Podcast

Memo to the RIAA: Better Check on Bush

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

It just sort of cracks me up that President Bush has an iPod is such big news. For the second time in recent memory, all the big news outlets ran coverage of the “First iPod” … what really gets me is that the one is in my favorite (old school) news outlet, the New York TImes by reporter Elisabeth Bumiller actually had this quote in it:

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist in the 2004 campaign. Among them are “Circle Back” by John Hiatt, “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” by Joni Mitchell and “My Sharona,” the 1970s song by The Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor in charge of music coverage at Rolling Stone, cheerfully branded “suggestive if not outright filthy” in an interview last week.

The key there is that the line that says, “The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy …” Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t that stealing music? As a matter of fact, it is. You just can’t do that! I’ve been following the discussion over at the excellent Corante blogs, When Are You Going to Sue the President? Some great pointers to the coverage, but the best is perhaps the fact that Siva Vaidhyanathan promised he’d ask RIAA President Cary Sherman and actually did! The answer from Mr. Sherman’s answer: “We’re only suing uploaders, not downloaders.” Well that clears that up, I’m sure my students here at PSU will be happy to know it. Check out the whole 3.5 hours from the Cornell sponsored debate here.

Thought That Looked High

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

So, I included quite a few stats from the Pew Internet and American Life Project report about podcasting in my talk at the University of Missouri. Turns out, Jen Reeves was right when she thought their numbers were overblown. She felt (and even stated it in her talk) that Pew was factoring in music downloads and the like and not focusing on podcasts solely. What Pew forgot to tell us was that the 6 million or so listeners of podcasts they cited weren’t really podcast-only listeners. Makes it really hard to trust sources when your sources aren’t being completely honest with their data. That’s just flat out too bad. Live and learn!

Where Have You Been?

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

That’s what a lot of people (if you count the four or five people who visit this site as a lot) have been asking the last several days. No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, but I have been both very busy and very distracted the last week or so. Things have been nuts at work and we have been getting some new initiatives running, so that’s good. We have been spending most of our time between rolling out the few fixes that are needed to the CMS we built to drive the School’s web presence and investigating several open source tools for our blogs@ist project and a few kick ass project management and bug tracking tools. Its kept me busy.

Some other things on the personal side of my life — I am a real person — have also gotten in the way of posting. As a matter of fact they are the kinds of things you’d love to post about, but just know it wouldn’t be a good idea to do so. Some of the things I have been working on and trying to pull together have taken quite frankly all of my time and mental energy and it hasn’t left me with anything to say. I can say this, stay tuned … some interesting things are in the works.

Here’s something I will rant about for a second … the whole podcasting, Daily Source Code thing has gotten me a bit down. I’ve been a daily listener to the Source Code since around October or so and have always loved it … I am seeing the end of the run for me though. The content just doesn’t seem as inspiring to me anymore and podcasting in general hasn’t been getting me going like it did the past several months. My podcasting guys (who we do our weekly show with) and I haven’t even posted our last two shows … I’m just not feeling it. I need some new, good content to get me excited again. Or maybe that I am moving on to the next round of thinking with all this stuff …

Anyway, more to come on the new ideas front shortly … a few last wrinkles to work out. I will try to get the posting juices flowing again and get this thing back to where there’s actually some discussion related to Innovation & Learning. And oh, by the way, Let’s Go Mountaineers (WVU in the Sweet 16)!

Working at Otto’s

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Here we are at [Otto’s](http://www.ottospubandbrewery.com/) (a nice little brew pub in State College) to discuss podcasting and I am demonstrating WordPress … no other way to talk about the power of RSS without showing people just how easy it is to make and edit content. Todday I met with two faculty members from our [College of Education](http://www.ed.psu.edu/) to discuss a NSF grant they are assembling. One of the things they are really interested in is podcasting. Let’s just say they walked away with the light bulbs on!

Again, it is just really cool to see people’s reactions when the whole content delivery via rss thing clicks with them. I have a feeling we’ll be doing quite a bit of good stuff with these guys! One of them was Kyle Peck — quite frankly one of the most respected names in Instructional Systems Design … I studied his book in grad school for crying out loud! This isn’t the first time Kyle and I have hooked up … he is a great guy and very into pushing the limits of technology (and the establishment, research, educational philosophy, etc) and is just great to hang out and talk with. He is going to be a guest on the From the Basement Podcast here in the next couple of weeks.

We’ll be setting up a pilot program that I’ll be blogging about here. Until then let’s just say it was a great meeting that will unlock a ton of opportunities.

Podcasting in Education

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I did a few podcasts for my IST 110 class last semester … although students didn’t take advantage of the auto delivery via RSS enclosures much (maybe 10 in the class out of 42). They got them the old fashioned way, they just clicked the link and downloaded them. The ones they really liked were mostly feedback related … you know, you did a great job on this, don’t worry about grades, etc … Starting here in the next couple of weeks we’ll be doing the SI Live Podcast from the Solutions Institute … it will have faculty, staff, and students from the School talking about research, projects, and emerging technologies. I just hope faculty end up using them as part of their course! Now that would be cool.

I came across this post over at the Educause Blogs that talks about how David Sturges is using IT Conversations as a big part of his course … great idea. Take a look … good pointers from there. My question is how do you get faculty to (a) produce their own podcasts and (b) use those that are already available? Any thoughts would be great!

First Podcast: NLII Stuff

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I am down in New Orleans for the NLII conference. So far everything seems cool. The conference really gets going tomorrow, so I’ll see what its all about then. I present on Tuesday, so tomorrow will be more of a walk around, listen, and discuss kind of day. There are some good sessions, so I’ll see how it goes.

If you’ve been reading here, you know I have been working with Apple, Educause, and MOJO to make sure everything gets podcasted here this week. When I say working with, I really mean I had an idea and pushed a bit. The people at MOJO and Educause have done the real heavy lifting — the results so far are great! So much so, I decided I’d record a quick podcast and include one of the first podcasts from the conference. Make sure you listen to it as it marks the first Learning & Innovation Podcast.

One other thing, I emailed Adam Curry today and sent a quick audio comment in about the NLII efforts … he wrote back to me almost instantly and said he will plug the effort on the Daily Source Code. Very cool. Well, I’ve loaded up the podcast, so listen in … its about 15 mins and weighs in at around 6 MB. Enjoy and please post comments–>

Secure Enclosures

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I think this whole RSS thing is really powerful … I also feel like I’m late to the party. But in all reality, a whole slew of people are just starting to see it. Its been around for quite some time, but podcasting has really brought this to the surface. I remember working at Cogence Media and seeing software that would receive content that was in a “push” mode … anyone else remember that? I think it was pointcast … it was the start of the Internet, .com explosion. When I read about it, what strikes me as amazing are the facts that the pace of innovation was so rapid in the face of all that capitalistic competition and that one of the two largest players in the RSS fad, Dave Winer, has been there since the get go.

With that said, I have been thinking for weeks about how you could do secure enclosures … they could be a very interesting solution to course work, articles, white papers, assignments, feedback, or other academic materials delivered directly to students … or for subscription based newsletters, magazines, news articles, weather, or really whatever people are currently required to hold some sort of membership to receive. I would have to also imagine someone has done … at any rate, RSS is so much better than email or html … the end of people getting information by searching specific websites is on its way.

At any rate, it has me thinking about if there is a new browser experience coming, or if it will be server side protection, or just a next version ipodderx. All of it has me interested in the web and technology again for the first time in a long time. I’m going to continue pushing and exploring this space … I know there are solutions in this movement … its actually also fun. This is cross posted at the From the Basement Podcast site.;-)