Year: 2006

I am rediscovering the podcasting world as I write this. Although I’ve been listening to a couple of podcasts for the last nine month or so, and even produced three episodes of my own podcast, I just realized that I am a total newbie to podcasting.

You see, most of my podcasting experience was around Adam Curry‘s show Daily Source Code. Adam Curry is a bit name in the podcasting world, so I just had to listen to what he is doing. I then made a couple of attempts to listen to other people, but I didn’t push myself enough to study the diversity of podcasting.

As a result, my view of good podcasting was something along the lines of: a 40 minutes to an hour show, daily or almost daily, a mix of speech and music, a couple of sound effects, audio comments from the listeners. You get the idea.

How stupid of me! With all the variety of topics and formats, how did I ever arrived to that view?

Anyway, I am happy to report that that has been changed. I am downloading about ten podcasts at this very moment. Some are about technology, others are about photography, one or two about productivity, and a couple of music ones too.

Obviously, not all of them fit my previous view of a good podcast. Some are as short as three minutes, speech only. Others are longer than four hours, full of music. Some don’t have large enough audience to get the audio feedback. Others, just don’t include it in the shows.

And while we are on the topic, I have to say that I ditched amaroK. It’s a beautiful piece of software, but it just doesn’t fit my habbits. I don’t need most of the bells and whistles of it, and what I really need is a simplier interface. Plus, amaroK doesn’t work too well with podcasts just yet. It never downloads them itself, although I have the program running all the time. It needs a kick in the butt to actually go out there and grab new content. That’ll probably get fixed in the upcoming versions, but I just don’t care.

For now, I’ll be using BPConf, which is a simple KDE interface for bashpodder. Content-wise, I’ve found a lot of good shows at Podcast.net podcast directory. I’ll post my favourite ones, when the dust of choice will settle.

And with all these changes, who knows – maybe I will start podcasting again…

First of all, if you don’t know what is “bogstipation” – that’s writer’s block for bloggers (source: The Giant Blogging Terms Glossary). These are the times when a blogger can’t think of anything to write about. Every blogger had at least one of those.

As you know, I’ve had one very recently. And here’s the little quiz for you. To make it easier, I’ll even make it a multiple choice.

Question: Is my blogstipation over?
Answers:
1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes.
4. All of the above.

Which one is it?

Seriously now, I’ve been thinking about the reasons that cause me to fall into blogstipation mood and I think I found at least one. You see, I like to keep things chronological in here. All posts are dated and backdated in the order I thought about them. And that’s not actually the problem in itself.

The problem arises with pictures. Sometimes I take a lot of pictures in one day. Usually this happens during some events or on special occasions. All those pictures have to be looked through, sorted out, postprocessed, and uploaded. And it takes a lot of time to do all that. But I want pictures to be posted with the date they were taken on. And this suspends me.

I don’t want to write a few posts today, and then add another post backdated with yesterday. That’s non-sense. The post with the pictures will just get burried in the archives without anyone seeing it. So, what I do is pause all my bloggin activity until all the pictures are ready. Sometimes that takes a really long time – like a two or three days. And when I come back to blogging after those two or three days, with five or ten posts in my head, I just don’t feel like doing all that work. So, I avoid blogging. But that doesn’t solve any problems. Because the more I stay away, the more posts I have to write later.

Finally, one fo the two things happens. Either I throw away a dozen or two of posts, or I sit down and do all the work. Sometimes in more than one sitting.

Now, all I have to do is force myself to blog earlier than later. And I’ll try to blog more in times when I don’t shoot any pictures. Maybe this way, my mind will get unloaded more often, and will rest at those rare times that I have to process images.

Anyway, I identified the problem. Now I have to work out the solution. That’ll probably take some time, but that’s the easy part.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on the matter?

If you’ve been holding your breath for WiFi connectivity on the airplane, then go out and get some air. After that, read this post, which links to this story, and also has a few interesting comments.

I myself am not yet too disappointed. Most of my travelling is still ahead of me, so airlines have some time on their hands to figure out the solution to this problem. But I do expect them to provide me some sort of wireless connectivity by the time I will fly around the world with my son. Because, how else are we going to duel in Quake VIII?

For some strange reason, articles about the future of the media capture my attention. This post in Fred Wilson’s blog is no exception.