ViCasting.com

As an experiment, I've created an iTunes enhanced AAC version of the plain old Live From the Formosa Tea House, Session Five, that contains chapter markers, images and links to websites we mention. Here's what it looks like:

Because of the AAC encoding, and the embedded images and links, this is a much larger file than the regular MP3 version (32MB vs. 12MB). But it also sounds a lot better. Feedback welcome on whether this is worth it.

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Session Five this afternoon over lunch.

The focus of this episode was on Zap Your PRAM 3, the next incarnation of the Zap Your PRAM conference we organized in the fall of 2003. Zap3 is running February 16 to 19, 2006 in Cavendish, PEI; details forthcoming shortly on the new Zap3site.

There is, alas, an annoying bit of electrical interference that runs throughout the episode -- it's most noticeable at the beginning. I tried various methods for filtering it out, but they all made Dan, Steven and I sound like drunken fish. Here's a rundown of what you'll hear:

• 00:00 - The intro and extro stingers are from Royalty Free Music.
• 00:15 - We start off with a somewhat dorky and stilted introduction to Zap Your PRAM (early-episode dorkitude seems to stike us every time). We get better as we go along.

• Video and Audio of Zap Your PRAM One
• 19:45 - The "people standing in from of webcams" phenomenon.
• The Island Cam (Dan stood here).
• The YankeeCam.
• 21:15 - People at silverorange buying digital SLR cameras?
• Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
• Canada EOS 20D
• Nikon D200 (with GPS capabilities)
• 22:30 - Peter takes a picture of Steven with his T610 camera phone (either Peter or Steven was moving, so the photo is more jiggly than it would be otherwise).
• 24:00 - What podcasts do we listen to?
• Peter: Daily Source Code, The MacCast, Meet the Press, BBC Podcasts, Yankee Foliage Podcast
• Steven: LugRadio, Diggnation
• 26:45 - Peter's television addiction leads him to rent a Eastlink DVR.
• 28:00 - Steven and Dan love Homestarrunner.
• 28:30 - Steven to make a LongBet with Ray Kurzweil?
• 28:45 - WikiPEI, Wikipedia, Tourism PEI Website RFP.
• 32:00 - The Rukapedia pages for Dan and Steven and the compromising photo.
• 34:45 - Interactive Charlottetown Bus Map, RealCharlottetown.com and Open Locations.
• 41:02 - Dan has an "unbelieveable hate-on" for Web 2.0 so we avoid talking about it at all costs.
• 41:44 - Steven talks about going to The Gnome Summit in Boston: Springboard and Tango Project.
• 51:44 - Queen Street Commons update from Dan.
• 54:15 - silverorange releases Swat, a PHP web application toolkit.

In addition to the RSS Feed for the Podcast, we've also registered LiveFromTheFormosaTeaHouse.com where you can always find show notes, links to previous shows and more fun.

Stay tuned for more Live From the Formosa Tea House; in the meantime I'm just claiming the podcast feed by sticking this link in: My Odeo Channel. Go on about your business.

Like all other things web, it's deceptively hard to come up with realistic numbers for "readership" or "listenership." Web requests can come from too many places, in too many guises, to each be dependably tied to a real person.

That said, we can get a vague idea of the "listenership" of Live From the Formosa Tea House by looking at the number of times the MP3 audio files have been downloaded. This doesn't mean they've been listened to, of course, but it's better than nothing.

So here are the episode statistics, covering downloads from September 27, 2004 to the present:

• Episode One - 3,705 downloads
• Episode Two - 3,456 downloads
• Episode Three - 2,153 downloads
• Episode Four - 392 downloads

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 4 this afternoon over lunch. At the Formosa Tea House. Live.

We recorded in the coveted back room of the Formosa, with a very simple technical setup. We all sat around Dan James' APEX435 microphone, which ran into Steven Garrity's Behringer Eurotrack UB802 mixer. We took the output of the mixer and plugged it into my iMic, which was plugged into a USB port on my laptop. I did the recording in Sound Studio, saved as an AIFF file, then imported the file into iTunes and converted to an MP3 (24 kbps mono, VBR medium quality).

This episode runs one and a half hours. It didn't feel "too long" when we were recording it, so we've decided to release it completely unedited to maintain the "three guys having lunch" feel. It may feel too long to listen to. Things we discuss:

• Our technical setup.
• Recent travels by Dan to Peru and Peter to France and upcoming travel by Steven to London and Paris (for his honeymoon). [starts 2:42]
• London bombings, "terrorists are people too." [starts 28:30]
• Steven's Canon PowerShot S330 digital camera motor goes bad [starts 36:00]
• Queen Street Commons update (and QSC vs. ATC). [starts 37:15]
• An extended riff on the differences between employees, entrepreneurs and freelancers, the responsibility to be "open" about what we do, charging for "mind share" vs. "billing by the hour," refusing to write proposals for new projects, "adults don't really know what's going on," how we price our services, how we select our clients. [starts 43:50]
• Steven is getting married. [starts 1:13:00]
• Wikis, Wikipedia coverage of London bombings, the Rukapedia, the silverorange wiki. [starts 1:14:48]
• A brief mention of Plazes. [starts 1:28:45]

You can subscribe to the Live from the Formosa Tea House RSS feed if you want to become a regular listener. We're also in the iTunes 4.9 podcast directory -- just search for Formosa.

Some housekeeping items for our Live from the Formosa Tea House podcast:

• We're going to try and record a new episode this week.
• There's a new section in the archives for the podcasts.
• There's a new URL for the RSS feed (the old locations should auto-redirect).
• If you subscribe to the main RSS feed for this site with a podcatcher, you'll get the podcasts now (they used to be driven by a hand-coded RSS file, now they've joined the mothership).

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 3 this afternoon. And because the Formosa Tea House is closed until February 24th, we switched locations and recorded here in the lounge at 84 Fitzroy St. in Charlottetown.

This episode features the best audio yet, with three microphones running into a mixing board running into my iBook. We missed the delivery of the iced tea and dumplings, though.

In this episode you'll hear:

• Talk about travel. My trip to Croatia last fall, Dan's trip to Peru coming up this spring, and Steven's trips to San Francisco and upcoming honeymoon trip to Europe. We also talk a lot about travel in general, using the Internet to make reservations, and the differences between being a tourist and being a visitor.
• News of the new Queen Street Commons project that silverorange and others are working on at 224 Queen St. in Charlottetown.
• Random musings about the nature of web design work vs. "creating real things." Special bonus "I always thought I'd be an architect" musings from me.
• An update on the Firefox web browser from Steven, including his description of the night Firefox 1.0 was released.
• A Google Alerts success story involving a sunken schooner.

The Live From the Formosa Tea House RSS Feed has been updated; it's got the MP3 of this episode included as an enclosure for all you podcatchers. Traditionalists can still grab the audio from the web like normal. Enjoy.

Update: Dan has posted photos of our "recording studio."

We recorded another episode of Live From the Formosa Tea House this afternoon (the first episode is here).

You can download today's episode (it's an 11MB MP3 file) or, if you're using iPodder or its brethren, you can set up an auto-grab via RSS 2.0 enclosures from our RSS 2.0 feed.

Self-flagellation about this episode:

• We squeezed 30 minutes of content into 60 minutes of talking. We could probably lose a lot of the witty side-banter, and tighten up our conversation 50% and not lose anything.
• The sound is better. We were in the back room of the Formosa Tea House, where it's quieter and more isolated from the fray. Things got worse the more we went along because we forgot to lean into the microphone as our audio guru John advised. We need a big "LEAN IN" sign.
• We were more focused: we had three set topics (Firefox, silverorange stuff and my phone adventures), and something of a structured "okay, now you're the host" system worked out in advance. We can get better at this.
• We flipped back and forth between "intended audiences" from "telling Ann Thurlow what Firefox is" (which will bore the techies) to "using FOAF and RSS and GPS to drive location-based Thai restaurant wayfinding" (which will bore the normal people). I don't know what the solution to this is. Maybe there isn't one.
• Steven needs to read the how to pronounce Rukavina guidelines.
• We have a nifty intro theme, courtesy of GarageBand on my iMac.
• It was still fun and we'll do it again next week.

Listener feedback is, as always, welcome.

Update: Here's Steven's original outline for the show:

• Steven (me): Firefox 1.0 Preview Release (grilled by dan)
• How did we get involved, how are we involved?
• 1.0PR features/fixes
• RSS stuff (live bookmarks)
• Overall polish
• New Find toolbar
• update notifications
• SSL visibility
• Nice linux keyboard stuff
• Usage trends
• Different types of users
• Default install
• Spyware/popups, etc.
• Numbers - SpreadFirefox.com
• Dan: silverorange stuff site (grilled by peter)
• reputations
• vs. epinions/amazon-review
• Google ads ($$$)
• Peter: The Reinvented telephony setup (grilled by steven)
• Why?
• tech setup
• costs
• future ideas?
• other VOIP stuff

Ever since it became possible -- because of high-speed Internet and good audio tools -- to "do radio on the web," I've been itching to dust off my interest in radio and start recording. Today the dream was realized, with the recording of the first episode of Live From the Formosa Tea House.

Using Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes and The Gillmor Gang as inspirations, Dan, Steven and I gathered, as we do two or three times a week anyway, at the Formosa Tea House here in Charlottetown. Except this time we brought audio gear.

You can listen to the result, which I've encoded in a variety of ways, using the links here:

• 48kbps MP3 file [29:56 - 5MB]

The AAC version will be especially useful if you have an iPod or use iTunes, as, at least in theory, these should "remember where you left off" if you take a break.

This isn't a polished radio program -- it's sort of a combination of sticking a microphone on our lunch table, with the extra self-conciousness of the microphone making us each a little stiff. I don't think we knew who we were talking to really -- each other, "the Internet," or the invisible folks at home.

I certainly learned a lot (or at least remembered a lot) about why radio is so hard to do well, why it's so hard to achieve that balance of the formal and the informal and "sound natural."

We'll go back again next week, though, and give it another go. I'm sure Steven and Dan will comment on their blogs about how things went from their perspective.

Update: Steven has posted some photos (one, two, three) of our recording rig. We used a boundary mic, which because it was phantom powered, needed to run into a Shure mixing board, the output of which ran into a iMic that ran into my iBook. I used Sound Studio to record the programme to a 350MB AIFF file, and iTunes to generate the MP3 and the AAC.

Another Update: I've set up an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for the radio programs. Note: location for RSS feed updated May 31, 2005.