I’m desperately trying to cut into my over populated desktop RSS feed reader as I really do not have the time to wade through the amount of subscriptions that I have in there. What with FeedDemon pop-ups and Tweetdeck its like having bloggers ADD (on steroids) and having too much information at your fingertips is as self defeating as not having enough.

Well over seventy percent of my feeds are music related, be they music news, music industry commentary,tech and MP3 bloggers and music 2.0 (is that term still in use?) evangelists. Very few of them are from traditional music biz news outlets like Billboard (USA biz bible) or Music Week (UK equivalent). Simply because I think that  much of the mainstream music press are as behind the rest of us as the recording industry itself. With some exceptions of course.

Walled garden restrictions to content are a major sticking point for me.

Probably the best place to start vacuuming up those music news resources is at Guy Kawasaki’s excellent  Alltop Music, though my main ‘complaint’ is that I have to visit each individual link to grab the RSS feed. A nice touch would be to have the feed URL next to the publishers headline.

Anyway, so I decided I’d do just that. Gather all the most useful and essential music/tech/social media (they blur into each other these days) related websites and blogs together in one big huge collection that I use on a regular basis through the beauty of RSS feeds. So I’ve done a bit (a lot!) of feed harvesting and squeezed everything into an OPML file for data portability.

I’m including an OPML download link so you can import all the feeds within seconds into your RSS reader of choice, whether that be via your desktop app of choice, Google reader online or a Firefox add on (like Sage). There’s an OPML file for each category to import or the whole bunch rolled into one.

Each category has an OPML link so you can grab the feeds by category. Do leave a comment if I’ve missed anything of note (I probably have).

(more…)

I rambled on here about finding flights and deals online in the ‘traditional’ manner using meta-searchers so you dont have to visit each individual travel site etc, but there is an even more time efficient way by using RSS. I’m assuming that readers have some entry level knowledge of RSS, if not, read this to get some background on the format that’ll help save you bundles of time.

I use the Sage RSS reader in my Firefox browser. Its a great lightweight way of reading RSS feeds without having to log-in to an online reader or fire up a desktop stand alone ( I use Feed Demon for more heavy duty feed trawling). Once you’ve installed Sage in Firefox you can open it in a browser sidebar to view your feeds.

The “big three” online travel agents, Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz all now offer various RSS feeds.

(more…)

I have a lot of RSS feeds in my current desktop reader of choice Feed Demon. So many in fact that I’m really having to filter through the ones I really have time to look at. When my reader updates my feeds it can pull over 90 percent of my system resources at times. Ouch.

Anyway, I did a thing I guess only Geek’s do and exported the feeds from my feed reader and uploaded them all at Share Your OPML.

Oh, and if that isn’t geekery at its finest I made the most prolific subscribers top 100 at number 78 ha! My own sizeable list of 676 different feeds pails weakly however compared to the guy at the top of the list who boasts a mind bending 8,000 feeds.

And why would this interest anyone? Well, if you’re looking for some great technology content this is a very good place to start to fill up your RSS reader.

Top Ten Feeds (Taken from the Share Your OPML Top 100)

1.   Techcrunch
2.   Slashdot
3.   Google Blog
4.   Engadget
5.   Scobleizer-Microsoft Geek Blogger
6    Digg
7.   Joel On Software
8    Boing Boing
9    Scripting News
10. 43 Folders

Related Reading

Share Your OPML Top Podcasts (OPML.org)
Wikipedia OPML (Wikipedia.org)

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror looks at how the increased bandwidth of a popular blog can throttle a Website and offers some tips. In one way its a nice problem to have as it means you’re getting traffic but there are some straight forward tips here to cutting down on bandwidth usage. The biggest culprit for many is images, there are enough third party image hosting solutions (Flickr is the one which immediately springs to mind of course) around for that to not to be an issue anymore. Also as Jeff mentions, your RSS feed is a bandwidth leech. Again services like FeedBurner can snuff out this problem.

Of course we’ve never had Website meltdown here at Buzzsonic, though we got an indication of how bandwidth can spike within minutes of a popular story being linked to by a news site when Slashdot picked up on a story and bandwidth usage went up fifty fold within hours.

Related Reading

We Got Slashdotted and Survived (Buzzsonic.com)
Using Amazon S3 As An Image Hosting Service (Coding Horror)

Here’s a great example of buzzword overkill. Tioti ( acronym: Tape It off the Internet) apparently started as an online joke back in November last year hyped as an electronic TV guide for the world – with links to BitTorrent files and also social applications for P2P discussion and sharing. The idea was taken seriously by some and went into proper development.

The homepage right now is little more than some basic info and the ubiquitous “give us your email address and we’ll tell you when we’re ready” invite box.

“Built using the robust J2EE Spring framework and making use of AJAX interface hotness, TIOTI brings Wiki-style content editing for you guys, plus tagging and RSS up the yazoo. We currently index 16,000+ TV shows – 88,000+ episodes – and we are matching everything up with an ever increasing number of content sources.”

So basically another You Tube wannabee with a bit of Tivo and BitTorrent thrown in for good measure. Throw in a site built on Ruby On Rails and Ajax, promised RSS feeds, IM and VOiP and you have a veritable quilt of Web 2.0 buzzwords.

Mashable.com have a more indepth look at the beta including screenshots. But there’s going to be thorny copyright issues for sure (as with You Tube). Om Malik mentioned the problems online video companies like Google Video and You Tube have with policing content earlier this year.

“I am not sure if this is a problem that is going to go away. Online video companies will have to figure out a policing mechanism… after all if CSI shows start showing up on Google video (not the store), Google’s partners at Viacom are not going to be too thrilled. Similarly SNL videos now for sale on iTunes store, available for free are going to become a headache of sorts for folks at You Tube.”
Related Reading

BitTorrent Meets YouTube (Mashable.com) July 14 2006
The RIAA Says No Dancing to Music on You Tube (TechDirt.com) June 14 2006
A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It (NY Times) Feb 20 2006
Google, YouTube & the Darkside of Online Video (GigaOm.com) Jan 15 2006
What is Web 2.0 (oreillynet.com) Sept. 30 2005

Well I struggled with the Word Press upgrade. Even following the helpful support links at Word Press itself and doing the usual Google search I had some scary moments, php errors, parts of the site vanishing etc. Ouch. I’d backed up the whole website archive to my desktop so I was able to restore the site and try again (thankfully!).

Anyway, I decided the safest way (but not the quickest way) was to install the latest version of Word Press side by side the old version in a different directory on my server and painstakingly move all the old posts over by hand. One thing that Word Press dosn’t seem to support as yet (at least I couldn’t find it) is migrating the content over from Word Press to Word Press, although there is support for moving from alternate blogging platforms over to Word Press (I hope you’re still following me here).

So thats the latest, a weekend of moving content. The old Buzzsonic was running on Word Press 1.5 using the Semiologic theme by Denis de Barnardy. The new Buzzsonic is running on Word Press 2.0.3 using the rather cool looking Durable theme by CSS whizz Andy Partling.

Word Press Resources

Word Press Codex (WordPress.org)
Word Press Theme Browser (AlexKing.org)
Word Press News (Wordlog.com)
Word Press Guides (Tamba2.org.uk)
Word Press Station (WPStation.com)
Word Press Theme Park (WebDesignBook.net)
Word Press Plug-ins Database (WP-Plugins.net)
How to Make a Word Press Theme (TheUndersigned.net)
Social Bookmark Link Creator (TwisterMC.com)

Sony have updated the Playstation Portable this week with firmware updates to add streaming support for Podcasting and WMA files.

Using the PSP system’s RSS Channel feature, you can add link information to your channel list that will enable your system to link to RSS-distributed audio content available on Web pages.

The device doesn’t download the Podcast but rather uses the RSS feeds to tell you what Podcasts are available and streams the audio content rather than downloading it for offline use later. Useful for on the move browsing I guess but if you want to download you’ll want something more than the expensive memory Stick option.

Online gadget retailer Lik Sang have a neat Datel 4GB Hard Drive which would free you from the limitations of the expensive Memory Stick. The 4GB Hard Drive is connected with the PSP by means of what Datel calls a flexible Memory Stick adapter that is plugged into the Memory Stick slot on the PSP. The unit retails at $199.

Thanks to Russell Beatties Notebook

Related Reading

PSP RSS Channel Tutorial (Playstation.com)
Flixpo.com (Free PSP and iPod Downloads)

Here’s another useful little service. An online generator that allows you to convert any RSS feed into a PDF, called, not unsurprisingly RSS2PDF. Useful if you’re wanting to print out stuff I guess.

Here’s how the Buzzsonic RSS feed looks like using RSS2PDF

There is such an avalanche of information on RSS, RSS software and RSS feeds nowadays it is simply bewildering, even to someone as relatively ‘informed’ as me. What I do know is, apart from a hiatus this summer I was trying to wade through literally 100s of different feeds a day, each with multiple headlines.

Imagine trying to visit each individual website daily and pulling out all the new headlines manually. RSS delivery shaves hours off any news hounds day. I’ve been using the free aggregator RSS Bandit for a few months now but noticed as my feed list grew to a more sizeable proportion, when RSS Bandit updated the headlines the thing rendered my two year old laptop almost useless, grabbing almost 100% of system resources as it updated.

The solution was a lovely little Firefox plug-in called Sage. The tiny little app sits on your browser toolbar and kind of acts similar to recalling your history function or your favourites, opening up a column to the left in Firefox. Another big headache for me was that all the feed URLs I’d built up in RSS Bandit would have taken hours for me to manually type back into Sage. No worries.. I simply exported my collected feeds (as an OPML file) in RSS Bandit and then imported them back into Sage. Excellent!

I’m finding that Sage is extremely nimble, especially in terms of resource useage and feed updates. Still, if I’m away from my own PC I’m still stuck. Well not really, there’s been a number of web based RSS readers for a while now but the one I’m using right now is the Google Reader. Like most things from Google its functional and simple to use. Again, I simply imported all my feeds via the OPML file and bingo, access to all of my essential feeds from any computer anywhere.

Related Links

RSS Background
All About RSS (FaganFinder.com)
About Feed Syndication (Feedburner.com)
OPML (Wikipedia.org)
RSS (Wikipedia.org)
Choosing an RSS Reader (SearchEngineWatch.com)
What is RSS and Why Should You Care? (SearchEngineWatch.com)

Finding RSS Feeds
BlogPulse
Daypop
Technorati
Pubsub
Yahoo RSS

Free RSS Readers
RSS Bandit
Feedreader
RSS Reader
Pluck
Rocket RSS Reader
List of News Aggregators (Wikipedia.org)

Web Based RSS Readers
Bloglines
Findory
Google Reader
Newsgator
NewsIsFree

We started writing about Podcasting over six months ago when it was still a niche buzzword. Since our last post on the subject there has been an incredible explosion in the fledgeling web broadcast medium.

You cant look at the interweb nowadays without stumbling across the words, Podcast, Podcasters, Podcasting or iPodders and the like. Least of all, easily the biggest boost for Podcasting this year came in June when Apple added support for Podcasting with the release iTunes 4.9 (the software is now up to version 6.)

Even since we last wrote on the subject back in May, there’s been a great amount of new and improved and streamlined resources for you to get involved, broadcast yourself, listen or just learn what all the fuss is about. What we decided to do here was get up to date and trawl around for the best sources of information, links and resources, wether you simply want to put your own podcast together, or just subscribe to some shows and listen for yourself.

Some Podcasting Background

Podcasting (Wikipedia)
How Podcasting Works (HowStuffWorks.com)
iPodder:A Brief History (iPodder.org)

Creating Your Own Podcast

Podblaze.com (Podcasting Resources)
Wave Pad (Free Audio Editing Software)
Audacity (Free Audio Editor and Recorder)
Liberated Syndication (Libsyn.com)
RSS Radio (Podcasting client)
Juice (Podcasting receiver)

Podcasting Directories, Shows & Resources

Odeo
Podcasting News
iPodder
Podsafe Music Network (Podshow.com)
Christian Podcasting (Christian Podcasts)
Dailysonic (MP3 Zine)
Podcast Alley (Podcastalley.com)
Podomatic (Podcast software & directory)
The Podcast Network
Podfeeder
Vital Podcasts
Podspider (Podcast Search)
Podcast Pickle (Podcast community)
Podnova
Gigadial
Yahoo Podcasts

News search experts have long been wishing for Google News search results to be dished out as RSS feeds. For a company usually renown for its forward thinking innovation Google have been slow to usher in any serious useage of RSS feeds, mainly because the search power house has been actively supporting the rival syndication format Atom.

No sooner said than done. ScrappyGoo is an unofficial app that lets you search Google News and generates a unique RSS feed of the results. By default, each feed has sixteen entries and uses standard boolean operators.

ScrappyGoo uses Gnews2RSS, an open source, experimental PHP script developed by British programmer Julian Bond . He’s already run fowl of Google when he was hit with a cease-and-desist order last year.

And then there was two. Just as I was finishing this post another Google RSS news generator came to my attention. The GNewsfeed from Justin Pfister also offers geo targetted results.

Thanks to John Batelle’s Searchblog

Related Links

Google Moves to Block RSS Scraping [Internet News April 2004]
Google News RSS/RDF Feed Generator [XML Mania] now blocked
Google Mulls RSS Support [CNet News]

Besides the ‘revelation’, and there was no pun intended there, that even Catholic priests are producing ‘Podcasts’ there’s been some more significant news this past week on the fast emerging Podcasting phenomenon. Within days of each other both Sirius Satellite Radio and Infinity Broadcasting announced separate plans to put podcasts on broadcasts for mainstream and satellite-radio distribution.

Infinity Broadcasting, one of the USA’s largest radio operators with more than 180 stations around the country (and the radio division of Viacom) announced late last week that they plan to convert San Francisco’s 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content.

The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOU Radio and will invite DiY radio producers to upload digital audio files for broadcast consideration via the KYOU Radio website.

Programmes are set to start May 16th and the station is billing itself as the first in the world to get all of its programming from podcasts. KYOU will cover the cost of music-licensing fees from industry producers so podcast contributors can include music from major record labels.

Sirius said Monday it plans to add a four hour podcasting show to its satellite programming starting May 13 on the talk channel 148. The show, “Adam Curry’s PodShow,” will star the former MTV video jock who helped develop the technology. Podcasting was developed in part thanks to the work of Curry and his iPodder software..

Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because it uses the RSS protocol. This technique has enabled many producers to create self-published, syndicated radio shows.

Related Reading

Sirius Hops On Podcast Bandwagon [Wired.com]
The Freshest Podcasts in the Known Universe [Audio.Weblogs.com]
Gigadial-the Podstation Factory [Gigadial.net]
Priestcasting [Buzzsonic News]
Podcasting Catches On [Pew Internet PDF]
Podcasting (How to Get Podcasts and also Make Your Own) [Engadget]
iPodder Podcast Directory [iPodder.org]
DiY Radio With Podcasting [Doc Searl]
Who Owns What [CJR.org]

As an indication of how widespread the phenomena of Podcasting is becoming, early adopters are springing up in the most unlikely places. Father Roderick Vonhogen, Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht in the Netherlands led Internet listeners on an intimate audio tour that allowed them to pay one last visit to Pope John Paul II before he was laid to rest earlier this month with his podcast show , “The Night the Pope Died” delivered in MP3 format and downloadable from his Catholic Insider website.

Catholic Insider and thousands of other podcasts can be found through directories like Podcast Alley , Podcasting News and Podcast.net while free software like iPodder, Doppler and iPodder X automatically downloads new shows as they become available. Listeners can transfer their podcasts to an Apple iPod or other portable MP3 player, and listen to them when and where they wish.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one in three U.S. adults who own an MP3 player have listened to a podcast, though the survey’s small sample size of respondents means that figure could be substantially lower, according to some critics. In all, 2,201 people were interviewed, including 208 owners of iPods or MP3 players.

Pew Internet researcher Mary Madden told the NewsFactor website. “Podcasting is clearly a growing online phenomenon,” she says. “It is part of the larger notion of the Internet being a democratizing medium. Anyone who has the basic tools, a basic grasp of technology, can do it. Podcasting is definintely mimicking blogging in a lot of ways,” Madden continues. “In a lot of cases, they are audio versions of someone’s personal rant for the day.”

Related Reading

Podcasting Catches On [Pew Internet PDF]
Six Million Podcasters and Counting [NewsFactor.com]
Podcasting In The Dark [Washington Times]
iPods and MP3 Players Storm the Market [Pew Internet]
Podcasting Tools [Podcasting-Tools.com]

Everyone who is anyone now seems to have a ‘Podcast’ or is name dropping some obscure micro broadcast show nowadays. Others are already looking at the possibilities of “broadcatching”, put simply, podcasts with video besides just compressed audio content delivery.

Broadcatching refers to the use of RSS feeds and BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing as an alternative to distributing multimedia content on the Internet. Podcasting meets Tivo said some wise spark, other people have already labelled it Vlogging, or the self explanatary ‘video blogging’.

Latest sofware app for Windows users is a beta version of ANT which was released last week. ANT is an video RSS aggregator and player that has been available for Mac for a while now and has already been incorporated into a hack with the Sony PSP.

ANT can playback any media format and will sync audio with iTunes for playback on any MP3 portable. You can subscribe to any ‘Podcast’ or RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures and ANT will automatically download any audio and video content. ANT is currently freeware and still in Beta for both Mac and PC.

Thanks to Scobleizer

Related Reading

Experimenting With BiTTorrent and RSS 2.0 [Blogs.Harvard.edu]
How To Create Your Own Podcast [About.com]
PSPcasting on Your Mac [Engadget]
Video Blogging [VideoBlogging.info]
Ready For Your Close-up? Here Come The Vlogs [MSNBC]
Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings [NY Times]
RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo [ScottRaymond.net]
BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution [eWeek.com]
BroadCatching Using RSS + BitTorrent to Automatically Download TV Shows [Engadget]

Fairfield, Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, will debut a Podcast search engine called Podscope later this month. Every word within an Internet podcast will be made searchable which is equally applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podscope will crawl the web to look for podcasts, when it finds one, it will create an index against every word within the content. Podcasters are also able to submit url(s) for crawling.

“With a looming explosion in such user generated rich content as Podcasts and video blogs, there is a growing need to empower consumers to find and subscribe to programs that meet their diverse interests, commented Allen Weiner, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner. “Searching and indexing these varied audio and video programs will not only benefit content-hungry consumers, it also adds legitimacy and velocity to this burgeoning space.

Podscope isn’t the first speech recognition search technology. HP’s Speechbot has been online for years in demo form using speech-recognition technology to create a searchable transcript. BlinkxTV which we featured here last December also uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable text transcripts.

Related Links

Podscope: New Search Engine Will Allow You to Keyword Search Every Word Spoken in a Podcast [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Pod Catch [PodCatch.com]
BBC To Massively Expand Podcast Trials [iLoveRadio.org]
Podcast Lab [PodcastLab.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
Busy Podcasters Guide [iPodder Sourceforge]
Podcasting (aka How To Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own) [Engadget.com]
Podcasting Power [MercuryNews.com]
A Look At Other Video Search Tools [SearchEngineWatch.com]

Quite a few things that we’ve missed whilst we’ve been ‘away’, even since the end of January and the last proper posts here under the old URL, the buzz surrounding ‘Podcasting ‘ has gone from a speculative whisper to a very loud shout, to the point where the grassroots internet broadcasting+P2P+RSS craze has even spawned its own Expo , ‘The Portable Media Expo’, which will debut in California this November.

Weblog pioneer Dave Winer probably explains it best here:

“Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new files from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on any capable mp3 player on the computer or hardware player such as the iPod. Think of your player with podcasting as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates.”

The latest variation on the Podcasting ‘theme’ is ‘Skypecasting’ which has been picking up mentions over the last few weeks on various websites with many people pulling their quotes from a spartan mention on the News Target website. Though the word seems to have been originally penned by Stuart Henshall on his Skype Journal back in December of last year where he revealed a straight forward how-to.

“The SkypeCasters’ recipe is simple and we have written it up in detail. Add together Skype, Virtual Audio Cables, Windows Sound Recorder, a simple Wav to mp3 converter MT_Enclosures and iPodder and you can be Podcasting later today! The solution will cost you $40.”

The Skype software was founded by Niklas Zennstr�m and Janus Friis, the creators of Kazaa and boasts 29 million users. Skype is the largest of the new breed of companies offering voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, which lets Internet connections double as telephone lines by treating calls no differently than e-mail.

The new development is being done without Skype’s active input. But Skype has made some of its source code public so developers can tinker with new applications, such as Skypecasting, Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee told CNet, “We’re aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it,” she said.

Related Links

VoiP Gets the Podcast Treatment [CNet News]
Hot Recorder [HotRecorder.com]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters [SkypeJournal.com]
iPodder [Sourceforge.net]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters ( 8 page PDF instructions download) [Henshall.com]
Adam Currys Weblog [Curry.com]
Pod Show [PodShow.com]
iPodder Podcast Directory [iPodder.org]

Needless to say the closed nature of the Apple iPod software hasn’t stopped the Open Source mob getting their hands dirty with a whole collection of unofficial hacks and software add ons enabling geeks to do things that the standard Apple gear restricts you from doing. One of the main reasons after market firms like Belkin and Griffin can charge $50 for add on devices that enable the recording at a strictly low-fi 8khz.

Philip Torrone at Hack A Day has come up with a hacked work around that enables high quality recording for no cost using the Linux based user interface Podzilla.

iPod Linux Links

WikiPodLinux [iPodLinux.org]
Linux for the iPod Review [XLR8YourMac.com]
iPod Linux Forums [iPodLinux.org]
iPod Linux Installer [Sourceforge.net]
Free Your Music [Hymn-Project.org]
iPodHacks [iPodHacks.com]
Using an iPod with Linux [MIT.edu]
myPod Project [Sourceforge.net]
Podzilla and PTK [Dotink.org]
iPod Mini with Linux [Freedos.org]