Steve Jobs: Good for Radio?

MacNN | Jobs named "Radio Person of the Year"

I'm not all that sure of this. Podcasting has taken a certain amount of listeners away from radio. But the stations that have used podcasting as a way to re-package their radio programs may have seen a positive effect. So this sort of confuses me that Steve Jobs is names Radio Person of the Year. Kind of a double-edged sword if ya ask me. But you didn't, did you?

I'm sorry, I thought that I got a lot of spam. But 4 million messages a DAY? That's what Bill Gates gets. And apparently it goes against one of his predictions from a couple of years ago: Bill Gates 2004 spam prediction - Spamfo.

Damn, that's almost like his prediction in the early 80's that '640K of memory is all anyone will every need.' How did this guy get so rich?

Check out Paul Colligan's Podcasting Blog. Lots of news and chat about hardware, news, software, etc. I interviewed Paul on a recent Tim 'Gonzo' Gordon show - a fun, informative conversation, definitely worth the listen. On December 26, he posted his top ten predictions for podcasting in 2006. It doesn't look like a single one of them matched MY top predictions for podcasting for 2006! Sheesh, maybe one of us needs new batteries for the crystal ball.

First Juice...

So now that iPodder has changed to Juice, it looks like iPodderX is going the way of the dodo bird, too. News coming in January on what the name change entails. Is it the big hammer of Apple and iPod that's busting balls? Or do they just want to differentiate themselves from the iPod?

Word of the Year: Podcasting

So, the good folks at the New Oxford American Dictionary of English rejected the word 'podcasting' last year, saying that not enough people were using it. This year, it's the word of the year, according to a posting on CNET.com.

I just Googled 'podcast' and they came up with 72,700,000 pages that use the term. Just a month ago it was about 10,000,000 LESS. So yeah, I guess podcasting has come of age.

Are you podcasting yet?

Digital Radio Moves Forward with Coalition

Looks like digital radio just got a kick in the ass. And it's about time. I remember years ago, when I was a young pup in radio in the 80s (early 80s!), a radio engineer told me that digital AM radio's technology at that point was already good enough to make AM radio sound better than FM. Ever since then, I've been waiting for digital radio to come along.

Of course, the problem now is that I'm no longer in radio (well, that's not the problem), and radio today sucks even worse than it did in the 80s. Radio was best in the 70s, or course...or even the 60s, when Top 40 BOSS JOCK radio was da bomb. (Here's a cool 70s radio site....)

GarageBand.com Moves into Podcasting

The boys and girls at GarageBand.com have launched Gcast, which claims to be the most refined offering yet if you're looking to create, publish and distribute your podcast. I took a look at the service, and was underwhelmed. They do aim to offer free hosting, the ability to mix your playlists online, telephone recording (oooh! imagine the quality! count the listeners who will say - eeehh, no.), free podsafe music, a free flash player....hmm. Nothing about actually creating compelling content. I guess that's up to you?

Too bad it doesn't look all that appealing. I really like the GarageBand.com site and the concept. I'll be curious to see how its received by their audience.

Of course, here's the plug: for the Creating Killer Content System, there's always Podcasting Adventures Online.

Searching for Podcasts

It looks like there are more entrants to the podcast-searching game, according to Wired Magazine. I took a quick look at Podzinger, and after registering my podcast there, they told me they'd send an email with code to insert on my podcast page so listeners can search my podcasts. Wow, pretty cool for sure!

Blinkx on the other hand is a TV / Video / podcast search engine. I easily found a number of my podcasts by using some search terms I had mentioned during the casts. Both are easy to use (thank you Google). In fact, as I was poking around the site I found the TV search page which displayed 100 thumbnails of tv screens. Many of them were live feeds and when you moused over them the thumbnail doubled in size and the audio track kicked on (on at least a few of them).