It never really struck me until I bought myself a Nokia N95. I won’t go into the technical wonders of this machine (but it is pretty amazing) but suffice to say that
- it has the ability to connect to a wireless network (like your home network)
- it has a fairly decent speaker on it
- there is a podcasting application available for it
Prior to my purchasing the phone I tried to get into this whole podcasting thing (internet audio programs) but for some reason, that escaped me at the time, I never quite got it. I was able to find podcasts that interested me but I never enjoyed listening to them. I tried downloading the podcasts to my laptop, putting on my big headphones, and listening to them but it just didn’t feel right. I tried downloading the podcasts using Juice, a podcast receiver, and transferring the podcasts to my iPod, but again it just didn’t work - it was too awkward, took too much time, too much hassle.
Now, thanks to my N95, I can go home and press a button on my phone, my favourite podcasts get downloaded to my phone and on my way to work the next day I can listen to them using the phones’ speaker. All very simple, very convenient, hassle free and just works.
It was never about the content of the podcasts, that was always fine, it was how I was digesting that content that was the problem.
I was explaining the very same thing to Michael Byrne at OpenCoffee Limerick yesterday. Michael’s business involves the production and distribution of podcasts and I was wondering how most of their end users listened. I said that ever since Bernie Goldbach donated his Sony Ericsson P1i to me my own podcast listening habits had been transformed. Downloading to the PC and syncing to an MP3 player was always just too much work for me. Taking away several of those steps by downloading directly to the playbackk device over wifi feels like magic by comparison.
was thinking about this post recently. On budget day I was very busy in meetings and then climbing afterwards and missed all the radio commentary. As a news-junkie I wanted to download the podcast of radio 1’s drivetime and listen in the car as I drove home that night. I tried discovering it first from the N95 pocast discovery fiunction. It wasn’t listed there so I tried naviagating to the rte website and getting it from there. quiet a few clicks are required to find the relevant podcast but even after a couple of false starts I finally realised that the programmes are not archived in full. They only podcast little snippets of content. newstalk is the same. Very frustrating for me.
In this case I had the utensils and the know-how but the content was indigestible
Also annoyed the way rte archive their tv shows in stupid formats and then start taking them down soon after they go up. Dan and Becs, a perfect show for video podcasting, was one such example. They started taking down episodes after a week or two so all episodes were never available for watching. Though they are now on youtube.