This is a great quote: "It's a way for the demand side to supply itself."

The latest in my series of podcasts playing the songs nominated for Grammy Awards. I cover the big categories in Field 8, including Best Song and Best Album. At the podcasting station: http://www.internet.pro Stop by, pull up a chair.

The Boston Phoenix (via Susan Crawford): "Podcasting...could evolve into the most serious challenge to commercial radio since television. Radio’s descent into bottom-line-oriented irrelevance, sped by the 1996 repeal of any meaningful controls on corporate ownership, has been well-documented. Other than public radio, which is thriving, the best-known alternative to the commercial AM and FM bands is satellite radio, which got a big boost in visibility in 2004 thanks to former NPR host Bob Edwards’s move to the XM network and Howard Stern’s $500 million deal with Sirius. But satellite requires a new radio receiver and costs around $10 a month. Podcasting, by contrast, is free...."

At the ellipsis, I excised the words "could be a passing fad — or it" because I didn't think "passing fad" was a realistic alternative. In my mind, it was sort of like saying that the Internet or RSS "could be a passing fad." For example, even in my own amateur way, I think I've added something valuable to radio. Today's podcast played all of the songs nominated for Grammy awards in Grammy Category 40 ("Best Country Instrumental Performance: solo, duo, group or collaborative performances, without vocals"). These songs are never played on commercial radio, but they deserve to be. They are terrific. In preparing for today's podcast I realized just how much I've been missing in commercial radio.

So c'mon, Susan, join in. I can't wait to hear the SCrawford podcast! What will you play?

Do you know what a "breakdown" is?  Listen in at www.internet.pro.

I've done a slight redesign of my podcasting page at www.internet.pro.  First, I removed all of the Amazon Associate links. They had been there for a month and generated exactly $0.00. I've been fairly disappointed with the Amazon Associates program, both on Internet.pro and this weblog generally, so unless I'm planning to talk about the exact item featured you won't see any more Amazon ads. Second, I expanded the Google Ads from one featured ad to four. The Google Ads have been terrific so far. I'm not only impressed by the revenue flow these can generate, I'm also impressed by the close matches between my content and the advertising content.

I intend to keep the podcasting page fairly simple: three links to the most recent podcasts and a link to the RSS feed. The "back-end" is a category of this weblog, but the simple internet.pro page has more the look and feel of radio. And the graphic of the guys with headphones, courtesy of the National Archives, is still one of my favorites.

As always, suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Over at www.internet.pro.

A new podcast over at the ol' podcasting station. The third in my series of podcasts covering the Grammy nominees.

A new podcast over at the ol' podcasting station. Another in my series of podcasts covering the Grammy nominees.

I'm a realist about Digital Rights Management. I'm neither a knee-jerk DRM hater nor a DRM zealot. I've worked with enough content companies to understand DRM's importance. What I don't like, however, is a bad implementation of DRM. Here's what I mean. On Friday, I recorded what I thought was my finest podcast ever (yes, a pretty low bar, but still....). Friday's podcast was a review of all of the Grammy-nominated songs in one of the country categories. I even got the file size down to svelte 45 megabytes. I put it on my iRiver 180 to see how it sounded, and it was terrific. So far, so good. I then decided to see if I could slim the file size down even further. That's when I made my mistake.

I didn't think I needed to back up the original recording because I had a copy on my iRiver. Makes sense, right? So I resampled the original and saved it in its new 34 megabyte size. The sound quality was mediocre, with a fair number of crackling artifacts from the compression. No problem. I still had the original on the iRiver. Big Mistake. That's when I learned that I can move files from computer > iRiver but not back from iRiver > computer. This makes no sense. But I suppose it does put a stop to all of those kids trading iRivers for a night and copying each other's music. Was that ever a problem? And isn't breaking the device for the honest user a bigger problem? Grrrrr.

I won't be so careless on Monday.

Episode One, in which I take on one of the 107 categories of Grammy nominations and play all of the nominated songs in the category (plus a few others). Yeehaw!

Another Internet Pro Radio show over at the ol' podcasting station. Nothing ICANN-related, mostly music.

An Internet Pro Radio show for Tuesday, December 14th. No discussion of ICANN, so ICANN Blog followers can feel free to skip....unless they like music for grownups.