The New, New Podcast Review

Podcast Review: Viva Podcast

Format: conversation
Content: music and movie commentary, general life stuff
Rating:
What I'm going to do: subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 25 minutes; typically right around 20

Your hosts, Lisa and Greg, are parents, students, music and movie lovers, and podcasters especiale. The Viva podcast is a podcast primarily about this couple's life. The interchange between the two of them is smooth and flows well, keeping the podcast moving along and highly listenable.

Greg and Lisa (let's not show any favoritism, eh?) are heavily into music and movies, so along with a little bit of content about school, jobs, and kids, much of what they discuss has to do with movies and music. They treat us to movie reviews and commentary, not just about first run movies, but also about rentals and movies that are off the beaten track with the occasional trailer review thrown in for good measure. On the music front Greg and Lisa listen to quite a bit of new music and give us some pretty in-depth looks at what they're listening to. They also listen to a lot of music that doesn't make the main-stream radio air-waves (at least not where I'm at), so they're a good way to find music you haven't heard about. In addition, while some musicians may rail at this, they often couch their musical comments in "sounds like" comparisons. I guess this tends to pigeon-hole artists, but it's quite helpful when looking for music you may want to try. They also play a portion of a track as a break in the middle of the show, and usually comment on it afterwards.

Lest I mislead, the Viva Podcast isn't about reviewing movies or music. Greg and Lisa also discuss their own life events with an engaging humor and vivacity and sprinkle in a bit of topical or societal commentary often based on something they've seen on television.

The audio quality is typically good; aside from the occasional clipping or distortion (I think caused by one of the hosts getting too close to the mic) the vocals are all clear and easy to understand and the levels are good. However after a recent change to the Propaganda podcasting software they seem to be still working out the levels and there's some new distortion that I hadn't heard before.

The podcast is family- and work-safe, and the balance between music and vocal is good and the fades well-executed. They started out podcasting 5 days a week or so, but have recently dropped back to thrice a week, which is still a healthy amount of work. Meta-data for the podcast is good; the file- and track-names match (which is nice) and consist of a channel name and date, and the album and artist name all work as well. The Viva Podcasts is encoded at 64 kbps, which is a good level for primarily talk.

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Posted by cori at 10:22 AM

Podcast Review: May it Please the Court podcast

WLF | May it Please the Court Law Weblog

Format: short audio blog posts
Content: quote of the day, commentary, rants
Rating:
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 1½ - 3 minutes

May It Please the Court is the irregularly published podcast from the Williams Law Firm in California. J. Craig Williams et. al. produce short podcasts containing a quote of the day and some commentary on the headline of the day. Most of the time the headlines and related commentary are related to a legal issue or court case that's come to the attention of the producers. On a few other occasions the loosely law related headline serves as a spring board for a rant about congress in baseball or Microsoft Word.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes a rant is just what the lawyer ordered. I'm certainly guilty of enough of them. But in this case the rants take away from what I perceive to be the value of this 'cast: a short opinion by a lawyer that could serve to clarify a complicated issue. The May It Please the Court blog at the link above certainly fulfills this purpose more often than not in its posts, but the podcast does it less often. On some Fridays, MIPLC repodcasts several other podcasts (Grape Radio and Reel Reviews Radio, to be specific). I'm assuming for the sake of this review that he's got the rights to do so, but I'm not sure why he would choose to repackage that content here.

In terms of audio quality, the actual sound quality is satisfactory, although there are a few occasions where there's significant clipping of the vocals. It's encoded at 128 kbps, which is quite high for the content, but given the short length of the 'cast the size of the files is still negligible. The quality of the actual delivery is sometimes uneven; it seems as though the podcasters are still getting used to the medium, but if they continue to podcast I suspect that will improve.

Speaking of rants, this is probably the first podcast the I've reviewed where I have a beef with its RSS feed. For one thing, there's no tag, which means that audio.weblogs.com will not accept a ping (for what it's worth, for this reason is almost a required element for podcast feeds). It's also missing all contact and date information at the channel level. These are all optional elements, and though I can't see any reason why the shouldn't be there, they don't have to be. However, the elements have the required attribute of "length", but it's always filled with "1". This means that iPodder (and some other aggregators beside, I'd surmise) don't know how big the enclosure is. Not a killer problem, but an inconvenience.

May It Please the Court also produces a tech channel and a video blog ("Vlawg") with different content. They originally requested reviews for both podcasts, but unless there's some more activity on the tech channel I don't see a reason to add it to the queue.

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Posted by cori at 09:35 PM

Podcast Review: Shakespeare Souffle

Shakespeare Souffle

Format: rambling talk
Content: talk about Bradley family culture
Rating:
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 30 minutes

Shakespeare Souffle is a "blogcast" of the audio antics of a family of 4 from Chicago. Subject matter is as widely varied as the activities and events of Bradley family life, ranging from a soundscape of a typical day to a recording of a trip to the field museum to 2 or 4 of the family members (and maybe some firends, too) sitting around a microphone and talking.

This family has the good fortune to get along well and to lead fairly busy and interesting lives, as families go. They're homeschoolers and have what appears to be a wide social circle. Daughter Fiona and son Liam get along as well as can be expected, as do the parents Ken and Kim. They have a cat. Fiona is a girl-scout, and Kim participates as well.

If you found the preceding paragraph somewhat interesting then Shakespeare Souffle is for you. If you found it less than compelling (as I did) then probably not, because that's largely the extent of the content on Shakespeare Souffle; details of the Bradley family life. My intention here is not to belittle the effort the Bradley's are putting in to their podcast; quite the opposite. They enjoy the podcasting, and it is the first podcast that I've heard that involves an entire family. They have a great time doing it and it's a great new way for a family to spend some additional time with each other, which is great! However, for some listeners the subject matter will be less than riveting.

Early in the podcast series Shakespeare Souffle suffered from some problems with audio quality. They've made great gains in that area more recently and their "at home" podcasts are intelligible, although with 4 or more people around a microphone it's inevitably hard to hear some portions and other portions are too loud. Their mobile 'casts still have some quality difficulties, but that's perhaps in the very nature of mobile podcasting. Track-naming is adequate but not ideal, comprised of the podcast channel name and podcast number, but no date; the file names contain the date and a shortened name, which is fairly accessible. Tracks are encoded at a variety of bit-rates, from 64kbps (probably a good rate) down to 24 kbps (too low in my opinion), and may be the cause of some of the quality problems they've had, especially seeing that the later podcasts have been the one with the higher bit-rates. The show is typically kid- and work-friendly, but on occasion hasn't been - and they've let the listeners know when it's not, which is good form. The Bradleys podcast somewhat irregularly, but average about every 2 weeks.

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Posted by cori at 03:57 PM

Podcast Review: open source sex

tiny nibbles - podcasting
Format: talk
Content: education sex talk and reading of erotica
Rating:
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 35 minutes

Disclaimer: this review may not be suitable for all audiences

Our host for Open Source Sex, Violet Blue, is a professional sex educator, author, and porn reviewer. As such she is highly qualified for the content of her podcast. Not only does she have a strong background in pornography and sex education; I believe she's also given up her day job to do this stuff full-time. Violet (may I call you Violet?) is striving to open our minds to the power of eroticism, fantasy, and sexual play.

She does a good job of it, as well. Her voice is well-suited to reading erotica, with a soft and sultry quality, and while she's not an actor she clearly enjoys the reading and puts herself into the characters' roles.

Early in her podcasts she was including a little more in the way of educational topics, and the more recent ones have been directed more exclusively at readings of a wide variety of erotica, from the racy to the raunchy. I don't think of myself as a prude, but I'm less interested in the erotica than in the educational topics Violet covered in her first podcast or two. She has returned to more "informative" topics in her latest podcast, however. In any case, if you're looking for erotica in a podcast, this is the place to go.

Violet's early podcasts suffered from some audio quality problems; the audio was difficult to hear on my portable player, even when turned all the way up and piped through my car's audio system. The levels were OK for listening on my laptop, however. In addition, there was a liitle bit of a tin-can syndrome in the first few podcasts. Since then, however, the audio has improved greatly, although they could still stand a little more volume. Violet encodes at a variety of bitrates, the early podcasts encoded at 32 kbps, which probably accounts for some of the quality issues. The more recent ones are anywhere from 64 kbps to 128 kbps, although I think the 64 kbps would be sufficient. The podcast meta-data is lacking some detail, but the latest few have been OK, albeit without a date tag in the file name (rant).

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Posted by cori at 06:31 AM

Recent Submissions: 2005-04-04

Here's what's been added since the last update. These have been posted to The New, New Podcast Review: Review Queue as well.

Talk

Music

Speechless:: feed
The Roadhouse :: feed

From the search log

Site news

Let's see. Well, I've caught up adding things to the queue, including these. While I'm on the subject, I changed the queue to use OPML and the activeRenderer APIs to display the list. It's the same organization that I use for the reviewed podcast list, so moving stuff from one to the other will be a lot easier. It also means that the "done" reviews in the queue are gone, but they're (almost) all in the reviewed list (I'm missing a few of the 3.5 star reviews still) and they were mostly cluttering up the queue anyway. Doing this led me to question the OPML architecture that I'm using for these. I'm putting html-escaped tags in the "text" attributes of the <outline> tags, which makes them display as links, which is pretty nice. However, it also means that the OPML is all but unreadable by humans, and I suspect that many apps that would read it probably don't like it much. So I'm thinking about changing that. To do so I'd have to have 2 <outline>s per submission - 1 for the site and 1 for the feed. If anyone has thoughts on this, please feel free to leave a comment.

As I noted above I'm still digging out of the search log backlog, but I don't feel a lot of urgency for that. I'm trying to settle into a more regular schedule between this and my other writing; we'll see how that goes.

Have a great week!

Posted by cori at 12:12 AM

Podcast Review: Tech Nation

IT Conversations; Tech Nation

Format: interviews
Content: Technically knowledgable host and guests talking about the guests specialities
Rating:
What I'm going to do: watch podcast feed
Typical Length: 5 - 40 minutes

Dr. Moira Gunn is something of a jack of all trades, with degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and work experience as a professor and at NASA. Perhaps that serves to explain the varied nature of the Tech Nation podcast's guests and subject matter.

Tech Nation is produced for public radio, and is one of IT Conversations first forays into repackaging National Public Radio audio into podcasts. The NPR show's format typically consists of 2 or more interviews; the IT Conversation series breaks these into separate 'casts. The Tech Nation website has similar information to the detail pages at IT Conversations, and points solely to IT Conversations for the internet audio.

One of the most refreshing aspects of the Tech Nation podcast is that unlike most tech podcasts (for example most of the techpodcasts.com affiliates), Tech Nation doesn't focus primarily on computer, web, and gadget technology. Dr. Gunn covers everything from special effects (Jim Rygiel - effects supervisor, LotR) to social science (Barbara Heinzen - geographer and social scientist). One of the interviews from each set is often part of a regular sub-series; Bio Tech Nation, which deals with, um, biotechnology. Guests cover the gamut from authors to entrepeneurs, professors to CEOs, programmers to futurists.

As we've come to expect from the IT Conversations series, the audio is well-mixed and well produced. The balance of host and guest voices is even and the intro / outro music fades smoothly into Dr. Gunn's own vocal introduction and closing. File- and track-naming is adequate, including both channel (series) name and the name of the guest; however I would like to see a date tag in the name in addition to the existing information. Also, more recently IT Conversations has begun naming the tracks with an abbreviated channel name (i.e. "ITC.TN..."), which I find less clear than the older naming, which had the full name of the series (i.e. "Tech Nation"). That said, the shorter name is probably more useful on a portable device, where the slow scrolling of longer names can be frustrating.

Tech Nation is produced weekly.

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Subscribe to AAC.

Also see reviews of other IT Conversations Series:
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; The Gillmor Gang
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Voices in Your Head
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Memory Lane

Disclosure: To avoid any sense of impropriety, I am going to be working on IT Conversations as an editor in the near future.

Posted by cori at 09:49 PM

Podcast Review: Acowo Podcast

ACOWO: Introduction of High Quality Netlabels

Format: individual music tracks
Content: independent music
Rating:
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 3 - 12 minutes

The Acowo podcast is essentially a companion to the Acowo blog, a resource for "Introduction of High Quality Netlabels." In other words, Acowo is essentially a site for tracking new releases from a few hand-picked netlabels.

Your host at the weblog is Kengo Miyazaki, and for this site he's picked a few "labels that are dealing with minimal, techno, abstract, experimental, ambient, noise and stuff like that." (from the FAQ). Kengo blogs information about new releases from his chosen labels, including label, artist, album, track information, availability of a donation page or shop, license for the MP3s, and host for the MP3s. There is often additional descriptive information about the artist culled from the source site for the netlabel. To that extent, the Acowo site seems to be a very useful place to find new music of this sort.

The podcast aspect of the production consists of the individual tracks that Kengo links to from the blog posts; all of the tracks he posts links to on the site are also 'cast over the feed. In this sense the Acowo podcast is very similar to the Starfrosch Podcast. I have detailed my opinions of single-track podcasts previously, in the reviews for both the Starfrosch Podcast and The Big Chap Podcast, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice it to say I can't comment meaningfully on delivery or production values for this podcast. The music Kengo podcasts is not altogether to my taste, but it is well executed and of high quality. The encoding rate is high (typically 192 kbps or above) frequently resulting in fairly large downloads. Given that the podcast comes out several times a week, you'll be downloading a fair amount of data. Track naming is satisfactory, and the file naming is OK as well, although it's sometimes difficult to decipher.

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Posted by cori at 03:58 PM

Podcast Review: The Bob & AJ Show

The BobAndAJ Show

Format: funny talk with some music
Content: interviews, music, general shenanigans
Rating:
What I'm going to do: watch this feed
Typical Length: 40 - 60 minutes

The Bob and AJ show comes to us from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and is (I believe) the first Canadian podcast I've reviewed. I really liked listening to these guys, partly because I lived for a few years in Sudbury, Ontario and hearing them speak brought back a lot of memories.

Bob and AJ mix up talk and music in a pretty good melange; they typically play 2-3 songs during the course of the show, and their musical taste is good. They've found some good artists in GarageBand and at least a few really good ones (Christa Couture in particular comes to mind), and must spend a fair amount of time researching their selections. The talk in the show centers around podcasting and recently they've been doing a lot of Skype interviews with other podcasters. In addition they throw in a fair amount of personal talk (but not too personal, if you know what I mean). Their self-deprecating humour (threw in that extra 'u' just for you guys, Bob and AJ) and self-effacing manner make them both easy to listen to and highly funny.

Bob and AJ are occasionally non-child- or work-safe but are for the most part unoffensive. In fact (and it may not seem a compliment to them) but this is one of the things that appealed to me about the Bob and AJ Show - perhaps I'm just getting old, or perhaps parenthood has taken its toll on me, but gratuitous cursing doesn't appeal to me much anymore. It's refreshing to hear some guys being funny without feeling like they have to swear. They broadcast once a week for now (typically on Sundays) but have been considering doing a shorter show more than once a week. They claim to shoot for 30 minutes but consisitently overshoot that and end up at 40 to 50 minutes. File meta-data is good, but I'd love to see the date in the track name as well (currently just the show number appears) (rant). Also, it'd be nice to have the track lengths in the podcast (rant).

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Posted by cori at 01:08 AM

Recent submissions: 2005-03-28

Here's what's been added since the last update (a month ago). These will be posted to The New, New Podcast Review: Review Queue as well, but not for a bit - I'm revamping the mechnism for the queue so that it's easier to maintain.

Talk

Music

From the search log

My apologies to all of you that have submitted podcasts but haven't heard back from me - obviously there are too many for me to respond individually this time. If you read this and think I missed you, please contact me.

In addition, several podcasts have dropped off the list either because they've been discontinued or for some other reason. Podcast King has been moved down the list and Reality Bitchslap Radio has ended, so will be pulled from the queue.

Lastly, you may have noticed a new tag on the Teach42 podcast review, named "I watch". I've added this to the list that previously consisted of "I subscribe" and "I do not subscribe". I determined that those 2 listings were too limiting, because sometimes I'm not interested in a particular subject matter enough to listen to every episode but liked the podcast enough to listen again. In those cases I subscribe to the text posts about the podcasts and watch that feed. If I see content that I think I'll find interesting then I'll listen to that episode. That behavior is represented by the "I watch" tag.

Have a great week!

Posted by cori at 12:01 AM

Podcast review: Teach42 Podcast

Teach42 » Teach42 Podcasts

Format: audio blog entry
Content: technology and education
Rating:
What I'm going to do: watch
Typical Length: 25 - 35 minutes

Stephen Dembo at Teach42 is an educator by vocation and a podcaster by obsession. Stephen's podcasting about educational issues and often about the conjuncture between education and technology, as befits his role as a Director of Technology. Stephen also occasionally podcasts about podcasting, blogging, and gadgetry without a direct link to education.

Gadget-based podcasts often provide interesting information about how other real people use their technology and how well the technology works in the real world - I found some of Stephen's commentary about his iPaq phone/PDA to be very interesting. However, I think the real value of Stephen's podcast is his commentary on education and technology in education. Stephen's been in education for some time and has seen it from a variety of positions, both in the classroom and out - he's one of those rare male teachers who loves to teach early childhood and has more recently been the Director of Technology for a small school in Chicago. His insights cover a wide variety of subjects within education, and he pays a lot of attention to other educator's blogs and podcasts and comments freely on those as well, bringing many different viewpoints into his podcast. His commentary on technology and education is especially enlightening, and he's clearly got a love of technology that provides an important viewpoint into this controversial topic.

Stephen is in his last semester as Director of Technology, but I hope that Stephen will continue to evangelize the importance of technology in education even after he's left behind the day-to-day worries of network outages and printer problems.

Stephen often speaks very quickly, which shows his enthusiasm for his subject, but can make it hard to follow his podcast - this issue might be worth an extra effort on Stephen's behalf to try to account for. Audio quality is mostly good in the Teach42 podcast, although Stephen's car-casts have an understandable weakness with regards to audio quality. In addition, some of Steve's podcasts have less than ideal balance between music and vocals and I occasionally have to adjust the volume of my player to account for the difference between Stephen's intro / outro or interstitial music and his vocal segments. Stephen makes a point of noting that he's not editing his podcasts and we're getting the "real Stephen" all the time. I think that it's great that many podcasters aren't editing what they say in their podcasts - that level of honesty is one of the things I like about podcasting. The downside of this "live production" model is that the balance of content to environment doesn't get the attention it deserves in many cases. Stephen encodes at what seems to be a variable bit-rate (the podcasts range from 65kbps to 96kbps) which is ok, although the structure and content of this podcast doesn't seem to require a 96 kbps encoding. Stephen's vocal quality is decent and his podcasts are almost universally work- and child-safe. Music track lengths not too important - Stephen doesn't always include music in his podcasts and rarely more than one track. Meta-data is OK - Stephen gives us the name of the podcats and the date in the file and track name. He uses the album name tag to include descriptive information about the podcast, which while not logical from a data standpoint at least gets that information on my portable player where I can see it. Stephen podcasts every couple of days, perhaps twice a week.

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Posted by cori at 08:58 AM

Recent submissions: 2005-02-27

As you might note from the title of this post, I've completely given up on the illusion that these updates are going to be weekly events, or even that they will appear on a predictable or even regular schedule. As I've mentioned before, life gets in the way, but more on that later....

Here's what's been added since the last update. These will be posted to The New, New Podcast Review: Review Queue as well.

Talk

TechNewsRadio: feed
Podcast from the Swamp - RSS Development with Eclipse Python and Ant, part 4: Updated: feed
superpixel :: see:learn:play :: home: feed
My Mac Guys Podcast: feed
Kentucky: feed
Podpoet: feed

Music

From the search log

So...life gets in the way indeed. Between a death in my wife's family and too much work to do at both my jobs I have had next to zero time even to spend with my family, let alone to do the listening and due diligence that I need to in order to write a good review. Therefore none have been written.... Also, if I somehow missed your submission to the queue this time around, please email me again - I'm sure it just got lost in the shuffle. Also, if I add your submitted podcast to the incorrect segment of my queue, please let me know. I don't pick from each side of the queue evenly - there are far more talk podcasts than music ones, so I'll usually do a few talkcast reviews and then a musiccast review. If I have you miscategorized I'll end up shuffling the queue just before I start writing; knowing ahead of time helps me out.

An another, unrelated subject, it looks like Ted Gilchrist of the Robot Books Botcast Network has picked up The New, New Podcast Review for a rebotcast. I'm tremendously flattered to be included amongst the other worthy rebotcasts (take a look at the list in opml or in html) and since I'm not doing a podcast of the reviews I think this is a great service. In fact, I'd be interested in the stats from the feed, since it's a feedburner feed. Thanks to Dan Klass for alerting me to it. It brings up a couple of very interesting questions, though (read on for a lengthy and somewhat involved discussion, if you're so inclined).

Thanks for your continued patience and patronage.

Have a great week!

Posted by cori at 11:47 PM

Here are the questions / potential problems that I see with the rebotcast under the Creative Commons licenses.
The creative commons license that I use to offer the content that the rebotcast is created from is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons Deed. There are 2 issues with this and the rebotcast that I can see:

is the attribution attached to the rebotcast sufficient to satisfy the attribution clause? There's a momentary mention of a partial URL in the text of the rebotcast which might be considered attribution. Also, some of the meta-data in the feedburner feed points back to me, so that also might be attribution. That's enough for me, but I wonder if that will be so for everyone.
The more serious (to my mind) issue with the rebotcast is not the attribution clause, but rather the Non-commercial and ShareAlike clauses. The feed for the rebotcast is provided under the Attribution 2.0 Creative Commons Deed, which states:

You are free:
...
* to make commercial use of the work

and does not state:

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
.
Again, not currently a big problem for me personally (although I could see where it might become one), but I can definitely see where some content providers would be seriously displeased with the fact that someone could come along and grab a rebotcast of their content and both refuse to share it and make money from it without compensating the original creator. I think this part is problematic at best, and a violation of the Creative Commons license at worst.

To be perfectly clear, I don't have a problem with my content being repurposed and repackaged. If I did, I wouldn't be offering it under the CC license as I am. I am satisfied with the level of attribution offered by Robot Books' current use of my work, but am less sure of the licensing of that derivative work. Ted, if you're reading (or listening?) to this, please contact me to discuss further (kinrowan at podcastreviews dot net).

Podcast Review: The Big Chap Podcast

podcasts - www.thebigchap.com

Format: back to back music tracks
Content: wide variety of different styles
Rating:
What I'm going to do: I subscribe
Typical Length: 1 hour to 1 hour & 15 minutes

While I haven't written it in so many words, but I think from my previous music podcast reviews it's clear that I'm not partial to podcasts that are nothing but music. The audio/music-phile in me definitely sees that advantages of having little or no talk mixed with the music itself, and I fully apreciate the departure from the mainstream radio model of incorporating commercials and "personality" into the soundtrack that most radio stations broadcast, something in me still wants to hear something of the personality of the editor of the particular musical thread that I'm listening to. I suppose this is partly becuase when I'm listening to a music podcast I want something different than what I get from listening to a CD - I spend a fair amount of time listening to music while alone, and one of the reasons I used to turn to radio was that listening to a CD seemed lonesome, while listening to the radio provided some level of companionship. Podcasts of music without the human touch of commentary seems more along the lines of a CD. I suppose this also might be due to being conditioned by listening to the radio for so many years.

But that's enough about me. Obviously (or not so obviously, perhaps) The Big Chap Podcast is a podcast of this type. As such podcasts go, it's brought me a little closer to embracing the format of a music-only podcast. Gordon's our host here, and he puts together as varied and appealing mix of music as I've heard. Listening to The Big Chap Podcast is remeniscent (to me, at least) of getting a new mix from that friend with the really eclectic musical tastes. Listen to the Big Chap and you'll hear music you've heard before and some you've never heard. You'll hear from artists you know and ones you've never heard of. Anything from The Who to Frank Zappa to Cake to Alison Moyet to Curtis Mayfield is fair game. The music Gordon mixes matches strangely with my own varied musical tastes, and the juxtaposition between tracks lends a great deal of interest to the flow of the podcast.

Unfortunately Gordon is that friend whose musical tastes you like a lot but you don't hear from nearly as often as you'd like (like I can talk, huh?). He hasn't sent out a new podcast for nearly a month, and even the posts on his blog have been irregular. Also on the negative side, the sources that Gordon uses for his music are widely varied as far a quality; some sound great and a few less so and the volume varies somewhat, requiring some adjustment over the course of the 'cast. Gordon also doesn't concern himself with RIAA risks as far as I can see, because much of the music he 'casts is certainly freighted with RIAA licensing issues. All of this said, if the Big Chap offers up more podcasts I'll definitely be downloading them.

Meta-data is minimal (rant); I'd at least like to see the channel name in the track and file name. For the last 2 podcasts Gordon included a date-stamp, which is useful. The Big Chap Podcast is also encoded at a fairly low bit-rate (48 kbps), which means that the hour-loing podcasts are relatively small, but certainly effects the quality - since this podcast is about the music, I think a slightly higher bit-rate would be adviseable. Clearly since there's no podcaster voice in the podcast, it's unlikely that individual track lengths will be forthcoming.

Subscribe to mp3s.

Posted by cori at 06:51 AM

This week's submissions: 2005-02-14

Here's what's been added this week. These will be posted to The New, New Podcast Review: Review Queue as well.

Talk

Music

IndiePodcasting.com - Music Podcasting and Promotion for Unsigned and Indie Bands: feed

From the search log

thegoodshit.co.uk - No rubbish music, just the good shit!: feed
Tokyo Calling: feed
Hertfordshire Chorus: feed
One Minute Tip: feed

Sorry I'm late - life gets in the way, you know....

Have a great week!

Posted by cori at 11:53 PM

Podcast Review: HOT Radio

HOT Radio Podcasting Schedule

Format: talk
Content: trading tips and market information
Rating:
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 20 minutes

The HOT Radio podcast is aptly named; not only is it about High Octane Trading, but your host, Steve Wirrick, is definitely high octane as well.

From what I can discern, Steve's podcast is an extension of Steve's existing stock market training business. From what I can hear in the podcast, Steve is either fairly successful at what he does, a very good actor, or optimistic to the point of insanity. His high-energy podcast leaves you in no doubt that there's money to be made with Steve's High Octane approach, and Steve markets his podcast as "The Quickest and Easiest Way For You to Consistently Learn My Money-Making Secrets." The only question that I have is whether or not Steve is intending to train people who already know something about trading or whether he is targeting his podcast at the complete trading neophyte. Because I have to say, I'm one of those neophytes and I didn't understand more than 1 word in 5 of what Steve was talking about. I'm sure once you know the jargon Steve's rapid commentary is meaningful, but certainly not from the outset.

All of that said, I should also point potential liseners to Steve's disclaimer, where he states:

Neither Steve Wirrick, nor anyone else at Planet Cash, Inc., are registered as a securities broker-dealer or an investment adviser either with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or with any state securities regulatory authority.

I am neither an economist nor a trader, but much of what I could glean from what Steve had to say seemed to contravene what I understand is commonly held to be sound investment strategy - invest for the long haul. Steve's strategy seems to be about short-term trades. To be fair to Steve I don't think he's pitching a long-term strategy here, but based on that fact this may not be the strategy for you. Your results, as they say, may vary.

Steve is very comfortable behind the mic, and his delivery is fast and smooth. A habit of his that I found to be somewhat annoying was his repetitive use of the NATO phonetic code to represent the ticker symbols of the companies whose stock he's discussing. While certainly helpful for clarity's sake, a little less repetition of those codes would be preferable to my listening pleasure. The meta-data for the HOT Radio Podcast is good, with a full title and date in both the file and track names and consistent tagging elsehwere. Steve's audio balance is good for the most part, although at the beginning and end of his vocal content he often seems to be fighting against the volume of his intro / outro music, so perhaps fading that music down a little more before he starts to talk would make things a little easier both for him and his listeners. In a strange twist of podcasting chance, Steve uses the same intro / outro music as another energetic podcaster, another paragon of promotion, Matthew Bischoff of Esc From The World!. In fact their delivery is so similar that if they didn't live on opposite sides of the country I'd be tempted to say they might be related.

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Posted by cori at 10:56 PM

Podcast Review: The Skinny on Sports

Skinny on Sports - Podcast - skinnyonsports.com

Format: talk show
Content: sports talk
Rating:
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 10 minutes

Andy and Matt Skinn are podcasting a good, compact volume of sports talk once a week (usually Sundays) for all the sports interested podcatchers out there in podcast-land.

If you're a regular reader of the site, or have looked at the back posts, you're probably aware that I'm not much on sports. Don't watch 'em, don't really pay that much attention to them. But I've long been surprized that sports podcasts aren't a lot more popular, given the fairly common shared interest in various sports not just in North America but seemingly world-wide. However, I do see that that's changing; while the iPodder.org : Podcasts directory only lists 7 or so, SportPodcasts.com lists around 30. That's great news for you sport fans, I think.

Back to Andy and Matt's podcast. The guys have a good format put together. They've broken each episode into 4 quarters and an overtime, dividing the 'cast into 5 roughly equal-length segments, each about a different sports topic. Their topics often involve recent games and/or predictions for upcoming ones, but they often also discuss the intersection of sports and society (issues such as women playing men's sports or steroids in Major League Baseball). They've also had a few interviews and seem likely to have more. They have fairly insightful things to say about all these subjects and seem knowledgeable about the sports side of things (I'll have to defer that decision to the more sports-knowledgeable among you since I hardly know the difference between a full court press and an offside pass). Their sports "obsessions" are dealt with in a fairly level-headed manner, which is refreshing.

The style of the podcast is likewise refreshing and easy to listen to; it has the feel of a couple of guys having a conversation at the water cooler (which I suppose it largely is, minus the water cooler). While in their interview at Podcast Alley they comment that they think they've gotten more comfortable since the first podcast, they were pretty comfortable to begin with and now they sound highly professional, with nary a stutter or hesitation to be heard. The audio balance between the musical bed and intro / outro music and their vocals is satisfactory. I would say, however, that while the use of the quarter-buzzer as a device to delineate between segments is effective and fitting, it's fairly loud and often obscures part of their commentary. While I'm sure it serves to keep them on target time-wise (because they are very conscious of their self-imposed 10 minute limit) they might be better served by playing it only when they're truly done with the commentary in any one section. File- and track-naming is satisfactory - while the track name doesn't contain the full podcast name they are consistent in using the name of the podcast for the artist tag, so the data is easily available.

All in all, if you like sports you're likely to enjoy The Skinny on Sports

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Posted by cori at 12:23 AM