Thursday, October 14, 2004

Podcasting != Audio Blogging

The discussion on maximizing blogging strategies quickly degenerated into a squabble over the utility of mixing rich content with blogs. While there were some good points made, podcasting somehow got confused among the mix.

Just because the podcasting bleeding-edge trend is associated with RSS 2.0 which is also a major driving infrastructural force behind the surge of popularity of blogs doesn't equate it to audio blogging.

Even leading bloggers like Scoble don't quite seem to grok this crucial difference. It's not about bloggers pushing rich content from their blogs, it's about the consumers of the media subscribing to what they want, receiving it when they want, and listening to it where they want. It's liberating to be able to consume information away from a screen and a keyboard for a while and give my eyes a break.

Scoble does make a good point that with audio enclosures in an RSS feed, there's only so much audio you can listen to in a single day, so that's an obvious limiting factor. Maybe his commute to Redmond isn't nearly as bad as mine is from Minneapolis to the southwest suburbs. It's rejuvenated my attitude about the commute, knowing that I can always fall back on an engaging talk from IT Conversations or catch some second-hand energy from Adam's frenetic, adrenaline-laced brain dumps. As a techno-junkie, I've just found a great new way to optimize my time in what otherwise would be an extremely dull part of my day.

Podcasting should be thought firstly as a time-shifted, consumer-centric extension of regular radio broadcasting, not audio blogging.


8:24:53 PM      comment []  trackback []


If you're actually someone besides me viewing this blog, give me a few days to sort out the feel of this thing.

My interests -- the topics I eventually hope to start hitting on a regular basis:

  • Technology -- cool stuff, my experiences with it, etc.
  • Software Engineering and patterns -- professional experiences and observations
  • Music

Plus I'll probably start a personal/diary category on the side, mostly for my own benefit.


1:44:26 PM      comment []  trackback []


Testing code blocks (thanks jMock). I've done this by tweaking my Radio inline CSS to add styles created by htmlize.el and copying the generated HTML.

/*  Copyright (c) 2000-2004 jMock.org
 */
package org.jmock.core;


/**
 * An object that stubs the behaviour of a invokedMethod invocation on
 * behalf of an {@link org.jmock.core.Invokable} object.
 */
public interface Stub
        extends SelfDescribing
{
    /**
     * Processes the invocation.
     *
     * @param invocation The invocation to stub.
     * @return The result of the invocation, if not throwing an exception.
     *         Must return <code>null</code> if the invocation is of a
     *         invokedMethod with a void return type.
     * @throws Throwable An exception to be thrown to the caller, if not
     *         returning a value.  A checked exception thrown from this
     *         invokedMethod must be in the <code>throws</code> list of
     *         the invokedObject invokedMethod.
     */
    Object invoke( Invocation invocation ) throws Throwable;
}

11:06:26 AM      comment []  trackback []