Planning to be on a plane for 24 hours over the next few days? I have just the thing: a combination ICANN Blog Audio entry and Internet Pro Radio show. I talk my way through the ICANN agenda and play a few tunes to keep you company. It sure beats anything the airlines will be playing.

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The sounds of bugs. Plenty of them. But I'm getting better, even if it's not quite so obvious to the handful of listeners out there. Podcasting in 2004 is a lot like blogging in 2000: few tools, lots of technical mistakes by the podcasters, and voices still under development. In 2000, professional publishers could easily smile down at the bloggers, confident that their place as the source of news and commentary was secure. I'm sure audio broadcasters feel the same about podcasting. Howard Stern and Mel Karmazin are pronouncing satellite radio as the future of audio, but I see the future of radio as the user-enabled network. Unless the users can send their own broadcasts over the satellite, Sirius will remain at the margins of mainstream radio. I've never aspired to be a DJ, but I do get excited when I see the future. And the podcasting wave is too exciting not to hop on and see where it takes me.

I'm now doing my podcasts in real-time. This is a big change for the better, but it also means that I have to learn how to fix a whole new category of bugs and mistakes. I consider my set-up a "Reverse-Adam-Curry." At Bloggercon, Adam explained that he was using his Powerbook as the source material for his music, sound clips, microphone and mixer and then using a line-out to an mp3 recorder to make the real-time recording. I'm going the other way. I have my music on one station (a Powerbook, an iPod, or a MP3 player). From the headphone cord of that station I connect to the line-in port on my PC. I also connect a microphone to the PC and use the Wave-Out Mix setting in Windows to combine the two. Sony Sound Forge 7.0 on the PC is where I make the sound recording. I now have a set-up capable of providing excellent sound quality, but I still have to solve two more problems. The first one is to find the optimal encoding that matches high quality sound with small file sizes. That's as much as matter of taste and download tolerance as it is a technical problem. The last podcast was 22,100/16 bit, but checked in at 35 megabytes. Above average sound quality but I'd like to cut the file size by about 10 megabytes. What's the right compromise? I don't know yet. The other problem will only be solved by practice. I don't yet have the timing down for starting and ending songs or fading them in and out. At Bloggercon, Adam described this as the Nintendo-skill part of podcasting -- in other words, I have to get faster with my hands juggling the sound levels and the play and pause buttons. It's just a matter of time. In the meantime, I could edit out all the mistakes or just continue to post the new podcasts warts and all. I'm going with the latter approach. Chirp, Chirp.

As I've written over the past couple of days, I'm licensed up and ready to roll with my Internet Radio podcasting station. I've filed all the paperwork and paid filing and initial royalty payments with the Library of Congress, Soundexchange (the RIAA collection agency), ASCAP and BMI. I promised to talk about the details of that process with Ross over a Skype interview, so I'll save that for a few days. 

The next step is set up a reporting system so I can accurately report how much I owe to the various rights organizations. I think a few Excel files in which I chronicle the list of songs I play and the dates and number of downloads will be sufficient. Adam says we don't have any tools yet for podcasting; he's right, and we certainly don't have any tools for automating licensing reporting and royalty payments.

All this preparation though has made me realize how expensive RSS might be as a delivery device for licensed content. For example, under the webcasting statutory license, I'll pay a royalty fee on every download, whether the person on the other end of the subscription feed listens to it or not. If other RSS readers and podcast subscribers are like me, they subscribe to waaaay more stuff than they can actually consume. I've also noticed that iPodder occasionally downloads enclosures that I already have, but under the statutory royalty scheme, I pay royalties on redundant downloads. I'm still convinced that RSS is the best way to deliver webcasts/podcasts. It just means that a revenue model has to support the "waste" (poor word choice, but reasonably accurate) inherent in the way RSS data is consumed.

In order to avoid finding myself with a RIAA bill that requires me to take out a second mortgage on my house, I'm going to start slowly and just to see how it goes. The first thing I'm doing is putting my RSS feed of RIAA-licensed music behind a blogware restricted category. Any subscriber to my weblog (see the subscribe button in the top margin) will have rights to read the category and download the shows. Anyone else with a blogware reader account, just post an "Add me" comment in the space below or send me an e-mail with your blogware account name, and I'll add you too. (You don't need to provide your real name when creating an account, so you can be anonymous if you choose.) 

After I've played with the medium a little bit and gauged whether revenue from GoogleAds and my Amazon Associate account is sufficient to pay for the likely royalties, I'll open it up to everyone else.

I expect to post the first podcast into the "Internet Pro Radio" category (see right margin) later tonight.

Police officers and District Attorneys (especially those on television) have a derogatory phrase for suspects and defendants who retain an attorney: "lawyered up."  As in, "we can't talk to him because he lawyered up." That was the phrase that kept popping into my head today as I was completing my licensing applications for podcasting. I've "licensed up." It's neither straightforward nor easy, and I promised Ross that I would try to explain it all once I get to the end of this.

In Progress: "Congratulations! Your BMI Music Performance Agreement has been executed. You now have access to BMI's award-winning catalog of approximately 4.5 million works!"  The ASCAP and RIAA licenses are done by mail.

Plus...I think I've figured out how to do a podcast under the statutory webcasting license. This is exciting. More soon. Very soon....

In which your intrepid podcaster breaks the first rule he set for himself and then thinks out loud about the upcoming .NET rebid. (Liner notes: link to downloadable mp3s played in podcast here.)

Heard on Earningscast's podcast: "The future of Tucows is no more about domain names than the future of Volkswagon is about the Beetle." Great sound bite. Glad I own stock.

Here's a feature request for Blogware (and other blogging tools) that would make podcasting more effective. First, let me create several "shows" at once and queue them up for future posting on my website. In other words, let me "post" something today that will publish to the rest of the world at a time I specifiy tomorrow. Second, let me set a TTL value ("Time to Live") for my podcasts. For example, set the podcast's TTL to "7 days" and the podcast is automatically deleted from the server after a week. The podcasts are too big to store forever and a TTL would make my housecleaning easier (and keep my hosting costs down).  

I wish I could be there in person, but the quality of the webcast for today's BloggerCon in Palo Alto is excellent.  

With apologies to both our President and Madonna, here's my remix of today's Presidential press conference and the wrap-up of my excursion to Nevada to act as a poll monitor. This is also known as Audio Lextext, Podcast #4.

November 2, 2004 Audio Lextext.