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Author: Christopher S Penn
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Farewell, still photographers
Something struck me tonight as I was taking a screenshot of my Mac. HDTV at 1080p is 1920 x 1080 pixels. That’s roughly two megapixels.
With 2 megapixels, you can print a reasonably nice 4 x 6 photo at 300 DPI.
Think about that for a second.
HDTV. 4 x 6 photo.
What does this mean? It means that the age of the still photographer may be coming to an end, at least in the way that we know it, where you try to click the shutter at just the right moment, in just the right light, to capture just the right photo.
As technology improves, as video goes from 1080p to higher and higher resolutions, at some point you won’t ever need to worry about clicking the shutter to capture a great photo. You’ll simply open the video stream, find the exact moment in the video that you want to print as a still photo, export that frame, and call it a day. Imagine what that will mean for portrait studios – just tell someone to come in for a minute, make a bunch of faces, have fun, don’t worry about posing, and then after 60 seconds of video or so, go to the studio display, scroll through the video stream, and get the photo you want.
Where will we be in 10 years? I remember the maximum resolution a consumer could get for reasonably money 10 years ago was 640 x 480 in the Sony Mavica and the Apple Quicktake. Today, you can get a 12 megapixel camera for about the same amount of money – 40 times the resolution. If we’re today at 2 megapixel VIDEO stills, and technology manages the same rate of improvement, we’ll be able to print mural-sized photos from our videos in the next decade.
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Declaring Someone Else's Independence
Once you’ve declared your own independence from doing things the way they’ve always been done, from mainstream media and mainstream thinking, make a commitment to help someone else declare their independence today – or at least realize that the option exists. Whether it’s at the barbeque, fireworks, on a hike, no matter where, bring a business card with you and share podcasting and new media with one person today who doesn’t know what it is.
Statistics tell me almost 150 people visited this blog yesterday. After today, we should have 150 NEW listeners in podcasting.
Go bring some independence.
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Happy Fourth!
Happy Fourth of July to all Americans! If you have a Mac, check out Skyrocket, a fantastic fireworks screensaver that’s safe for kids of all ages.
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I Want Different Podcast Awards
The Podcast Awards must be happening. In the past 24 hours, I’ve gotten 12 emails, over 40 bulletins on MySpace, and on virtually every other channel you can reach out to your audience with, I’ve had fellow podcasters begging, pleading, and pimping for votes for the 2007 Podcast Awards.
Now, don’t get me wrong. If my day job podcast, the Financial Aid Podcast, were to win an award, cool. More stuff for the resume, etc. As a prize, you know what I would want?
A PR Newswire US ENT-N1 press release, a promo on every nominated show, AND $500 in Google Adwords credits that I could use to build new audience. Here’s the thing I don’t like about the Podcast Awards – and believe me, it’s no dig on Todd Cochrane or the Podcast Connect folks, who do a great job with the awards – but the Podcast Awards are a fishbowl decoration.
What do I mean? To quote PodCamp co-founder and partner Chris Brogan, they’re an internal thing to the podcasting community, news inside the fishbowl, inside the echo chamber. Show the award to anyone deep inside the podcasting community, and they’ll know of it at the least (particularly if they’re friends of the winner on MySpace and got the same bulletin 6 times in 30 minutes). Show the award to the average passerby on Fifth Avenue or Ghirardelli Square or Faneuil Hall, and they’ll look at you very, very blankly, and probably mutter something polite as they run away from you.
What would be cool is if the Podcast Awards, or an award like it, had some of the values that I think are so essential to new media built right into them, the same values we try to build into PodCamp – transparency, openness, and most of all, outreach to people who are just getting into podcasting or are thinking about jumping in. What would that look like?
Well, for starters, nominees would need to provide a data set to the awards committee – statistics for a minimum of 3 months from two different, unaffiliated data sources. They could be Libsyn stats combined with Feedburner numbers, or Blubrry info combined with Podshow PDN info, or Apache weblogs and Kiptronic data. Whatever the numbers are you’d submit as an award participant, you’d agree to have them published publicly, because transparency is the key to fairness.
What would the judges be looking for?
– Largest audience. That’s a good metric. Measure a 30 day running average based on downloads per unique IP address.
– Most improved audience. A show that went from 10 listeners/viewers to 10,000 listeners in 3 months would be a huge gain. Again, downloads per unique IP address.
– Most diverse audience. Take a look at your web logs. I’d bet you that you don’t have a giant long tail of referrers in it. Suppose a show had referring site links – inbound links – from over 10,000 different web sites? That’d be some definite outreach (for the record, Bum Rush the Charts had about 13,000 referring sites at peak).
– One subjective award to the person or persons who’ve done the most to bring in new listeners to the podcasting community – not to your show, but to podcasting in general.As part of the award acceptance, the winners would need to provide details on how they achieved their accomplishments, and suggestions for others to help them grow their audiences, too.
Podcasting is practically self-selling – free, legal music, infinite choice in subject matter (and quality), unique perspectives on issues, and everything under the sun. More variety than Clear Channel’s swill, and it keeps the ol’ iPod fresh instead of shuffling the same library over and over again. However, podcasting needs to get people involved into at least one show – and then the listener will likely get curious about what ELSE is available. But you have to get them exposed to that one show first.
Outreach. Distribution. These are what podcasting is missing right now in a systematic fashion, and these are our Dip (Seth Godin, thank you) that we must overcome in order to make this podcasting phenomenon more than a passing fad.
So what do you say? Should we have the Podcasting Outreach Awards?
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Nokia Podcasting on the N91 Handset
Nokia Podcasting on the N91 Handset
System: 2.20
Software: Podcatching Client 1.00.3 SISHere’s what I’ve discovered after having a Nokia N91 for 48 hours…
Risto K. from Nokia flat out said at PodCamp Europe that the only directory Nokia *searches* for podcasts is DigitalPodcast.com. Make sure your show is listed in there.
Joe Carpenter from Podshow asked about Podshow’s directory listings. Unfortunately for Podshow, they’ve changed the lineup quite a bit in 1.00.3. Here’s a series of screenshots to get to the directories.
Directories:
Featured Podcasts:
Recommended:
Currently, Blubrry tops the stack in the 1.00.3 release of the client.
More importantly for podcasters, think VERY carefully about how you do your ID3 tags and show titles. This is how much room you get on the N91 for your show titles:
I definitely recommend making a short tag that you can glance at to see which show you’re on.
Finally, OPML support for podcasts in the browser on the phone is non-existent. When you click on an OPML file, it tries to load it into a text-based feedreader. If anyone from Nokia is reading, how do I set up one-click OPML to Podcatcher on the N series?
Other tidbit: if you have direct MP3 links on your show notes/blog page, the N91 will download the MP3 file to the music folder, so make sure you’ve got direct links. Between the iPhone and the N-series, direct MP3 links are the currency of the mobile realm for the time being.
Special thanks to CC Chapman for giving me the N91 to experiment with.
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Steve Garfield examines the iPhone
Steve Garfield examines the iPhone at Boston Media Makers, July 1, 2007.
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Web 2.0 Domain Names doomed on iPhone
Web 2.0 Domain Names doomed on iPhone
Watching the iPhone keyboard video, I thought this snippet was interesting:
“iPhone uses its built in dictionary to predict the next letter you might tap, and dynamically resizes the tap zones. It makes the next predicted keys larger in area, and the others smaller as it zeroes in on the particular word you’re typing. Let’s say you’re typing the word time in an email. I type tim. Since there are no common words spelled timr or timw, iPhone creates a larger target zone over the letter e and shrinks the target areas over r and w.”
How well will these sites do, do you think?
Flickr
Zoomr
Jaxtr
Expensr
BlubrryIf you’re a domain name investor, might be time to find out if any of the common English spellings of these sites are available – they may suddenly be getting a lot of iPhone users whose phones are correcting brand names to the English dictionary.
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Podcaster iPhone Kit
Giving away the Financial Aid Podcast Podcaster iPhone Kit which makes a simple page for iPhone goodness. Enjoy!
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What to do when your intellectual property is violated
What to do when your intellectual property is violated
Brian from Audio Attitude and the Procrasticast recently emailed both Adam Curry and me to let us know that EveryZing, formerly Podzinger, was infringing on the copyrights of our respective online properties. In Adam’s case, it’s a violation of Podshow’s IP, and in my case, a violation of the Creative Common Non-Commercial clause in my show’s license.
Because my show is the property of the Student Loan Network, our lawyers from Holland and Knight will just send a simple cease and desist letter, but Adam asked a very good question – what do people who don’t have a squad of lawyers do?
At PodCamp Boston last year, the fine folks from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society – a part of the prestigious Harvard Law School – gave out guides to Internet and intellectual property law, but if you weren’t there, here’s the short version.
Disclaimer: I AM NOT A LAWYER. I know a few lawyers, and have some lawyers, but I am not a lawyer and this blog post is NOT LEGAL COUNSEL OR ADVICE. Also, I’m speaking as a citizen of the United States, which means that if you live, work, or podcast outside of the US, or the dispute you have is with an entity outside the US, you will need to check local laws to see what applies. Always get a real lawyer for your specific situation.
First, understand what copyright is and what fair use is. You can determine if your copyright is being infringed by this primer on copyright law from Harvard Law.
Second, if your copyright is being infringed, document it by taking screenshots, photos, or video, printing them out, and send a Cease and Desist letter. The University of Texas has a great sample of a Cease and Desist letter here. It’s best to get any kind of legal notice notarized; a friend with a legal background recommended getting the notarization done by a court clerk or other court official, but if push comes to shove, any notary public will do. Make two copies and retain them, fax it, then send the original by certified mail or any delivery service that certifies a package was received and signed for.
At this point, most responsible companies will remove the infringing property and notify you as specified in the cease and desist letter. If they don’t, you’ll need to acquire legal representation. Depending on the potential damages involved, you may be able to find a lawyer who will either work pro bono or on a contingency basis; otherwise, you can also inquire with the National Legal Aid and Defender Association or your state’s Legal Aid organization.
