And He Blogs

If you want to get into podcasting, but you’re not willing to go through the steps and work to get a hosted WordPress blog (like we have with Bluehost), I have a recommendation for you. Check out my new WordPress podcast site at Podbean.com. Talk about feeling at home with an interface. On the Dashboard, "Write" is replaced with the word "Publish" so you can introduce (blog) a new podcast, and provide "show notes" for your recording. The Upload feature is one button easy, though if you get a paid account you will have FTP available to get your files (multiple files) up to the site. The rest of the interface has that familiar WordPress feel, with "Layout" being the place where you change your theme. That’s the best part about Podbean is that you get a WordPress blog to go with your podcast site.

The basic, free account gives you 100MB of storage and 5GB of monthly bandwidth. You also get some nice features to set up your podcast for an iTunes feed, and these features remind me of what PodPress gives you in combination with a standard WordPress install.

Now, if Podbean can trick out a WordPress install to do podcasts, it’s not too much of a leap to say that there’s great hope for a WordPress CMS/LMS in a short period of time. Podbean has done a lot to show me the real potential of the WordPress platform. Yes, I guess that’s put me in the front pew in Reverend Jim’s church!

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UPDATE: I discovered the culprit of my Ultra CS3 woes. Sony Vegas 7! I installed it on my way to installing Vegas Pro 8 upgrade and it immediately borked Ultra. After I installed version 8, I was able to uninstall version 7 and Ultra was back to working. Soundbooth sucks anyway, so while I don’t know whether it borked and unborked with Vegas, I don’t care!

I have really (really, really) liked Vista on my laptop/tablet (Toshiba Tecra M7). I have an editing workstation with Vista Ultimate on it. I need to do audio and video editing with this machine. It’s giving me more than a reasonable amount of trouble. The most strangeness is coming from Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. The suite was running OK, though there was a very minor problem with Premiere. It would give an error about starting in Admin mode, but it would still work fine. Now Premiere and Soundbooth are KO’d (Ultra never worked, it gives the same “stopped working” error). I’m trying out Sound Forge 9 and that runs like a champ. The latest Camtasia runs fine, but there is an audio issue. I can only record from the microphone. I can’t record what’s coming out of the speakers (in other words audio from programs that have sound). That’s an issue that TechSmith needs to fix.

So what to do? I like Vista. I like the improvements that it delivers, provided you throw the proper amount of memory at it (2GB is my recommendation). I know people are having driver issues with it. That’s not all Microsoft’s fault. Companies had a year before Vista shipped to address that. However, Microsoft changed some fundamental handling of the audio hardware and it’s wreaking havoc. I need audio to work right in several programs. I don’t even care who is to blame right now. I need the programs to run. Is Vista Ultimate the problem? I have Vista Enterprise available to me. The Camtasia issue is the one that might push me back to XP, it’s just that I am not looking forward to the re-installation. I have the weekend to think it over. I always look at these as learning experiences, well at least I used to when I was doing more tech support. Now it’s a little old.

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This is actually pretty funny. I am now presented with yet another chance to have fun at Jon Udell’s expense. First, some background. Many of you know, we were honored to have Jon talk at our Faculty Academy ‘06 edition. We were quadruplely (???) honored when he had very kind words regarding the Teaching and Learning crew here at UMW. We continue to keep Jon in the "minds that inspire us" category. So imagine how tickled I was to see how persistent Jon was in trying to follow me on Twitter, as demonstrated by my Hotmail account (my Twitter email address of record). Sure looks like Jon is spamming me something awful. Well, truth be told, it’s actually Twitter not working right (how’s that possible ).

The other fact is that I recently discovered Jon was on Twitter more regularly. There was even this recent cryptic message from Jon that actually turned out to be a basis for a blog post. Jon being on Twitter is to me a good sign that it is an appropriate tool to be using in my work. I want to know what Jon is working on and Twitter gives me access to his and other great minds, including my colleagues here at UMW.

I direct messaged Jon on Twitter telling him that I would un-follow and then re-follow him to see it that fixed things. We’ll see, but Jon you should know, it’s an honor to be spammed by you!

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For those of you who haven’t heard of Picnik, here is a little promotional video that those folks have put up on YouTube. If you store your photos online at sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, or even Facebook, then why not use an online photo editor. The Picknik folks are doing what looks like a bit of a promotional tour (NBC and ABC networks), so I’ll help them out (again) by posting their video here, and vouching for their service. It really does work elegantly with really easy and tight integration with the above mentioned photo services. Their "premium" features are even available for free, for a limited time.

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Two more great videos from the Digital Ethnography crew at Kansas State University . . .

A Vision of Students Today

Information R/evolution

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Why not get some onsite video when you visit a place in Google Earth? The

Google Lat Long blog announced yesterday that if a YouTube uploader "geotagged" a video in YouTube, a Google Earth user can see videos associated with that specific place. The example above shows a video from the observation deck of the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario. It’s another interesting way to see the world.

I’ve added the location information to a video of the Jepson Science Center (an "exciting" video from a project a while back). I don’t know if there is supposed to be a delay and will eventually be added to Google Earth, but as of this morning (16 hours later) it has not shown up. I reserve the right to have screwed something up, so we’ll see.

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This one comes via the Tubetorial site (which has a definite "monitize it" theme). As the video demonstrates, there is now a Revver plugin for WordPress. What are the advantages of Revver over something like YouTube? Well, for one thing, you can make money from your videos. The second advantage is that the video quality is superior to what you’ll get with YouTube. The screencast in the above video looks great.

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Thanks to an intrepid UMW Blogger, it was brought to my attention that one of my favorite bands is releasing their new album as a download on October 10. How much will it cost. Well, you name the price. "No really, it’s up to you."

I never really care about how much a record sells by a band. It has no correlation to whether the music is any good or not. However, this will be pure profit going to the band, and it’s up to the listener what that profit is. It’s time to find out whether this free-love, hippy, Internet stuff is really worth anything. I don’t know the details about whether there is any DRM on the digital tracks, but knowing Radiohead, I’m guessing not. So how will that affect piracy? Well, since you CAN type in "0.00" Why would you pirate this?

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