Lots of discussion and email about the best way to utilize the MP3 ID3 tags. I’ve recently made some changes for IT Conversations, and I’ve received both positive and negative comments. I’d like your feedback on my current thoughts.

ID3 supports the following hierarchy: Artist—Album—Title

Here are examples of how I propose using this hierarchy for a variety of IT Conversations programs:

IT Conversations—The Gillmor Gang—October 15, 2004
IT Conversations—Memory Lane—Len Kleinrock
IT Conversations—Voices in Your Head—James Patrick Kelly
IT Conversations—Law and IT—The INDUCE Act 2.0
IT Conversations—Gnomedex 4.0—Steve Wozniak
IT Conversations—Joel Spolsky—Joel on Software

The last example is slightly different because it’s one of my own interviews. To be more consistent, I probably should create a series name such as:

IT Conversations—Doug Kaye’s Interviews—Joel Spolsky

I know the ID3 tags are handled in varying ways by different MP3 players, so let me know if you think the above scheme will work for your player or whether it can be improved. Leave a comment here (on the blog) so others can react.

Clarification: The above schemes are not the way I’ve been using ID3 tags, I just realized. They’re they way I propose to use them in the future.

When I interviewed Bram Cohen back in March I realized how brilliant BitTorrent was: a content-delivery mechanism that actually scales better than linearly. The more downloaders, the cheaper the cost per download. I’ve used BT on and off for a few months, but tonight I wanted to see the clip of John Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire (thanks, Dave). I clicked on the link and the download was painfully slow. Then I remembered — I recently re-initialized my firewall.

I forwarded ports 6881-6889 to my PC and re-started the download. Wow…superfast! If you have popular large objects, it’s awesome. But you already knew that, right?

And the Golden Rule of BitTorrent: When you’re done your download, don’t close the BitTorrent Window. Give unto others as you would have them give unto you. It costs you nothing.

Carl Franklin of .Net Rocks fame has launched a new company named Pwop to produce podcasts for others. Could this be the first commercial venture into podcasting? I’d take the credit for that honor, but IT Conversations doesn’t make real $$ yet. [Source: Robert Scoble]

Wait!…We had paying sponsors for our podcasts of Gnomedex 4.0. Could that be the first instance of paid sponsorship of podcasting? That might be a cool thing to remember in five years when everyone else is making a whole lot more money.

At first I thought podcasting would hurt broadcast radio, but after listening to Dave and Adam I think the opposite is true. Podcasting frees the radio broadcaster from the constraints of transmitters and geography. WHen they podcast, I can reach any radio station, anywhere, anytime. I haven’t done the math, but I expect that with BitTorrent delivery, the per-listener cost to the broacaster will be less than via the AM/FM airwaves. I haven’t been able to listen to Terry Gross for a long time because I’m working during her show, I refuse to pay Audible.com $14.95/month for the privilege, and manually download MP3s is a pain in the ass. Now I’m going to get one of those radio-to-MP3 devices and podcast it to myself.

So if I’m going to spend even more time listening to audio content — I’m already in the studio at least eight hours a day, and boy are my ears tired! — where’s that time going to come from? It’s already coming from television. Although podcasting is less than two months old, I can get content that is more inspirational, educational and entertaining through podcasting than I get from the broadcast or cable TV networks. I’m spending no less time on the Internet, and I predict others will likewise find that podcatching (listening to podcasts) will cause them to hit the OFF button on their TVs as well.

It’s still only 11:30pm and I just determined that IT Conversations transferred more than 100GB of web-site and audio files today: 81.77GB of dowloads and streaming to the Windows Media Player, and just over 20GB of web-site and ShoutCast MP3 stream traffic. That’s up by 4x over the September average.

Why? First is the latest content: Gnomedex 4.0 presentations by Wil Wheaton and Steve Wozniak, a new show by Dave Slusher, and the usual programs like The Gillmor Gang. I figure that accounts for 2x increase. The other 2x? I think it’s from Podcasting and the hyperlinks (including the verbal equivalent) we’re getting from other Podcasters.

Thank goodness for Limelight Networks, our CDN. They’re awesome.

What’s tougher on infrastructure than being SlashDotted? Feing Farked, that’s what. Fark.com just posted a link to Wil Wheaton’s presentation and as of 12:30pm we’re getting a new listener every 8-9 seconds on average. Most of the audio (MP3 downloads and streams to the Windows Media Player) is delivered by the CDN thank goodness, but the MP3 ShoutCast streams and the HTML pageviews are server by a little Celeron box somewhere in Texas. Looks like the IT Conversations site will be a bit slow until this quiets down. Guess it’s time to think about that new server.

Adam Curry and I were comparing notes this morning. I just checked my logs and noticed that IT Conversations is up to >60GB day (1.8 terrabytes per month). That’s an average of 5.56mbps, probably peaking close to the capacity of a DS3 (45mbps). That makes sense, of course, since just 15 people simultaneously download files using 3mbps cable connections can hit 45mbps combined. Thank goodness for Limelight Networks, the content-delivery network (CDN) that brings you IT Conversations. Without them there would be no delivery. BGW, that 60GB/day doesn’t include MP3 streaming, which is handled separately.

I dropped the ball on blogging all of the films I’ve seen at this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival, but since opening night I haven’t seen anything all that exciting. Last night we saw Vera Drake, the latest film by director/screenwriter Mike Leigh and starring Imelda Staunton. It’s a terrific film that I predict will receive critical acclaim, be loved by audiences, yet stimulate a controversy in the same was as Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. No, the film isn’t at all like Gibson’s, but the controversy could be as great. Staunton’s performance is an Oscar-level tour de force. The entire cast (with no exceptions) are great. The directing, editing and cinematography are superb. I’m purposely not telling you much about the film because there are some important twists, but it’s a film you’ll want to see. It has only played a few festivals so far, but I expect it will be released shortly.

Here’s a free plug-in that will bookmark files played in the Windows Media Player. I haven’t tested it myself. [Source: Random Bytes]

Some have suggested that podcasted MP3s have the ID3 genre tag set to Podcast. Bad idea. Podcasting is no more a genre than is TV or radio. It’s a transmission mechanism: audio files as RSS enclosures. You can do that with music (of all kinds) speech, sound effects, and more. Those are genres. If you want to use a genre to idenfity things like Daily Source Code or Evil Genius Chronicles, you could refer to them as audioblogs, but even then it might be too much of a catch-all. In any case, podcasting is not a genre.

There’s also a lot of confusion about the definition of podcasting. Again, I say it’s no more (or less) than audio files as RSS enclosures. A podcaster is someone who sends audio — any audio — in this way. So what do we call the receiving end — the people who use iPodder, its derivatives, or (heaven forbid) copy the MP3s to their players by hand or listen to them on their computers? Are the listeners of podcasts podcatchers? Okay, I admit that’s a bad name that should die an immediate death, but let’s remember that podcasting is the act of sending, which is quite decoupled from the acts of receiving or listening.

Oh, one more thing. There’s been a lot of talk about the history of podcasting. According to the above definition, the first podcast I can recall was when Dave Winer worked with Christopher Lydon to deliver some of Chris’ interviews as RSS 2.0 enclosures. I immediately copied the idea. Does that make IT Conversations the second podcast? Does anyone even care who was second? 🙂 And of course Steve Gillmor was probably the first to consider the iPod platform, and Adam Curry was first to automate the receiving process all the way to the player.