience
I think you could use Skype, with a good broadband connection, the quality is very good.
Regarding content, what about summing up the week in news and discussing the most relevant comments? This way, most insightful readers would have they hall of fame
I suggest no more than 5-10 minutes. Beyond that, you give up and close the podcast, I’m afraid
Podcasts are for a specific audience, especially the longer ones like this. We’ll have to prove that we’re worth listening to, but of course it will take us some time to get there.
That’s why I asked Kroc to specifically mention that this was the first time we spoke to each other. I’ve spent a great deal of time studying human interaction, and while listening to our podcast I immediately noticed all the cues that give away that we simply don’t know each other very well.
For instance, it’s obvious that we don’t know each other’s turn taking cues, which leads to overlap and pauses. We have to rely on the limited set of default cues that govern conversation, but those are limited and not everyone uses them correctly, or consistently. The only thing we can do to improve that is to make more of these podcasts.
What also didn’t help was that I sometimes had trouble understanding what Kroc was saying. He was using his MacBook’s internal microphone, and speaks in a British accent that demands more of my attention than, say, an American accent. As such, I could not think ahead very well, leading to some stutter on my end.
Those are all things that can luckily be solved by better audio equipment.
What was this comment about? Oh yeah, length. Well, I’m not going to invest time, money, and effort into a 10 minute podcast, that’s just pointless. A podcast is supposed to be longer, but as I already said, they are simply not for everyone.
Edited 2009-04-05 22:13 UTC
Well would you consider creating a 10 minute edit of your hour long podcast for those who don’t want the full thing? See how many downloads each variant gets. There’s no point investing time, money and effort into a podcast no-one listens to.
The problem with lenghy podcasts is that, for most of them, basically, they could be summed up using 1/10 of the time it took, because the journalist is wordy, talks about not-so-useful stuff, and places a piece of interesting information here and there to keep the audience’s attention. This is what happens on the radio for instance in talk shows. Personally, I prefer reading the summary on the web after the talk. It takes less than a minute and I get only the good stuff (I even skim the summary sometimes
)
I guess it depends on what you see the purpose of a podcast to be. Podcasts or radio will never be as good as text for quick condensed delivery of important information and I don’t think they should even try.
I quite like longer rambling podcasts that meander around several related topics. I often use them as background noise when working, in the way that many people like to have the radio on the background.
That’s like saying that a newspaper has too much text and you want just the headlines. The point is the content, wordy or not, because it’s original content.
In 10 minutes all we could achieve is to read exactly what’s written on OSnews and that’s it. That’s terribly boring and doesn’t give you anything that isn’t possible with plain text. The point of the podcast is that you are hearing a conversation as well as very fresh personal opinion, rather than formal news-speak.
I think Thom will agree that if you’re not interested in listening to the whole thing, then it’s not a podcast you want anyway.
Ok, IMNSHO, the format is quite good.
If people want the headlines, they should stick to the rss feed. The podcast certainly must have some kind of elaboration.
An Ogg version would also be nice, although not exactly a necessity. It would emphasize the openness of OSNews.
What would be really useful, though, is a friendly player embedded in the page/feed. I’ve seen a lot of those out there…
And a feed for iTunes/Amarok/Your-favorite-player-here is, of course, essential.
What openness?
Maybe I expressed myself badly.
I meant OSNews is obviously OS and platform neutral, and it does seem to have an extra consideration for open source projects (even hobbyist/smaller ones).
If the audio quality would be better I would be listening to this. But its *really* hard to listen to this way.
Podcasts are to the ears
…what blogs are to the eyes.
Both have about equal value to the mind.
I tried to get the feed into iTunes but the RSS feed I’m ‘detecting’ on this site gives an error. Where’s the feed to the podcast?
Hi,
I really liked your “podcast-trial”. There aren’t many _good_ pc-related/os related podcasts. Despite the bad sound quality you are easy to listen to.
A tip: Don’t script your podcasts too much, a conversation like structure like you did is easier to listen to, then a too tightly scripted and layed out podcast.
Hope to hear more of this, I need more good podcasts I can listen to, when I drive to work (which almost takes an hour ;-))
Cheers,
Serophos.
The “Gizmo” VoIP service / software has had the ability to record calls for a while now. I’ve also been told that newer versions of Audacity can directly record both input and output audio.
How long before OsNews TV?
I found it informing and well done.
I do not completely agree on Mac being THE solution for low informatics level people, but okay, we hit each other enough like that on OSnews.
I liked the analysis on the palm PRE vs Iphone war. I found it spot on about online stores and gestures ( dear Lord, you would really think that Jobs is a genius for implementing something that we were begging for on our knees for years)
How come nobody noticed that the Garage band crashed precisely when you were taking snipes at Windows stability by the way?
Keep it up, I want more.
Ah, finally, someone mentioned the content; thank you!
We’ll try again next week, or the week after that and have the sound issues ironed out and an RSS feed available.
Episode #01?
Don’t you mean #03, or did you forget the previous attempts?
I certainly did
We think this new one is more sustainable. (By ‘sustainable’, we mean ‘requires little effort’)
Bit late on the uptake here, but still (better late than never?).
Anyway, I use floppy disks everyday in my Yamaha RM1X – it’s not dead! (It’s an old (but still awsome synth/sequencer)
Works as well as it ever did
Sam
of inthebinaryrefinery.co.uk
I sure hope you guys keep going with the podcast, daily would be ideal but weekly would be very good also.
Nice site great work on the podcast!
Thanks…
Thom, just a small tip for next time from an other dutchy, the english-speakers don’t say oehm or whatever when they are talking about the original equipment manufacturer(s), but you should spell it like Kroc: ohh, eeh, em.
I have been reading OS News daily for over two years and have never registered to comment and most likely never will again. I hope that gives some clout to my comment when I say that I am a truck driver who listens to talk radio all day and you guys did an excellent job. I understand why a lot of people complain that it’s too long and boring. It took me a while to get used to appreciating talk radio but it is an art form as writing and acting are. The only thing missing is live call-ins. Don’t be afraid or ashamed of your accents. They add character; something a lot of talk radio don’t have. Don’t pronounce OEM or anything the way someone tells you to. Listen to Dennis Miller and you will hear that he rants on with English slang and you get so lost you end up laughing. Outlines and time breaks for the content? Gag me! Just briefly mention what you will be covering at the beginning. I hope to hear more of you guys in the future. Keep it up!