Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I upgraded the software on this site today. Both WordPress and Podpress are now up-to-date. I recently did the same to my podcast site.

Okay, so the blog software is updated, but why Podpress? Why podcast support in a blog the rarely has audio content? Continue Reading…

Recently, the Copyright Royalty Board set new rates for internet radio to pay to play music. Acting in a way that greatly benefits the Recording Industry, who must be rubbing their hands together in glee right now counting their profits, they set them so high it will make streaming radio on the internet prohibitively expensive for even the largest entities. Even large new media outlets like NPR, AOL Radio and Live 365 are threatened by this.

Here’s what one blog, Linux Journal had to say:

In a move that recalls the Vogons’ decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising the Copyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won’t be inconvenienced by something it doesn’t know, like or understand.

Read more about this and how you can take action against it:

Save Our Internet Radio
Save The Streams

At this point the only possibility is to persuade our government to change this action. Contact your Senator and Representatives and tell them you don’t want internet radio to be priced out of existence.

How this affects podcasts isn’t clear, but you can bet they will either try to apply this to it, or come up with something just as bad soon.

I’ve been hearing about this Web 2.0 for about a year now. No one seemed to be able to really define what it is, though. It finally dawned on me one day after all the new cool stuff (that’s a technical term…) I’ve been seeing for the web. Continue Reading…

I went to a conference – actually, an un-conference – a couple weeks ago in Toronto about podcasting. It was called Podcamp Toronto and was held at Ryerson University right in downtown Toronto.

I had a great time, of course. I’ve always liked Toronto ever since our days in high school when my class went there for a class trip. We liked it so much, we went twice, two different years. We went to Crystal Beach one other year, and I don’t remember the fourth, so Canada in general was pretty popular.
Continue Reading…