OSNews

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, heck, yeah, it does feel better

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

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

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.

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).

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.

I certainly did We think this new one is more sustainable. (By 'sustainable', we mean 'requires little effort')