A fun present in the mail today

I have begun to enjoy the sight of packages bearing the mark of Alliance Atlantis. A copy of Back to Breaks: The True Sounds From The Original Block Parties arrived in my mailbox at work via Jenna.

Words cannot descibe how perfect much of this music is for radio scoring. Just take a look at the track list.

The Big 8

Manny at work gave me a copy of this NPR documentary on CKLW.

Kind of neat to think that I work in the same building that these broadcasts came from.

Popped Culture is podcasting

As Jessica mentions in this comment, the CKDU Pop Culture Collective’s Popped Culture is now podcasting. I listened to the first episode of the new season a few days ago, and it’s excellent. Almost enough to make me want to move to Halifax and join the collective.

A quick check of the CKDU podcasting site shows that Popped Culture joins Let’s Get Baked‘s podcast and What’s New Mitsou?‘s podcast, to bring CKDU’s podcast simulcast count up to 3. Way to go!

Thoughts on Odeo

Last night, I requested an invite to Odeo, Noah Glass and Evan Williams’s new podcasting portal. Shortly after, I received an invitation, and signed up. Odeo claims to offer its users a podcasting holy trinity: “Listen, Sync, Create.”

On the “Listen” level, Odeo is a user-friendly podcast directory. It’s got some nice features: tagging (a la Flickr), audio previews and individual Odeo RSS feeds for each podcast, comments, and personalized subscription lists and queues. I was able to browse podcasts, listen to samples, view past episodes (or “Shows,” as Odeo calls them), and add feeds and shows to my subscription list and queue.

To actually get content onto my iPod, I had to download the OdeoSyncr. As a podcatching app, the Mac version is pretty bare-bones. There’s a big pink “Sync Now” button, and a link to an online settings page. Simple as it was, it performed its stated functions; it connected to Odeo, got a list of my feeds, and downloaded them into iTunes. The About page states that the program is based on iPodder, feedparser, and BitTorrent technology. Downloads seemed a bit slow, so perhaps this client is using some sort of distributed peer-to-peer network to alleviate server strain?

Additionally, it would be nice if OdeoSyncr could add ID3 info to content before putting it in iTunes (like iPodderX does). Then I could use my existing iTunes smart playlists to filter content.

The “Create” section of the site isn’t up and running yet. The page says “We’re not ready to open the doors on the Create side of Odeo’s “Listen, Sync, Create” just yet, because we want to make sure everything’s working well and can handle the demand.”

But, I successfully added Metro Morning’s podcast to the directory, and was able to download content. Frustratingly, only one of the four daily items (the oldest) was automatically added to my download queue.

All-in-all, Odeo’s not there yet. Promising, though. Then again, if Apple can build some sort of magical tagging system into its podcasting support for iTunes, I’ll have no use for Odeo.

Technorati tags: podcasting, odeo

Memento pilot

Memento is a show idea I pitched to the CBC Radio Program Development Group earlier this year. Though they didn’t want it, I decided to produce a pilot as my senior practicum project for Ryerson.

I finally got around to uploading the pilot to PRX.org.

It’s not 100% yet — there’s still tweaking I’d like (and plan) to do. But in the meantime, please have a listen and let me know what you think.