With the new internet pipe, I can now download a podcast in very little time. Today’s drivetime choice is Finally, My Last Christmas Music Show, from the Brooklyn Bluesman. Looking forward to the drive today.

-k-

Read this comment on my posts about the Erik’s Diner podcast.

The comment is well-taken; I was working on a post about the other side of the story, and frankly, ran out of gas in trying to get it together a night or two ago.

I’ve listened to the podcast dedicated to an interview with Mr. George Lambert of podkey.com. George comes across as a guy who is sincere about promoting podcasting, and enabling listeners to find shows that might interest them. He didn’t sound the least bit nefarious to me. Mr. Lambert in fact offered a free service to podcasters, when podcasting was in its nascent state, a scant 15 or so months ago. Podcasters would register keywords, or tags, which were descriptive of their shows. Mr. Lambert added no advertising or other content to the feeds; rather, the podkeyword feed was redirected to the canonical URL where the podcast could be found; this URL was supplied when the podcast was initially registered at podkeyword.

A rather lengthy quote from eWeek follow-up story:

Podcasters happy with the redirection service provided by Podkey aren’t hesitating to come to its defense.

One such comment demonstrates the possibility of a user having registered with Podkey and then forgotten about it: “From my own experience, I have to say, my dealings with George have always been on the up and up,” Podcaster Kevin Devin wrote on Lambert’s blog.

“I too had created a Podkeyword for my Podcast WAY back in late 2004. Interestingly, I had actually forgotten about Podkey until iTunes hit with their Podcast directory, which ended up including two different listings for my feed. The Podkey one, and my actual.”

When Devin discovered the listing, he wrote, he discussed with Lambert what the impact would be of deleting the keyword altogether. Devin planned to have Lambert redirect what was listed under the Podkey feed to another special feed that contained only a single “special” Podcast providing listeners information on what was happening.

This way, Devin wrote, listeners would receive notice in his own voice as to what was going on and could then be redirected to his actual feed, which he preferred to use.

“Additionally, it would be simple to include in that special feed the tags to tell iTunes NOT to list that feed,” he wrote.

While it would have created an interruption of service similar to what Marcus experienced, that’s just what happens when a service such as iTunes collects data from numerous directories, Devin said.

“That act by Apple is what has caused most of this problem ALONG WITH our own willingness to list ourselves with services like Podkey,” he wrote.

“I have no doubt that had [Marcus] asked [Lambert] to do the same thing for him, for all of his keywords, the results here would have been far different than what is happening now,” Devin wrote.

It certainly seems from the above that George Lambert was more than willing to work with podcasters.

So, as I see it, in keeping with the Principle of Least Astonishment, here’s the how this whole thing went down:

1) Erik Marcus registered his Erik’s Diner podcast with podkeyword.com in order to boost listenership;

2) It worked, listeners subscribed, and listened;

3) Yahoo and Apple added the podkeyword-redirected feeds to their directories.

4) Erik noticed this, and instead of proceeding like Kevin did in the above quote, requested his feeds be deleted from podkeyword, thereby breaking the feed lifeline, and causing his listenership to tank.

If podkeyword were formed with malicious intent, why haven’t bunches of podcasts been “hijacked”?

I still think that the Apples and Yahoos of the world should be more responsive in updating their podcast directories in such circumstances, and that they should do a better job of vetting the authenticity of new feeds added. Even without podkeyword and other services, it would be easy to register a podcast feed owned by someone else, and redirect it, via iTunes, or the Yahoo Podcast registry.

To the extent that this blog has fanned the flames of misinformation, I apologize. And this post is my attempt to set things straight. And for any blogger or podcaster that may have sent an obscene or threatening email to George, for heaven’s sake grow up.

-k-

Technorati Tags: Erik’s Diner, podcasting, podkey, podkeyword, vegan.com

And the WOTY (Word Of The Year) is podcast.

And I remember when audication ruled the earth.

Man, I’m old.

-k-

UPDATE: There’s podcasting, then there’s Clambakes.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, rootkit

Podcasting is several months past its first birthday. I’m still ruminating on the audios I’ve heard thus far from The Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference 2005 presentations. I’ve still got some to listen to, but I’m getting there.

I don’t know how many simple Ken iPod¹ listeners were there at the conference; I’m guessing not many. So, I’ll assume the mantle, and opine away, in the first of a mini series of posts:

Listening to podcasts isn’t a matter of “dialing through the stations”. That’s called radio, when you do that. Nope, signing up for a podcast requires involvement on the listener’s part; either via clicking an MP3 link to download, or better yet, putting the ‘cast’s RSS feed into a podcatching client of choice. I’ve read all kinds of pondering about “making it easy to subscribe to a podcast”. The answer to that is making the podcast URL prominent on the podcaster’s weblog. People can cut and paste; they’ve been doing that since the early Windows days. The point here is that the listener makes a conscious choice, to the effect of “this is a good show; it’s important to me; and I’m willing to expend a little effort so I don’t miss any episodes.” So listeners are involved, even prior to hearing the show for the first time.

-k-

1 – My name is Ken, not Joe. Just an humble listener, not a “consumer”.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, portablemediaexpo

OK, so news.com now picks up this non-event. I just wish these twits would quit bickering, and getting covered like something from the WWE. Or I can stop reading about them.

I’ll take door 2, Monty.

-k-

Technorati Tags: Adam Curry, podcasting, WikiPedia

A few posts back, I wrote about the hijacking of the “Erik’s Diner” podcast.

There are links all over the place; I read a few, including comments:

Colette Vogele, a lawyer with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, has a post which speaks to some of the legal matters, though with enough technology to make it interesting;

From there to Pete Prodoehl, who through his blog post and his comments on Colette’s blog, shows he knows what’s going on.

From the above, it’s clear that there’s been a lot of talk about this case, some of which involves adding additional information to RSS feeds, watermarking the feed content in some fashion, encrypting the feed, and so on ad infinitum.

And all of this leads me back to what I believed originally, which is:

1) Feeds (blog, podcasts, vlog, whatever) are freely available to all; that’s the beauty of RSS. They should remain that way.

2) There is no problem with the RSS spec, insofar as this case goes.

3) Any attempts to modify RSS to fix this thing should be stoutly resisted.

4) The real problem here has nothing to do with specs, encryption, nor anything of the sort. The problem is simply that the Yahoos, Apples, and other BigCo service providers, must vet the legitimacy of new feeds added to their services. They surely have tools available to enable them to do such a thing; they should use them. And, if problems ensue, they should be more responsive than they currently appear to be.

And lastly, we’re still living in a virtual wild, wild west, in lots of ways. So, if you are publishing/podcasting/vlogging/producing, be aware, and protect yourself accordingly. I’m not blaming the victim here; however, the system shouldn’t, and mustn’t change, because someone didn’t know or didn’t understand the rules.

-k-

Technorati Tags: Erik’s Diner, podcasting, RSS

I’d surmised earlier that there may be a name change in iPodderX‘s future. Insight such as that has been rewarded; not only is iPodderX changing its name, but they are having a neat little contest to choose the name.

Don’t bother entering, though; I have just submitted a name so succinct in its cleverness¹, that any other entries will fall into the also-ran category.

-k-

PS: By any name, this is the best media aggregator you can get. Period.

1 – You mean “I’d like to win some cool stuff” isn’t a good reason to send in a name ?

Technorati Tags: podcasting, ipodderx

I had an enjoyable drive to work today, listening to the audio of Dave Slusher’s presentation at the recently-concluded Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference 2005. Dave is the ever-personable host of the Evil Genius Chronicles Weblog and Clambake. This was a one hour or so presentation of the human side of podcasting. I have a 40 minute commute; today was one of those rare days I wished for a longer drive. I heard the last bit driving home. Thank heaven for the iMac@home, so I could listen again.

My original plan was to quote specific things from the talk, and point out how blindingly correct everything was, and echo a few “right on!”’s, but I can’t do that right now; there were far too many nuggets in the stream, and a beer or two too many in me to do an even passable job. I got a couple of the larger ones:

1) “The baby-boomers were an inventive generation”. Hailing from this group myself, and having spent several childhood days in cardboard boxes that were space capsules, race cars, airplanes, or Army forts, depending on my mood du’jour, took me back a lot of years. In my day, we used what we had, imagined the rest, dreamed for the future, and were encouraged by our community. Having said all that, I can’t make my own pacemaker.

2) There was a comment in the talk, at least I think there was, that pointed out the powerful connections that simple audio, formerly known as radio, can make with an audience. It reminded me of an “ad for radio ads” that ran on the same little 1000 watt AM radio station where Dave spent his high school summers that said something like “Can’t TV stretch the imagination?” And the answer was “Yes, up to 27 inches.”¹ I loved radio back in those days, and podcasts are as close to that as exists today. There’s an affinity in just the voices that take you back to what you knew, or more importantly, propel you forward to where you are going.

Dave made numerous observations of a straightforward economic nature in this talk²; these stirred up some deep-seated ideas I couldn’t begin to elucidate tonight. But I’m going to later.

A great talk; check it out.
-k-

1 – Yes, Virginia, there was a time when 27-inch TVs ruled the earth.

2 – Not Economics, but economics, a’la Thoreau, et.al.

Technorati Tags: Evil Genius Chronicles, podcasting, portablemediaexpo

From eWeek, the tale of a Erik Marcus, podcaster, whose feed was hijacked, and according to the article, held for ransom.

According to TFA:

Over the past few weeks, he noticed that Yahoo Inc. had created an entry for his show on its beta site, Podcasts.yahoo.com.

The page had an RSS feed belonging not to Vegan.com, however, but to a site named Podkeyword.com.

And, the plot sickens:

Marcus came to find that Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes service, which shields RSS information from its users, had also picked up the Podkeyword URL.

Which leads us to the ransom part:

Marcus then wrote back to Podkeyword to ask that his listing be temporarily reinstated on Podkeyword while he worked to fix things with Apple. Podkeyword reportedly responded that the listing would be reinstated only if Marcus provided an unspecified payment or agreed permanently to its terms.

And, lastly, the scheme in a nutshell:

The manner in which the purported hijacking occurred exemplifies the fact that RSS feeds are far more vulnerable to squatters than Web site domains. The method doesn’t require stolen passwords or other overtly illegal methods.

Rather, it merely involves finding a target Podcast and creating a unique URL for it on a Web site that the hijacker can control. The hijacker then points his URL to the RSS feed of the target Podcast.

Next, the hijacker does whatever it takes to ensure that, as new Podcast engines come to market, the page each engine creates for the target Podcast points to the hijacker’s URL instead of to the Podcast creator’s official URL.

Meanwhile, Erik’s audience dropped from somewhere around 1500 listeners to around 500.

There’s a lot of legal discussion in the article, but being just a simple man, I’d pose the following question to these BigCo podcast aggregators: How do you vet the veracity of any feeds submitted to your sites? And I’ll provide the answer: Poorly, if at all.

And end with a last question:Why not?
-k-

Technorati Tags: podcasting, Erik’s Diner, vegan.com