Entry 22: "Oh Podcast, Where Art Thou?"

Yo!

SPECIAL TOPIC ALERT! SPECIAL TOPIC ALERT! It seems to me that the good quality audio podcasts are getting more and more scarce, not in terms of general quality, but in terms of regularity, as far as releasing them on a schedule. Those of you who regularly use podcasts know what I'm talking about here, no doubt. Apparently, either these guys are all really super-busy around late summertime, or they're starting to slack off.

In case you don't know, "podcasting" is a special kind of blog, like this one you're reading right now, my "BTJM" Monday blog, but in a special spoken-word audio format: MP3. MP3 stands for Moving Picture Experts Group [class 1] (or MPEG-1), Layer 3 Audio, which is an extremely popular and common audio format used by millions of people to store lots of music without taking up a lot of space on their computers, and due to the varying audio quality rates, or "bitrates", people can choose to copy, or "rip" songs off of their existing CD collection onto their computers with a diverse choice of bitrate between a very low bitrate (which produces a very low filesize, taking up much less space on your computer), or a high bitrate (producing significantly better sound quality, but getting a very high filesize in the process). The most commonly used bitrate currently is arguably 128 Kbps (Kilobits per second; 128,000 "bits" of audio information copied from original audio source per second. Pretty good sound, depending on content).

As far as where the format came from, back in the early '90s, a group of European engineers were tinkering around with special hardware and software in a special digital radio research program, and eventually discovered several different file formats alongside MP3, including MPEG-Layer 1 and 2, and used different compression programs to find one bitrate compression method and file format that would work well with large audio files and require very minimal hard drive space and computational power (remember, this is circa 1990. Hard drive capacities were less than half a CD's worth back then), and used the song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, because of its softness and simplicity, to hear imperfections in the resulting audio test files easier. Guess which one came out on top. Because of this, some people (read: the Wikipedia community) sometimes refer to Vega as "the mother of MP3."

Also, "podcast" is a phrase coined by Apple Computer, meaning when people produce audio recordings of themselves talking about different topics for varying time lengths, usually from 30 minutes (roughly 25-28MB of 128Kbps MP3, or 4 percent of a CD) to an hour (50-60MB, 8 percent of a CD), then submitting it to Apple's iTunes Podcast store (which isn't the only source of podcasts anymore. More on that in a second). iTunes users would then download the audio files ("podcasts"), for free, and (ideally) play them in either their computer, or Apple's iPod MP3 device, hence the term "PODcasts". There's another couple file formats, M4V (basically MP3s with embedded pictures, or iTunes TV Show downloads use this file extension too) and MP4/MPEG-4 video, which are used for VIDEO podcasting, but that's another blog entry.

Phew! Now that this week's little history lesson is out of the way, those of you still awake and reading can enjoy the real rant. I don't know what the heck is going on lately, but it seems a lot of people are taking the last couple of months or so off from sticking to their own weekly or biweekly podcasts, or at least the ones I listen to, and I'm not talking about the iTunes users. Websites like IGN, GameSpot and TV.com alll have podcast shows I personally subscribe to and listen to regularly, thanks to my PlayStation Portable (Thank you, Firmware 2.60!), and The Podcast Network has gobs of categorized podcast content you can listen to as well, as does Yahoo! Podcasts Beta, but the underlying problem again is consistency.

Case in point: TV.com's guys haven't done anything since July 6th, and they haven't updated their RSS feed (for Really Simple Syndication readers like My Yahoo and NewsGator, and Firmware 2.60 PSPs, of course) since May 25th! Another one I use, ToonZone.com, hasn't done jack since June 1st! Maybe it's just these TV-related sites that are really getting lax, though, because most of the others are fairly regular. Well, except for Podcast Network's "The PSP Show". (Hey, Ewan Spence! July 18th is long gone! What's the deal???) Maybe they're just waiting until the September Fall stuff starts before they come back. But the fact that they don't even say they're going on hiatus sends up a red flag to me. Bottom Line: Hey, TV Podcasters! If Thanksgiving rolls around and your early-mid summer stuff is still "current", we're gonna have a problem here. Please get with (your) program and don't leave your listeners hanging! As for you other, more consistent podcasters out there, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! Just please give some advance notice before you go on a 90 day mini-sabbatical. .......But that's just me.

See you next Monday!

-D.