radio

Today I popped into SecondLife which is the first time I've done such a things for literally years.

I'm not sure why I had the compulsion to log-in again but I did, but more importantly, I'm am glad I did.

SecondLife was a very busy place for me several years ago culminating in the work I did for Coca Cola on the Virtual Thirst project, it was always going to be hard to top that in there to be honest, so I guess I got kind of bored and moved on.

I'm digressing though, and I just wanted to mention that I was glad I popped in as it gave me a moment of reflection looking at the old friends list. In fact I sent out a message to that list and it was a great feeling to get lots of people instantly getting in touch with me again, brilliant, really brilliant!

This experience today helped me finalise another idea I have been having recently which is to start another Internet Radio Show, available as a podcast, or just an on-line player. I used to do one regularly when I owned an Internet School some years back which was always a popular show so I've the chops to pull it off I believe.

I've had numerous people tell me they'd like me to continue with a show so I've made up my mind to start planning another one, and I'm getting quiet excited about it.

It can be a really great feeling running an on-line radio show, it's very satisfying and really does help me channel some of my creative juices.

The new show will be hosted as part of the Social Media Mafia, which really does seem to be the place for it, it's gagging for it really, so much fun can be had with the brand.

I'm expecting to have lots of music YES LOTS and also industry interviews and news from around the Internet.

Really excited about it all.

What would you like to hear on such a show? I'd really like to know.

We are living in a changing dynamic, probably the rate of change is faster than ever, we can experience and witness mass convergence regularly. We can find ourselves exposed to more and more content from a variety of channels and mediums.

Some of us enjoy being part of a “tight-knit” community defended with furious passion, some of us enjoy only obtaining independent music, some of us only enjoying watching web TV, some of us only enjoy open source software and many of us stick to one vendor with impressive loyalty.

In all of this choice and preference this very weekend we saw Apple release their new operating system Leopard, and I’ve personally seen a frenzy take place, a buzz, a rush to the store.

Now what I find interesting in this (and I’m struggling with the conflict so need your thoughts), is that I’d call Apple a MAINSTREAM provider, nothing independent, and in fact they mostly choose mainstream channels for advertising for their product, nothing particularly social going on, from what I can see, I may be wrong.

But I’m digressing slightly this post is not about Apple it is an attempt to get to the core reasons about why YOU choose your music, where do you hear about new music, what makes you buy it, what makes you purchase a new game, a new download, what media or advertising works for you?

I want total honesty here from you, does the TV work for you, does the weekly magazine work for you, does the X-Factor, do you buy a new single cause you hear it on mainstream radio, do you buy a film because it is in the box office charts, the billboard charts, what penetrates your buying decision?

How do you choose your media?

Net casting (in recent years known as podcasting), started for me, way back in the 90s.

I first had a web domain back in the 90s which was an audio service catering for musicians, classical and jazz mostly, I used to record a variety of performances and make them available on the internet for download, and some of these were to “show-off” new violin builds for example, by way of comparative recordings, kind of like A/B recordings. Of course back then this was a fairly time-consuming process due to restrictive speed connections.

Around 2000 I started Audiocourses.com as a post-graduate research project, as distance learning school for music production, sound engineering, and immediately made recorded voice content avaliable for download and streaming. Most of this audio was me giving tutorials in the RealAudio format, on topics such as music production, mixing etc. Being RealAudio format meant listeners could stream fairly easily from the site, RealAudio would select the bandwidth setting automatically for the user. Incidentally these early streams are still available on the Audiocourses.com downloads section and are dated to autumn 2002!

Throughout the early 90’s I uploaded more and more audio content, including such things as drum samples, sound effects and complete 24 track recording studio sessions. I then started audio blogging, which saw me using the telephone as an audio-blogging tool, I also rolled this service out for students, which enabled them to blog their thoughts simply by using a telephone, this was very popular, was quite a buzz chatting into a cell phone back in 2003 and having the content appear on a site as an audio file.

It is since the addition of the enclosure tag in RSS feeds that the concept of “podcasting” (a misguided name, in my opinion) somewhat “popularised” the concept of internet audio and video, but in essence the only thing that had changed (albeit an excellent change) was that content could be downloaded automatically. The fact is that audio/video content had been cast over the net for many years before this.

Having been “waist-deep” in audio content over the web for a number of years I had always toyed with the idea of a “radio show” for sometime (I did a number of radio style streams back in 98/99), but it wasn’t until 2006 that I decided that perhaps a regular show might be damn good therapy for myself and provide added value to the Audiocourses.com site visitors. I’ve always been very keen to ensure clients and students have plenty of virtual community building tools, a distance learning school is all about a sense of something virtually powered, so AC Radio (formally AC Podcast) was born.

Since then I have also introduced some other audio casting services including a text to speech service on SLEDucating, and a soon to be active cast on Audana (both called podcasts, but yes I have issues with that). I also have pro-audio news converted to aggregated audio on AC.

Whilst Podcasting seems to be a current popular term I have now decided to come full circle and reject it, basically just using net cast, or radio, or stream, as to be frank 50% of my current listener’s just stream right off the websites, as they have for years. The other issue is that the word Podcasting is very confusing for non-tech people, (no pod needed). I'm not alone in thinking the term podcasting will be dropped in the future, I of course may be wrong, but Radio, or cast, is far more widespread and understandable which is my excuse for sticking with it, plus I may also actually broadcast some of my shows live, which gives some more validity to using the term radio, even though technically I'll probably not use radio waves, in the electromagnetic sense.

Recently I have been capturing sound in my car and calling these Car Casts, as well as a new fun brain dump called the Running Man Radio show, where I take a portable recorder out on my road roads.