Why does bittorrent + podcasting matter? (Or, “why open source?”) February 28, 2006
Posted by spanky in apple.4 comments
Quite often, some of my friends and acquaintances don’t really think open source is something that they need to pay attention to, that it’s a quaint little hobby for tinkerers and doesn’t have a really large place in their day-to-day internet life. While I’ll be the first to admit that the products of the open source community are not a panacea, it is probably the only group that has nothing other than the satisfaction of end users in mind. Corporate entities, while often appearing benevolent, will inevitably limit choices or features, or use the product to further their own interests, be it building a user base, or mindshare, or whatever.
An example of this is Apple’s iTunes including PodCasting. It’s a double-edged sword; by making podcasting much easier to subscribe to, shows are getting much wider exposure and more listeners. The cost of this is that now Apple has a great deal of control over podcasters since they are now the point of entry for the listener base. If an RSS feed works with other podcast clients, but not with iTunes, the number of people who will subscribe to your show will drop precipitously. If, for whatever reason, your podcast doesn’t show up in the top/featured podcasts, you won’t get the coverage that a podcast that Apple features will. Apple has the mindshare and market clout, as well as the content delivery software in place to establish this hegemony on what was once a community-led phenomenon. Now, I’m not stupid. For Apple, this was an incredibly smart business move. While they may not have invented podcasting (i.e. the simple act of putting MP3 URLs into RSS) they get to become a primary supplier for the content. Why should you care? Simple. Without bittorrent, podcasting will not be able to scale well to a larger listener base. Already, a lot of my favorite podcasts are taking on sponsors and ads for revenue to offset bandwidth costs that keep rising. Podcasts are already recorded on sub-par equipment and downsampled and compressed to appallingly low file sizes to cut back on bandwidth spending, but if podcasting keeps growing, it won’t matter. If podcasters don’t start using bittorrent, small, independent people may not be able to attract and sustain a larger listener base. And I don’t see that happening unless iTunes supports it. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think the strength of podcasting lies in independence and free speech (like blogging). I just don’t want to see a day where Clear Channels and Time Warners move in and become the only game in town for podcasting.
An interesting article in 2600 January 26, 2006
Posted by spanky in Uncategorized.add a comment
mirrorshades has an interesting article (more like a rant) titled “I Am Not a Hacker” in the current issue of 2600 (22:3, Autumn 2005) about how “hackers” don’t exist anymore. The media has been misusing the term for as long as it has existed, but the group of people it once referred to doesn’t exist anymore. “The title conveys and eclectic sense of rugged nobility from a bygone era – to call someone a hacker is to call them a true old-school master… it simply doesn’t make sense to refer to anyone as a hacker if they can’t remember a time before desktop computers.” He makes it clear that people with the same motivations exist in the Internet era, and span a wide range of backgrounds, but just that the term is becoming archaic and no longer applies.
Ruby renaming script January 1, 1970
Posted by spanky in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Or what I like to call my "Ruby Litmus Test." Probably once every few months, I need to rename a bunch of files and I look for the quickest and easiest way to do it. The first time, I wrote a script in Ruby, but I inevitably misplace or delete it by the next time, so I just rewrite it. Hopefully, my current one is better than the one I started with, this is probably the third or fourth iteration.
