I really like the This American Life podcast. It's probably one of my favorite pieces of public radio, and having a full high-quality public feed is fantastic. However, I've been a little grumpy about the long forewords that have been put into the show lately, asking for donations from podcast listeners. Here's the scoop: apparently WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) is spending US$150K just on the bandwidth to keep the podcast on the air (not counting servers, staff, or whatever). This is not just small potatoes for WBEZ; they just laid off a dozen workers. So, podcast listeners should pay their fair share and help out Chicago Public Radio. Now, I'm a big fan of public radio, and I think everyone should become a member. However, I find the premise of this solicitation kind of faulty. First, there are a lot of technical ways they could cut down on their bandwidth requirements. Providing an alternative BitTorrent RSS feed, for example, would reduce their bandwidth requirements a lot. They'd need to put a bit of documentation on their site, but is that really harder than getting people to pony up $$? I think not. Second, they could change the redistribution requirements and let other people or organizations mirror the episodes. A Creative Commons license would let other people distribute the files, saving WBEZ a lot (possibly all) of the distribution costs. But that second option is probably not that interesting to WBEZ. Why not? Because they make money selling "This American Life" to other public radio stations. If they put it under a free-redistribution license, they wouldn't be able to get that income. So, in reality, the service announcements at the beginning of the podcasts aren't really asking listeners to keep the podcasts running. There are lots of ways to do that. What the announcements ask is for listeners to support a particular "business" model. There are even ways (like BitTorrent) to have their cake and eat it too. I'm still going to contribute to WBEZ, since I like the show and I'm glad it's produced the way it is. But I regret the disingenuous guilt-tripping that's going on. It's not a fair way to treat listeners and supporters. tags: thisamericanlife wbez publicradio podcast cc bittorrent
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
15 Nivôse CCXVII
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/15_Niv%C3%B4se_CCXVII
January 4 2009, 3:30am | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
3 Floréal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/3_Flor%C3%A9al_CCXVI
I'm happy to point to the announcement that Wikitravel Press now has a guide to Paris. Paris has long been a targeted city for Wikitravel Press, and I'm really happy we were able to get this book out. Bonus: the Wikitravel Guide to Paris includes maps from OpenStreetMap, the Open Content geo database and mapping system. We've got some new software to overlay Wikitravel listings onto the maps, and it's working really well. Thanks to OSM, editor Mark Jaroski, and managing editor Jani Patokallio for getting this great book out... just in time for Paris spring! tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress paris guidebook opencontent openstreetmap Podcasts I asked a couple of days ago (Journal/30 Germinal CCXVI) about podcasts on the subject of Open Source and Open Content. I wanted to summarize a few that came in through comments on my blog: The iCommons Podcast, which (like many podcasts) seems to be running a little slow -- no updates in about a year. Still, an interesting project to be watching. (thanks Brianna) Wikipedia Weekly, the really great show by Andrew Lih and Liam Wyatt. I should have thought of WW before -- I was interviewed for the show last year! (thanks Padraic) Also worth noting is Not the Wikipedia Weekly, which is, uh, not the Wikipedia Weekly. I got this one from an episode of WW! LUG Radio, which I found from another podcast, LQ Radio. This has turned into a pretty decent list, but I'd love to see some more diverse discussion of Open Content and Open Source in general. Please, feel free to send more tips. tags: podcast linux opensource opencontent Vinismo For some reason Vinismo went over some tipping point with StumbleUpon this weekend, and we had a real flood of users from that bookmarking site. I can't say why that happens; I find SU to be a totally opaque Web site and service. In other news, Stevey likes our business cards. Me too! I think they look great. M-C Doyon, the Montreal graphic designer who laid out our Web site, also did our paper branding, and I think she did a great job. tags: vinismo stevey marieclaudedoyon cards Yay Firefox 3.0 I don't know when it happened, but Firefox 3.0 beta does non-ASCII characters in the address bar correctly. So, if you're reading this entry on my site with FF3, you'll see the é in "Floréal" rather than the URL-encoded "Floréal". I also like seeing Japanese Wikipedia pages in the address bar showing up correctly. Nice job, FF3 team. tags: firefox firefox3 utf8 url Planet software should preserve categories So, apparently there's once again rising problems with content drift on Planet Debian. Personally, I think this is a problem with a technical solution. All three main flavours of RSS support post categorization. Many, many kinds of feed software provide categories (see, for example, this feed). If the Planet software would preserve these categories and pass them through to the output RSS feeds, then people who really only want to read about Debian could filter the output feeds for category "debian". People who wanted to know about other parts of their fellow Debianistas' lives would just leave the feeds unfiltered. I'm not sure if the Planet software doesn't support categories in output at all, or if it's just an option that's turned off on Planet Debian. If nobody else wants to take a look, I can look into making this work. It seems like a pretty simple fix. tags: planet planetdebian rss categories
- Tags:
- opensource
- podcast
- wikitravel
- wikitravelpress
- paris
- guidebook
- opencontent
- openstreetmap
- linux
- vinismo
- stevey
- marieclaudedoyon
- cards
- firefox
- firefox3
- utf8
- url
- planet
- planetdebian
- rss
- categories
April 22 2008, 4:12pm | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
30 Germinal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/30_Germinal_CCXVI
So, I'm really getting into the podcasts lately. I got myself a personal music player (one of these) in winter, and I've been using it to listen to podcasts while I run. Earideas has been a huge help in finding new podcasts to listen to. I've kind of graduated from the best of earideas feed, which covers a wide variety of podcasts, and I'm trying to dig into things that really matter to me. Three things in particular, of course: wine, parenting, and Open Source/Open Content. I've found a good number of podcasts on the first two subjects, but only a few on the last. Right now I listen to: the infrequent and misnomered FLOSS weekly, which isn't the same without Chris DiBona. LinuxCast, featuring the mellifluous tones of Don Marti LQ Radio, from Linux Questions. So, what else is out there for Free, Libre, Open kinda people? Any podcast suggestions? tags: lazyweb podcast floss flossweekly linuxcast lqradio
April 19 2008, 8:15am | Comments »
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