A while ago I started to use Gigadial.com to check out new podcasts. Gigaldial is a service that allows its users to create stations. These stations are basically podcast feeds consisting of single shows that are added manually. Whenever I find a podcast, which seems to be interesting enough to listen to at least once, I add the most recent show to my gigadial station. My podcatch client is subscribed to my station's feed and eventually downloads all those accumulated shows. So far, so good.

Unfortunately Gigadial provides no convenient way for adding shows. To add something to your station you have to browse trough their podcast directory, select a feed and select a show from that feed. But what I wanted is a way to add shows while I was visiting the podcast's homepage/blog.

Long story short I hacked a dirty little bookmarklet to satisfy my needs: add to Gigadial. To use it, you have to exchange STATIONID with the ID of your station.

Note though the code is far from perfect. It just adds the last mp3 that is linked to on the webpage which is displayed by your web browser. To add a certain show, you should go to the show's specific subpage of the podcast's blog (usually reachable via its permalink on the blog's frontpage). If you read your blogs with an rss-reader, this shouldnt be an issue anyway.

Oh, also the RSS autodiscovery barely works. This isn't grave because the discovery of the RSS-feeds is only frosting on the cake and not needed for the actual purpose of the bookmarklet. But feel free to fix it if you want to ;)

After being ecstatic about the return of the engadget podcast and being disappointed about Eric Rice’s version of this once great show it is time to be ecstatic again: Phillip Torrone, the former mastermind of the engadget podcast, just published the first episode of his new show: The MAKE:DIYcast. I can’t wait to listen to it.

I hope he also will get Lenn Pryor (who just announced his move from Microsoft to Skype) to do the show with him again.

Following the second wave of podcatching clients (with the 2.0 versions of iPodderX, iPodder Lemon and Doppler) the podcasting community is greeted with the first wave of commercialization attempts.

After Odeo and the podcastnetwork finally Adam Curry and Ron Bloom entered the game with a site called podshow. It seems as if they are planning to be the missing link between advertisers and podcasters.

The exact business model of all of these ventures is still rather vague to me.

iPodder started out under the name iSpider before its name was changed to iPodder. It is usually called “iPodder Lemon” because of its program icon.

The original iPodder was an AppleScript hacked together by Adam Curry. I have never seen it. It is probably still available on the net, but from what I heard the code is not pretty. Nevertheless Adam’s code was an excellent proof of concept, which jumpstarted the podcasting genre and the development of more podcast aggregators.

The first open source iPodder was written in Java and is still under active development, now using the name jPodder. Furthermore there is iPodderX, a commercial podcast client written exclusively for the Apple platform.

Mostly everybody agrees, that naming the program (and consequently the hole genre) after Apple’s popular portable music player was a rather poor decision.

The iPodder team just released the first beta of their 2.0 version. It is available for Os X and Windows with a Linux/BSD version in the near future. It is written in Python and uses wxWindows. And it is open source.

I haven’t had jet the opportunity to thoroughly test it, because my iBook is still in the shop waiting to get fixed, but I did install it on my office laptop which runs Windows XP. The first impression is very good. A lot of requested features have been implemented: You are able to check only selected feeds, downloads can be postponed, paused and resumed. The ipodder.org directory is integrated in the GUI and the program provides basic tools to manage the storage of the actual files.

I still miss the possibility to read the show notes of the podcasts in the aggregator’s GUI. This feature would be very helpful, especially for managing the podcasts, i.e. deciding which files to keep and which files to delete.

I also haven’t found a possibility to automatically change the ID3 tags of the files (I like to set the music genre to “podcast”. This allows comfortable creation of smart playlists and exclusion of podcasts from music only selections). This might be a design decision though, because changing the ID3 tag (and thus altering the file) breaks bit torrent file sharing, a distribution method a lot of podcasters use.

So get it and submit bug reports. Now.

Dave Slusher made me laugh today:

“A weblogger that dismisses podcasting as inflicting tripe on the world is like someone dressed as Mr. Spock giving Dr. Who fans shit for being dorks.”

The days when I was a devoted gamer are long gone but I still enjoy following the progress of the gaming universe occasionally. On my venture into podcasting I stumbled over the G.A.M.E. Radio show, which is syndicated via HackerMedia.net. This show rocks.

What makes it so enjoyable is the enthusiasm of the two presenters, two gamers at heart. They really love gaming. They seem to do it in every free minute. They own every single gaming platform. But they never fall in the trap of unreflected fanboyism. They probably talk more about their dislikes on a particular topic than about the aspects they like. Recommended.

Sometimes I think, for Adam Curry the major difference between Podcasting and Broadcasting is the possibility to say "fuck" on the air.