The World's Local Blog

MixCast Live, Podcastmatic, and ASCAP license

It's Raining and I am sick >.<. Continuing from my last post, I think I kind of know what got me start blogging again. I think there's a correlation between how much you read blogs (or listen to podcast) and how much you blog yourself. In the past week I couldn't find things to say because I read didn't have to read any blogs at all. But in the last few days I listened to Daily Source Code again and found a number of interesting things that I want to blog... Yet it's been days and I haven't write anything about it.

So let's start first on podcast catch up. I'm very excited that MixCast Live has gone to public beta stage. The only thing we need to get podcast going mainstream is a good solid but software for people to create their own podcasts. We pretty much have the CPU power to record everything in our own garage but we lack the software to do so. So far people have to put things together themselves, using a number of software. (There's also a new WinAmp trick, suggested by DSC's listener) We just need an all-in-one podcast software that can route and play a number of files together, with good/cool interface.

Another area of difficulty in starting a podcast is learning to create a RSS 2.0 feed to "broadcast" your podcast. Fear not, we now have "Podcastamatic," a program that automatically create RSS feed for you. It can even create webpages if you are so lazy to maintain a blog. I haven't tried it yet but it sounds very interesting. Surely I am going to point this to people since I know someone who wants to podcast but they have no idea what an RSS is.

One more good news about podcast: ASCAP now recognizes podcast as a medium :D (though they strangely spell it "pod-cast" together with other words like "play-list." If you don't know ASCAP and BMI are organizations which overlook and collect money for music royalty. The cost is still unclear since different podcast uses music differently. I think it is $288 quarterly(?), or more (in percentage) if you are getting revenue from advertising. Adam Curry has already asked attorney listeners for clearifications, but I haven't heard any updates so far.

Enough for today, I guess. I might throw a big dump post of my collected links sometimes... btw, if you haven't noticed, I updated flickr pics and this blog is now under Creative Commons license ;) so feel free to use things/ideas you find here, in regards to Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. :)

today's extra links:
- PiP: Pocket iPodder for your Pocket PC
- Napster CEO: "We're going to be communicating to people that it's stupid to buy an iPod."
- Mobile message => Electronic Post-it

update: old links dump:
- Dave Winer asks about ASCAP license
- Update on Chicago's copyrighted park, with links to flickr pics
- 5-star Underwater Hotel
- Shoplifting is safer than downloading
- More web-based RSS reader - Newsburst
- GM President has a blog, and now he has a podcast also
- Feeder: RSS authoring/publishing software for Mac
- WNYC launches its second podcast
- Free invites for Gmail, if you don't have one already

update2: more Gmail invite spooler sites... it seems like Gmail is pretty open now. Everyone's getting lots of invites to giveaway. Gmail also emailed invites to those who signed up with them early on.

posted by Knot @ 9:36 PM