I’m a big fan of podcasts. As a podcaster myself, you might expect me to say that. I know many people are not fans, and that’s OK – it’s a matter of taste, I think. For me, it’s convenient to be able to get information while I’m driving, or travelling via some other means or doing something else which makes reading difficult. I like some of the insight that comes out through deeper discussion of a topic, or even from the interaction of several people in a conversation, which you typically don’t get from a written post which is likely to be from one point of view. Audio can take more concentration than reading text, of course, and is difficult to scan, so I can understand objections – like I said, it’s a matter of taste. For me, podcasts need to be interesting, and ideally they need to be short (45 mins max) and easy to consume[1].
One particular podcast series which I came across recently (via epredator) is an excellent series of short pieces from the Open University – it’s called The Internet at 40 (iTunes link). It looks at the origins of the Internet and then covers a series of interviews with some of the pioneers like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee as well as less well-known people like Donald Davies and Ray Tomlinson. It’s mostly delivered in nice bite-sized 5-15 minute chunks, with only the first piece lasting longer than 20 minutes, and even then, that’s a compelling listen.
Ever wanted to know how this thing called the Internet evolved? I found it fascinating to listen to Donald Davies talking about the genesis of TCP/IP – I’d always understood it at a general level, but hearing these guys discuss the original thinking behind some of the fundamental concepts was really cool. As both an historian and a techie, it was great to listen and see my two worlds collide. Recommended.
[1] the one exception I make to the 45-minute rule are the shows from TWiT – MacBreak Weekly and net@night are regular subscriptions, and the latter in particular is great for making new online discoveries. If you have the stamina for something a little longer, the TWiT network has some great shows.
Last Friday I recorded a quick solo edition of Dogear Nation. We are usually a three-man team (myself, Michael Rowe and Michael Martine) but we had some problems aligning schedules, and since I’d been away from the show the previous two weeks it made sense for me to pick up the slack.
Check out Episode 96 of Dogear Nation and let me know what you think – it was slightly odd not having anyone to bounce a conversation off, but it was a lot of fun editing it into something coherent at the end of the process
For those not familiar with Veronica, I first became aware of her when she was hosting the Maholo Daily podcast. She has since gone on to present Tekzilla on Revision 3 and Qore on the PlayStation Network. Bottom line? She knows her tech (just check out some of the stuff she’s done!) and was a great guest. She was also patient enough to bear with us and get over a, um, technical hitch, which meant that the show runs a little shorter than usual – ask Michael what I’m talking about!
So it was a great show, well worth checking out. If you’re not doing it already, why not tag some of the sites you come across this week with ‘dogear-nation’ on del.icio.us? I’m having a couple of weeks off, so the Michaels will need something to talk about!
I’m a long-time Notes user – even before I worked for IBM, my previous company used Notes, so I think I’ve been through from around version 4.5 to 8 now (and I really should get around to installing 8.5!). I’m not going to be a fanboy about it, but I have to say that it’s getting better all the time… and the fact that we have folks like Mary Beth Raven actually discussing the application design choices on her blog, and interacting with users as she does so, has clearly improved things.
Nevertheless, I was both surprised and pleased to hear that David uses Notes as part of his GTD process. I’m curious as to how he does so! By the way, he’s on Twitter, too.
In the past, I’ve posted a blog entry here whenever I’ve been a guest on the Dogear Nation podcast.
Well, not any more. That’s because this year, I’m one of the regular co-hosts of the podcast, and we’d only end up with a weekly entry over here as well as on the Dogear Nation blog and the show itself in iTunes.
Dogear Nation is a listener-driven podcast, so we’d love to have you on board with us. Throughout the week, listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. We record the show each Friday, picking out your best news stories from around the web. The content is varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics. Our regular segments are “the obligatory 3D Internet section” and “Mac-a-rooni” but we also talk about coffee, gaming, the environment, social software, books, gadgets, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what our listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you do tag something which we choose for the show, we’ll be sure to give you a shout-out.
Each episode is usually about 30-45 minutes (perfect for a commute!) and we have a lot of fun recording it If you haven’t tried us before, it would be great if you dipped in to check it out, and let us know what you think.
A note on conference photography. I decided to travel light as I was only going for a few days, so I only packed my compact digital camera instead of the DSLR. I also decided to take my Eye-Fi card, reasoning that I’d be able to hook up to the conference wifi and just get the images straight up onto Flickr.
When I first arrived at the Expo, I found I couldn’t configure the card to connect to the network. On day two, it finally did connect, so it was obviously just an issue with the wifi. Unfortunately this continued… so the card would sporadically connect, but not always finish uploading an image. As a result the images are out-of-order in my main Flickr stream (partially fixed by having the sets sorted into chronological order). As a note to myself, I might well reduce the image size in future, since I was shooting at full size and the images were ~2-3Mb which didn’t upload fast.
I was also then faced with the issue of editing and tagging. Flickr offers Picnick integration which is OK… but the range of enhancement options is far more limited than I’m used to in Lightroom, so what with the low light and often wanting to avoid distracting presenters with flash, the photos are hardly my best efforts. Tagging also seemed to take a long time, although I have opened the images for tagging by any Flickr member, so other people can help out there… I already started to trawl for other images from the conference, and note that many of them have restricted permissions preventing me from adding tags or notes
Podcasting
When I got back to the UK on Friday I joined the Dogear Nation regulars for a chat about the event and all the latest web news. Episode 73 has just been posted, so check it out.
By the time you read this you should be able to get hold of Dogear Nation episode 71 (in theory… I won’t be online to check when this post appears on the blog).
In case you are wondering what Dogear Nation is… it’s a podcast, run by my good friends Michael Martine and Michael Rowe. Listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. At the end of the week, the Michaels take a run through the interesting news from around the web. The show is fairly varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics: the 3D Internet and virtual worlds, coffee, gaming, social software, books, libraries and Kindle e-readers, Macs and PCs, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what the listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you haven’t tried it before, take a listen – the show is usually about 30-45 minutes and we have a lot of run recording it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy listening!
If you’re wondering about the name of the show – inside IBM we have a social bookmarking service called Dogear, and the guys started out running the show inside the firewall. They’ve migrated to the outside, but the name has stuck
I’ve been an occasional guest so far, and I’ve also been getting increasingly involved in the running of the website recently, rediscovering forgotten web management skills and learning a whole set of new ones around the wonderful world of podcasting!
On Friday night I joined the Michaels about halfway through the recording, and we had a little audio issue where I couldn’t hear everything so in a couple of places I lost track of the conversation… but it was awesome to be able to call in and chat about the latest tags. I always have a blast when I get to join in.
I’m looking forward to being back on the show in a week or so to talk about the news from next week’s Web 2.0 Expo.
It was my pleasure to join the two Michaels on Dogear Nation on Friday. If you listen to the episode you’ll pick up on a bunch of the things I’ve been doing lately that I’ve not gotten around to blogging about… such as our recent acquisition of a Wii + Wii Fit + Mario Kart, and my iPhone 3G. Oh, and there’s some mention of that Roo Reynolds guy, too…
I was able to join the two Michaels (Rowe and Martine) on Friday’s recording of Dogear Nation[1]… Matt Simpson was unfortunately absent, but we still had a good talk around a bunch of topics including last week’s Technical Leadership Exchange, Twitter, social networks for conferences, file sharing, Congressional hearings on Second Life, and Guitar Hero. I think this was the third time I’ve been on the show and it’s always a pleasure. I blame my memory dropouts and umming and erring on latent jet-lag, though.
This will be a first, I’ve not written a gig review before… bear with me…
Background
Somewhere around late summer last year I started listening to the Song by Toad podcast (aka the Toadcast). It’s a brilliant, weekly(ish) compilation of new music, or other random-but-strung-together-by-a-theme music, hosted by Matthew Young. Although Matthew is obviously far more informed and knowledgeable about music than I am – he actually goes to gigs and writes about music exclusively on his blog, whereas I write about anything that comes to hand – it seems as though we have a roughly similar taste and background… although I toyed around with metal and heavy rock in my later years at school, I was pretty much an indie kid at university and have been into a lot of guitar stuff ever since.
One of the first artists I discovered via the Toadcast was Alex Cornish, who was featured in Toadcast #5. I think I downloaded a track straight after listening to the podcast, and bought Alex’s album immediately after it was released on iTunes… in fact I remember exchanging emails with Alex at the time, I was travelling and wanted to get the album on download whereas he we encouraging me to get the CD, which to be honest I should have done. I’ve been following his MySpace ever since. Loved the album and had been hoping to catch him live, so when I saw he was going to be in London playing as part of Curious Generation at the Troubadour, I jumped at the chance to go along.
The venue
We’ve established that I’m not a regular gig-goer, and I’d never been to the Troubadour before. The website describes the venue as “the last 50s coffee house in Earls Court”, which sounded promising from the start. Basically it’s a coffee house / bar / restaurant upstairs with a small cellar for live music and poetry reading underneath. I stumbled in down the wrong staircase behind one of the bands, with the result that I arrived before the doors officially opened and was assumed to be part of someone’s entourage – kind of weird but I don’t think they minded my honest mistake too much. For reference, the way in to the cellar is right at the back of the coffee house! The cellar is an intimate venue – I don’t think there could have been more than a hundred or so people, and the music filled the space pretty nicely. I’d definitely go to other sets at the Troubadour in future.
Alex Cornish
The overall sound of Alex’s album is a bit low-key and acoustic (which, in case you hadn’t guessed, I like). The difference here was that I’d not heard the tracks performed with a full band before, and I have to say that some of them were transformed. For example, one of my least-favourite tracks on the album is “Scotland the Brave”, but having heard it performed live my opinion has changed completely. In fact every track was superb. I was grinning like a mad thing throughout most of the set, and carried on grinning afterwards. It was an excellent gig. If you have a chance to see him on his current tour, I suggest you take it. Apparently the next gig in London is sold out already.
Chatting to Alex afterwards, it sounds like the next album is coming along well and that there is going to be a bigger sound now that he has the band together. We got a preview of one of the tracks, “Look Out” (prompting much excitement from my section of the audience since Alex’s friends have heard it before), and frankly I’m looking forward to hearing more.
Snippets of Alex Cornish
I’m told that Alex is “a talented footballer and an incredibly nice guy”. Well I can’t validate his footballing skills, but I do agree that he’s a tremendous guy. As a sidenote, it’s a bit of a weird experience when you and the artist recognise each other from MySpace! Very cool though. And it’s strange what can happen when you hand out Moo cards and take notes in a Moleskine notebook – apparently people think you’re “the press” or “a proper journalist”. Hardly, but thanks
Apologies for the poor-quality pictures, I wish I’d taken the DSLR rather than a compact.
Joker’s Daughter; Rosie and the Goldbug
It would be utterly unfair not to mention the other bands who were on on Tuesday night, since I enjoyed them too.
Joker’s Daughter kicked off proceedings. They were an acoustic pair who played some really beautiful, haunting folksy tunes. The venue was still sufficiently quiet to make them stand out, too – I think later in the evening as it got busier, they might have struggled to make an impact. I need to check them out in more detail, as I really liked the music.
Snippets of Joker’s Daughter
The third band of the evening, Rosie and the Goldbug, were seriously entertaining. I can’t quite figure out their influences… at times the sound was Tori Amos (“Soldier Boy”), at times nearly Blondie, and the look (glittering minidress and peacock feather) was reminiscent of Moloko. Some fantastic banter in between the tracks, and a lot of energy. Thundering bass and piano, and the lead singer kept demanding “more vocals” from the engineer! Another band I’ll be exploring some more.
Snippets of Rosie and the Goldbug
I wasn’t able to stay for the last artist, Ryan Scott, so I can’t comment. If anyone who was there has anything to add, please let me know what I missed!
The company
Met some fantastic folks, most of whom knew Alex already. I hope I didn’t come across as some kind of MySpace stalker
…
Now, if you want so read what a proper music blogger thinks about Alex Cornish, instead of the inane and under-informed ramblings of a random enthusiastic fan, go and read Matthew’s review of Monday’s gig in Edinburgh. You’ll also find a few samples of Alex’s music there, and on his MySpace page. And once you’ve done that, go get his album Until the Traffic Stops, from iTunes or Amazon or your vendor of choice (eMusic have his singles, but not the album). Do it!
I noticed that Darren blogged about the effort in one of the Last.FM groups to try to get Lucky Soul’s ‘Lips Are Unhappy’ to Christmas number one, in order to prevent a seemingly-inevitable Simon Cowell-created reality TV sub-Stock/Aitken/Waterman pop crap last minute release making it, as would usually be the case.
Last night I was listening to the always-excellent Song By Toad podcast – episode 16, the Birthday podcast, and let me say Happy Birthday to Matthew (aka Mr Toad) while I’m here – and it turns out that there’s also another online campaign to create a Christmas number one. This one is Malcolm Middleton’s ‘We’re All Going To Die’, which seems an unlikely title for song to listen to during a period of peace and joy, but I can see the wry humour.
The thing that particularly interests me about both of these campaigns is whether the Internet has the power to beat mass market television at this point. Last.FM has a loyal following… and probably more than the music blogs who are pushing Malcolm Middleton… but I’ll be interested to see whether either can beat out the TV-anointed tune, whatever it turns out to be (see, I don’t actually watch the shows which tend to create them), even in this age when downloads do count towards singles sales.
