And He Blogs

Sometimes Apple leaves features out of products for inexplicable reasons . We’re on version 3.0 of the iPhone software and their iTunes application does not allow you to subscribe to a podcast using the standard itpc:// protocol, nor can you add a feed manually, like you can with the desktop version of iTunes. The screenshot from the iPhone above shows you what happens when you click on an iTunes subscribe link in the web browser.

An alternative program with the above features that you can use for the iPhone is called RSS Player. I mentioned this app in my post about AudioBoo, and it will allow you to get more podcasts that are outside of the iTunes universe. It’s $0.99 from the iTunes store.

As an example of how to give users a practical way to subscribe to podcasts using the iPhone, I created this video demonstrating how you browse to a webpage using the iPhone and by clicking a specially coded button, it will automatically start the process for adding a new feed to the RSS Player program.

The example podcasting site, which has some content and multiple tests of AudioBoo, is simply called Podcasting @ UMW. The RSS Player button is created by using the following link (using the rssplayer:// protocol) - rssplayer://www.podcaster.fm?feedurl=http://podcasts.umwblogs.org/feed. RSS Player will work over WiFi or 3G and there is no 10MB file limit like there is with iTunes. The app is a little bit wonky and lacks some of the polish of an iPhone app, but it gets the job done.

Tags: iphone

I was getting nostalgic about my blogs (as nostalgic as I can get with something that started in 2004). I wondered how I could get an easy view of my blog posts, and review where I had gone over the last 5 years. I decided to use a plugin that I used at the New Media Center website called Dagon Sitemap Generator. Anyway, I stumbled upon a post from March 2005 called GroundhogChase.com. It wasn’t the site that I had originally blogged about. It was and is a site produced by the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, but the videos have been updated (in 2006 maybe?). It’s a whole remake of The Shining, with Groundhogs! It’s brilliant!

Now go see the site Groundhog 202. Any Shining fan will laugh out loud, especially the scene where “Wendy” interrupts “Jack” while typing out his “novel”. Why didn’t this get more play. Thanks to my blog, it will now.

I did find the original videos that were there back in the day. It was a series of 8 or so videos complete with both endings - if the groundhog saw his shadow, or not. Here it is in one all-encompassing video from YouTube:

Good stuff, but the update is fantastic!

Tags: gorundhog202, goundhogchase, groundhog, pennsylvania, tourism

liamlivestrong.MP4 — powered by http://www.livestrong.com

He may not be your ordinary Internet user, but Lance Armstrong comes up with some pretty compelling content to entertain us with. 8 year-old Liam is riding up the Col de la Columbiere with our boy Lance, and he’s making it look easy. The Columbiere is not the steepest climb in this year’s Tour de France, but it will be the last climb of 5 major mountains in the 170km 17th stage, so it could be very decisive. Who knows where Liam will be around 2025, but you can never start training for the Tour too early.

Tags: bicycleracing, cycling, lancearmstrong, tourdefrance

AudioBoo Screenshot

I’m still not sure about this Internet time thing, but I think it was yesterday morning that Patrick asked me if I saw Cole’s post about mobile podcasting in regards to Penn State’s iTunesU setup. Since then I’ve gone from light-bulb going off, to frustration and the cursing of Atom feeds, to scaring Jim Groom that FeedWordPress was being broken (more about FWP later), to jubilation that the complete instant mobile blogging solution exists with an iPhone and UMW Blogs!

Sound intriguing? I think it’s a pretty big deal. As Cole says the “iTunes ecosystem” is coming together nicely, however, we at UMW do things in a “small pieces loosely joined” kind of way. This “ecosystem” is no exception. The epicenter of this instant mobile blogging system is a service called AudioBoo. They host the audio files, which are up to 5 minutes in length (so complete hour-long lectures are not feasible here). The other component of the AudioBoo service is the iPhone App (link is to the iTunes store). Essentially you start the app, hit the record button then hit Start, record your audio then hit Pause and then Publish. You have the option to include a single picture and the app will also geo-locate where you are recording from. After a short wait you have a page in your My Boos page that contains all those elements - recording, picture, and map.

Now we could just call it a day right here, because anyone can subscribe to the iTunes feed by clicking the button on the page where the recording lives. There is also an RSS feed button (actually an Atom feed) associated with the recordings as well. Now I need to do some additional research to see how many podcatchers out there support Atom feeds, or at least AudioBoo’s Atom feed, but I could not get it to work with Juice, nor could I get it to work with my favorite podcatcher on the iPhone, RSS Player ($0.99 from the iPhone App store). There are then several reasons to press on. One reason is that it would be nice to get a feed working with the RSS Player app because it will allow you to subscribe, with your iPhone, to a podcast feed that isn’t already in the iTunes universe. Yes, the regular desktop version of iTunes lets you subscribe to a podcast by clicking an icon, or pasting in a feed manually. However, the iPhone version of iTunes does not let you do this. Safari on the iPhone does not recognize URLs that begin with itpc:// and there is no place you can paste in a manual feed. RSS Player allows you to enter a feed manually, and if you create a feed with the prefix rssplayer:// you can create a link (or a linked image/button) to start the RSS Player app automatically from the iPhone’s Safari web browser.

The other reason we want to go a bit further is to re-publish the audio files in a space (or spaces) of our choosing, like say UMW Blogs. This is where Mr. Groom’s bestest, most favoritest WordPress plugin, FeedWordPress comes in. What we do with FeedWordPress is syndicate the Atom feed from AudioBoo into a WordPress blog. That will pass to the blog the author information, the picture, and the audio file. A nice Flash audio player allows the visitor to play the file from the blog. Setting FeedWordPress to publish “automatically” and “ASAP” allows us instantaneous (or virtually instant) podcasting. There is also a link to the nice AudioBoo page where you can see the map associated with the recording.

Now we take the RSS feed from the blog and plug that into the RSS Player app, and viola, we again have virtually instantaneous podcast publishing AND receiving. The great thing about the RSS Player approach is that there is no iTunes sync-with-your-desktop step to worry about. Once you refresh RSS Player, the file begins to download directly to the iPhone.

Now is where the imagining begins. For example imagine a class that goes out in the field (Geology, Geography, Biology, History, Historic Preservation, etc.,etc.) and does several recordings, and by the time they get back to class their podcasts are uploaded, published (in two, or more, places), and about to be/already received. This has the obvious side benefit of being drop-dead EASY. There isn’t much of a learning curve here, as long as you don’t need additional editing of the audio files. If you do there are several other audio recording programs available to the iPhone. I’ll be putting some screencasts together of all this stuff, but for now you can enter your weekend knowing that it all works right now, and it’s all very exciting thinking about the possibilities. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The screencast, Produce an Instant Podcast from an iPhone, is up!

Tags: audio, audioboo, podcasting, WordPress

Tags: cycling, giroditalia, lancearmstrong

After a slight delay, the second video from Faculty Academy 2009 is up and it’s the terrific talk from James Boyle on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness”. Lots of good morsels to chew on here. I’ll be putting up more videos on the FA09 website on the webcasts page. It all went by so fast . . .

Tags: boyle, Faculty Academy, keynote, umwfa09

The best comment about where this “debate” went horribly wrong wins a prize!

Tags: cms, debate, jimgroom, johnstclair, umwfa09

This is just a quick post that will be used as an introduction to my New Media Buffet presentation. Actually this is old, new media, but the Video Toaster/Webcam Max/Ustream.tv was put into service once again this year to stream the events. We also recorded the video so that we can post them online for later viewing. As ever, I want to go back and review these sessions as soon as possible. I’ll update/blog/twitter when we get these videos up.

Tags: New Media, streaming, videotoaster

Red2Blu website pic

Here’s a deal from Warner Bros. Studios that is intriguing. In their effort to get me started on my Blu-ray library, they are offering to let me buy the Blu-ray version of movies that I have purchased on HD-DVD format. You remember HD-DVD right? Their “upgrade” (teehee) program works pretty simply. I Select the HD-DVD’s that I own and want to upgrade, mail in just the cover art from the original, pay $4.95 for each HD-DVD (though some titles, like Blade Runner are $14.95) and wait for 4 weeks to recieve the Blu-ray discs.

You can upgrade up to 25 discs. I have about 10 discs that need the upgrade ( I just love that term in this context. Imagine if the same deal occurred when VHS beat Beta and they called it an upgrade). I’m estimating that I’ll spend about $75 with shipping costs (which is $6.95 for the entire order), so it’s relatively reasonable. However, I’m somewhat reluctant. Spending $75 isn’t trivial these days, especially when I’ve got the movies and the player and I can even rip them to my hard drive. I haven’t purchased a dedicated Blu-ray player yet. I own three Blu-ray movies and to play them I use a Blu-ray drive in my PC hooked up to my HDTV. Switching to the Blu-ray versions of the movies will only encourage me to purchase a dedicated player sooner.

What this will do is get me thinking about my movie collection, and specifically the future of my collection. Not that I haven’t been trying to figure that out for the last several years. Where do physical discs fit into the future? I’m still working on that one. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Tags: blu-ray, HD-DVD, HDTV

Do a search for “download youtube videos” and the results you get will offer up countless websites with instructions, services, tools, and videos dedicated to the subject. You would think that it was popular to download videos from the YouTube site, and you would be right. I’ve written numerous times on the subject of YouTube, outlining the benefits, but mostly I point out what a valuable resource the site is. Want to find a clip from a popular movie? Consult YouTube. Want to view that obscure music video from the 80’s? Consult YouTube. Want to watch your state’s governor deliver the latest information that will affect you? Consult YouTube.

Over the past year and a half I have written a few times on how to take YouTube videos and incorporate them into PowerPoint presentations (here, here, and here). Two of those methods involve downloading the videos and converting them to video formats that PowerPoint will recognize. One of them involves using the YouTube video live in the presentation. I received a comment on my post on Embedding YouTube in PowerPoint 2007 from “John” that was just a republishing of a section of YouTube’s Terms of Service:

5. Your Use of Content on the Site

In addition to the general restrictions above, the following restrictions and conditions apply specifically to your use of content on the YouTube Website.

1. The content on the YouTube Website, except all User Submissions (as defined below), including without limitation, the text, software, scripts, graphics, photos, sounds, music, videos, interactive features and the like (”Content”) and the trademarks, service marks and logos contained therein (”Marks”), are owned by or licensed to YouTube, subject to copyright and other intellectual property rights under the law. Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only and may not be downloaded, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners. YouTube reserves all rights not expressly granted in and to the Website and the Content.
2. You may access User Submissions for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the YouTube Website. You shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission.

I don’t know whether anonymous John was trying to be helpful, or snotty, but there are several points I want to make about YouTube downloads. First, EVERY TIME you watch a video at YouTube’s site, or even embedded on another site, you are downloading it to your computer! You have no choice. You are not streaming it, you are using a technology known as Progressive download. Here’s proof (screencast “YouTube Video and Progressive Download“) Now if I download a video, then republish it in a PowerPoint video, then OK, you got me. However, if I’m sharing that presentation with students for their further enlightenment, then I have the start of an argument for Fair Use. Then depending on what content it is and how much, I hope to make my argument stronger. John posted his comment on the post that described the ability to embed a live video into PowerPoint, so if there is no live Internet connection, no video appears in the presentation. It is no different than embedding a video on another web page. It makes for a more seamless way of doing a presentation with web video, as opposed to switching out of Powerpoint and opening a web browser, then switching back to PowerPoint and continuing the presentation. Sorry John, the Terms of Service don’t apply here, or at best, it’s extremely muddy.

Which gets me to my next point. YouTube needs to rethink their download terms. Let me reiterate that the technology that YouTube uses to show videos breaks their own Terms of Service. They have begun to allow certain organizations the ability to offer “official” downloads and provide a download button. In an article from February, YouTube announced that they were exploring ways to offer videos offline. They were testing “testing free downloads of YouTube videos from Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV“. An example is “The Role of Creativity at Stanford“, a video from Stanford University that has a button to allow you to download an MPEG4 version of the video. YouTube is even experimenting with Creative Commons licenses, but I can’t see yet where an average YouTube member can implement these licenses. It is only open to approved partners, and the partners program isn’t a program you gain instant access to. YouTube is moving way too slowly for the average producer, and seem to bend over backwards to appease media companies with their shoot first, ask questions later take-down policy.

YouTube needs to catch up with Flickr in offering a streamlined way of licensing through Creative Commons. Instead, I see the monitization train coming on full speed ahead. Here’s an example of one of those partners participating in a test of revenue generation by offering downloads of their video, for $0.99. Copyright infringement is still rampant on YouTube, but I argue that it is good for the most part. If people are watching all ten parts of The Wedding Singer on YouTube, then more power to them. If they are using a program to download the videos and stitch them together again and burn them to DVD, then hire them as a New Media Specialist. Either way they are never going to make a good customer for purchasing the original DVD anyway. Now there are legitimate reasons to take down videos from sources that are already putting their content out on the web for free such as Comedy Central. They want the advertising revenue for their site, that makes sense, but come up with new models for other types of content. A good start is a link to the iTunes store for those obscure 80’s music videos.

Now I’m not saying that YouTube is doomed to fail (they’re obviously wildly sucessful), but they need to take a more balanced approach. YouTube is doing some good things with their YouTube EDU and non-profit sections. Now it’s time to make it easier to get the content out into the hands of the people who can make a difference, change things for the better, and do what the pioneers in this industry did in the first place - build on other people’s work. A little download help, please?!?

Tags: downloads, YouTube