I’ve been a loyal, satisfied Apple Computer user for 20 years. I first bought a Mac Plus in late 1986 or early 1987 in order to work on a Ph.D. dissertation. I always thought they were the computer company “for the rest of us,” as they used to say.

But now it seems as though they’re just one of the big boys.

They’ve sent PodcastReady a cease and desist letter instructing them to stop using the word “podcast” in their business name.

Wha?

The word podcast entered the New Oxford American Dictionary last year. It was named the “word of the year” by Oxford University Press. It’s been around for two years. It is now accepted as the word designating an independently-produced audio made available for downloading on the internet.

Now Apple says it’s their word. I guess maybe they have their reasons, but this really looks like hubris to me.

The Apple iTunes Music Store, of course, has a whole division devoted to “podcasts,” but now, apparently, it’s only okay to call them that if you are using the iTunes Music Store to find them.

Ridiculous. I may mention something about this in the podcast–uh oh, I mean independent audio production–I do later on today.

I think Apple may be surprised at the breadth of negative response about this. My own podc…independent internet audio show has several thousand listeners who are NOT podcasting geeks. However, they all use the word “podcast” to refer to these things. I heard the word used at a high school back-to-school night earlier this week, by a non-geek French teacher who plans to use them in class. “Podcast” is what they’re called. We’ve had this discussion for the past two years, and we’ve all agreed that the train pulled out of the station in the fall of 2004.

So if we don’t call them podcasts, what do we call them?

(If you’re a blogger, please blog about this. Apple pays attention to the blogosphere.)

You four people who continue to faithfully read this blog deserve my heartfelt thanks.

The problem with my blog (well, one of the problems with my blog) is that it’s so hit-and-miss. I don’t write to it regularly. This is probably why nobody reads it except my closest friends.

So here’s my blogging regime from now on: I’ll post something on or about every Wednesday. Never mind whether I have a big, earth-shaking essay to write. I’ll put up something every Wednesday at least.

Regularity is, I think, one thing that has enabled The Word Nerds to develop a considerable worldwide following. It’s a pain in the ass to crank the thing out every week, but it makes all the difference in the world. It’s the basic time structure of the show: whatever we have to say, we say it every week.

Today I found out, somewhat by accident, that the first “mainstream” magazine about podcasting, ID3 Podcast Magazine, would not appear in print after all.

I had signed up to subscribe to this through Dan Klass’s website, and expected to get a print copy in the mail this month sometime. I also received a login ID and password to get access to the online features of the magazine.

When I tried to log in today, my information didn’t work. The magazine’s website didn’t recognize the information they had given me. Frustrating!

But I also found out, just by prowling around the site, that the print edition of this magazine will never come out. This is instead going to be solely an online publication, and paid subscribers will receive their money back.

This is no surprise to me, really. I always wondered whether the podcast world really had need of a paper magazine that arrived in the snail-mail every month, just like Atlantic Monthly or National Geographic. This is Web 2.0, after all! We can create radio shows that go out to the whole world and each other. We’re all subscribed to 20 or 30 bulletin boards or RSS feeds or blogs or whatever. I read the New York Times online. I link to the Washington Post whenever I can in my blog.

In contast to all this new online media, I received my subscription renewal notice in the mail yesterday for Genii, the Conjuror’s Magazine. I will renew my subscription to Genii, because it makes sense. The secrets of magic are ancient and arcane, and they resist being disseminated wholesale on the internet. (Which is not to say they cannot be found on the internet; but serious magicians deplore the internet publication of the arcana of magic and illusion.) Magicians do love their books and paper magazines. 

There’s a place for old media, and there’s a place for new media. But the fate of ID3 Podcast Magazine makes me wonder further what the future of “paid” media will be.

This past Saturday I was driving around Fairfax County in the rain, running errands and listening to podcasts. As I listened to Filme und so, the German movie-review podcast with Annik Rubens and Timo Hetzel, I realized that podcast is just about the only place I get information on new and soon-to-be-released movies nowadays. Annik and Timo are great reviewers and film experts, and theirs is an interesting program that is easy for a fluent non-native speaker of German to understand.

(I’m fascinated to see that Simran has posted pictures of Annik and Timo, from the first video version of their podcast that he had seen.)

It’s a bit funny that I’m getting my film news almost exclusively from Filme und so, because the original reasons I subscribed to it were that Annik Rubens, a podcasting colleague and acquaintance, is half of the team, and that it was one more way for me to listen to “real” German on a regular basis.

I am a 20-year-veteran German teacher with a Ph.D. in German from Vanderbilt University; I’ve published two books and some articles on German literature, etc., etc. Yet I probably will always feel inadequate as a speaker of German. I never lived in German-speaking Europe for more than four weeks at a time, I didn’t spend any growing-up years there, I am not married to a German, nor did I hear it spoken at home as I was growing up.

This is all to say that I never had a real, true, undiluted immersion in the German language. I can’t afford to travel to central Europe frequently, so I go there every two summers or so with American high school students. This is, of course, an intrinsically watered-down, or at least somewhat simplified, experience in the German language.

I sometimes feel like a poseur when I “do” German. Listening to myself converse with Annik last summer on Schlaflos in München, I felt like I sounded like a complete imbecile who could barely put together a simple sentence in German.

And yet–I wonder whether all non-native speakers of any language always feel that way?

First of all, I mean the word “amateur” in the post title in the purest sense: one who does an activity out of love for that activity. In that sense I am an amateur podcaster, since I do it out of love (so far); and I’m even an amateur magician and musician, even though I do both of those things for money rather often.

As consumers of mediated information (”mediated” being, of course, related to “media”), we have long been used to, and willing to, pay for media content, including the print media. Now, with the explosion of blogs and podcasts, absolutely everyone with a computer and decent internet hookup can and may publish.

Will there remain a place for “professional reporters” or “journalists” in the future? Even in this blogpost, I can link to a related article in the Washington Post and cause the Post to point back to my blog–thus undermining the privileged position of the “professional” journalists who are paid to write for that great newspaper. (See? I just forced the Post to link back to me by linking to a blog entry by Howard Kurtz, their media writer.)

When everybody can create content, will there remain a demand for “professional” content that people will be willing to pay for? Will there be a way to earn a living in the future as a journalist? (This question was posed by Annik Rubens to Steffen of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in edition #315 of Schlaflos in München. If you understand German, it’s a great discussion.)

Lately I have become a fan of a charming husband-and-wife podcast called Me and the Bean, produced by Chad and Amanda (”me” and “the Bean”) in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. I don’t think I am showing any disrespect to them when I say that their podcast is a modest project. They don’t line up celebrity interviews or discover new musical artists (although one of Chad’s projects, Locals Only, features independent music from around northwestern North Carolina). All they do is talk about their friends and their lives as parents of young kids.

Me and the Bean is like a semi-weekly newsletter to friends. We all listen, from all corners of the globe, and respond to them via email, voicemail, and MP3 audio files. It is nothing like “regular radio,” nor does it aspire to be.

When I wrote down the notes from which I’m writing this entry, I was listening to the show. Chad had just read an email from somebody who was listening while doing one of those mind-numbing survival jobs, like cleaning offices or something.

It occurred to me that podcasting beguiles the time in an empowering way. Not only is there a customizable content stream to listen to, but it’s a kind of content anybody can create. So you listen to your own special list of podcasts, and then you create your own audio files and respond back.

An audio podcast is essentially much different from a blog. With a podcast I can take the content with me; for a blog, I generally need to be online and hooked up to the Internet to truly get the essence of it (links and trackbacks and comments). To read a blog on a web-enabled cellphone, for example, would be just too tedious. I cannot participate in a blog, even in receptor mode, while riding on a subway train.

But while writing the notes for this blogpost, I was hearing (i.e., consuming) Me and the Bean (and Schlaflos in München and all the other shows to which I subscribe) on the Orange Line of the Washington Metro while riding home from an afternoon in DC.

Categories: blogging, podcast, media, annikrubens, meandthebean

I don’t know whether any of the four of you who read this blog have wondered where I am, but I’m assuming perhaps so.

As the title of this post suggests, I’m feeling that I have too many irons in the fire. This English idiom implies that I have too many projects going on at once, and one source suggests it has to do with blacksmithing. In any event, it means you’re trying to do too damn many things at one time.

That’s how I feel lately. I’ve been podcasting like crazy, keeping on with The Word Nerds week after week. We don’t have any sponsorship or advertising revenue yet, but we are hopeful that we may start making gasoline money soon. We have not missed a week since March 21, 2005, so we recently celebrated our first anniversary as a podcast. And we are happy to have a nice-sized worldwide audience.

I’m also teaching like crazy–three schools, three different administrations, three different sets of faculty meetings, and so on.

And the baseball season is about to start. There is an exhibition game in two days between the Washington Nationals, my hometown team, and the Baltimore Orioles, our rivals from the other league, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. The Orioles have a storied history, having won the World Series in 1983, and having fielded a number of successful teams until recently.

Luckily for the hapless Nationals, the Orioles have fallen on hard times, and even in spring training games, the Nats have beaten the O’s several times. After an unexpectedly strong first season in Washington, chances are pretty good that the Nats will suffer and bounce around the bottom of the division standings this year. No matter. I have good seats behind home plate.

I have a ticket for the Battle of the Beltways (Washington and Baltimore) on Friday of this week. And I got an email this morning telling me my season tickets for the Nats are on the way! They even gave me a tracking number! Life is good! Spring has sprung!

Categories: baseball, podcast, language, midlife

This week I have done several things to improve my knowledge set about blogging, podcasting, and RSS.

I’ve had this Blogger blog since mid-December (not very long, actually), but only in the past two or three weeks have I started to figure out how blogging is different from just typing my thoughts into an open journal. That is, I haven’t really used links all that much, which is why only four of you people in the world are reading this blog right now. The other 27 gazillion people don’t know it exists.

My podcast, The Word Nerds, is hosted at LibSyn, which has made it very easy to do. The downside is that I haven’t ever really figured out how to actually make a podcast, since the LibSyn RSS engine did all the work for me.

Friday, though, I set up a new podcast feed for my German 4 class. The kids are each going to produce a 5-minute podcast in the German language about one of their interests. (I won’t link to it yet because it has nothing but dummy content right now.)

I built the podcast by setting up a Blogger blog under my own account, setting the settings for German language, pointing to a media file that I’ve got hosted at LibSyn, and then using Feedburner to convert my Atom feed to an RSS2.0 feed. Lo and behold, it worked fine (except for a brief hiccup with Feedburner late in the day yesterday).

So even though I haven’t hand-coded my own RSS, I do feel like I had more of a hands-on experience setting up this student-project podcast.

In the meantime I’m trying to figure out how to use categories and tags in Blogger. Since I’m such a rank newbie in blogging, I feel overwhelmed. Blogger doesn’t natively support categories of posts, but I like it otherwise. I’ve seen a number of Blogger blogs that seem able to categorize posts, but for the life of me, I haven’t figured this one out yet.

I did claim my blog feed (actually, all three of my blog feeds: this one, the German class one, and The Word Nerds) in Technorati, but I haven’t yet wrapped my mind around what that does for me.

And yesterday I set up an account in del.icio.us. But once again, I haven’t figured out what that’s going to do for me. I understand that I can keep bookmarks in my del.icio.us account and get to them from anywhere on the Internet, but I can’t grasp how that will help me categorize my posts.

I’ve seen one solution that suggests establishing a different blog in Blogger for each category, and then pointing to those from a “main blog.” But that seems awfully clumsy to me, and I just can’t see starting a whole new blog (and copy/pasting templates and such) for each and every category that might occur to me.

A better solution seems to be to use either Technorati tags or del.icio.us (God, that’s hard to type!) bookmarks to establish categories. A bit of searching led me to a couple of really good explanations of the concept by sam bot (a great conceptual overview) and Blogger Hacks - The Series - Freshblog. Some judicious studying of these two will, I hope, guide me to a better understanding.

Categories: blogging, podcast, categories, rss, blogger

I am writing this from the Hampton Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after the first (annual, I hope) PodcasterCon meeting, PodcasterCon2006.

This was the first podcaster meeting of any sort I have ever attended. I was unable to fly across the country to go to the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, and I missed last month’s Washington, DC, podcasters meet-up because of an ice storm. (Will B., my hat’s off to you for attending! Glad I met you in Chapel Hill!)

I attended three sessions, in one of which I was a nominal discussion leader. In the morning I was at the session by Rob Walch and Stephen Eley on the 411 of Podcasting–an introductory session for people interested in getting into podcasting. This was simpler than I needed to do, but I thought I might be able to contribute to the discussion, and I ended up being the quasi-official audio recorder of the session. It was very good to meet Rob and Stephen, both of whom I had admired for some time on the podosphere (and, in the case of Stephen, on the Yahoo Prius group).

Lunch was an interesting, somewhat crowded experience in Murphey Hall of UNC, but I did meet a couple of other people whom I knew only by their voices–in particular Chad Barnard and his wife Amanda, of Me and the Bean. I also saw, but did not meet, Mur Lafferty of Geek Fu Action Grip, and Swoopy and Derek of Skepticality. (Derek looked very strong and in good shape, considering his recent health problems.) I also did a video interview with Joseph of the Mac Pro Podcast, and was interviewed, along with my brother, by Beau and Kevin of the Attack of the Nerds podcast.

After lunch I attended a very interesting session on copyright and intellectual property issues, led by Derrick Oien.

My last session of the day was an “open session” on the use of music in podcasting, with several great and thoughtful participants and led by Chad Barnard and Tom Shad. I was at least nominally a discussion leader of this one; I held my mike and recorded it (and said a couple of possibly worthwhile things as well).

After delivering Howard, the North Carolina Nerd, back to his car so he could drive west, I re-joined the group at Fuse, a bar directly across Rosemary Street from a house where my brother Howard and I lived for a semester as undergraduates. (That slum-dwelling house has been razed and replaced with a new condo building.)

Enormous thanks are due to Brian Russell for single-handedly organizing this event. It was fantastic. It cost us nothing, and Brian fed us lunch and gave us coffee in the morning.

More thoughts on this conference later, I hope. Further information and links to audio recordings of sessions will eventually appear at the PodcasterCon website.

Categories: podcast, podcastercon2006

Since it’s Christmas weekend, my partners in The Word Nerds and I agreed that we’d “take it easy” by not recording a new show, but “just” putting out a retrospective of the past nine months.

Therefore, I’ve spent at least nine hours each day of the past two days listening to old programs and assembling our retrospective edition. I finished posting it just minutes ago. I think I worked more on this one, at least as far as post-production is concerned, than I did on any previous edition of our show.

All right, I’m finished now. It should be up and ready for everybody to hear.

Categories: podcast