:Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

I just discovered today, that They Might Be Giants has a podcast! I’m way late in discovering this, as the first episode was from the summer of 2005. They have released three episodes so far. I don’t know how often they are putting them out, as only the first podcast is dated. There are unreleased recordings and assorted “stuff” in there. And they are really cool.

In other They Might Be Giants (TMBG) news, they are promoting a new DVD bundle of their Venue Songs. What is Venue Songs, you ask? On their site, they explain: “At each stop of their 2004 tour, TMBG wrote, arranged and performed a brand new song, dedicated to that evening’s venue. Hence the name, Venue Songs. Each song came together in one day, as a surprise for the audience.”

The Venue Songs DVD features original videos of the Venue Songs, and a weird story about a deranged millionaire that wants to lock up the Venue Songs forever. It makes for some silly watching, TMBG style!

TMBG are releasing the original Venue Songs videos, compressed for the web, on their website every week, one video for each “venue” in the album. There are also three bonus videos from the DVD on the site. They’re funny and goofy, just like the songs. I like them a lot!

The Venue Songs DVD also features a DVD-quality video of Homestarrunner’s “Experimental Film” Flash cartoon episode, for which TMBG wrote an original song. ( If you don’t know Homestarrunner, it’s the best Flash cartoon, ever! ) This video is not available on TMBG’s website, although you can see the original web-quality-sound Flash cartoon at the URL above.

Go check out They Might Be Giant’s podcast, and go check out Homestar Runner. They’re silly, zany, web-powered fun!

Technorati Tags:
personal media, podcast, they might be giants, homestar runner, web cartoon

4 Comments

I have been listening to podcasts and watching videoblogs since September 2004. As the first podcasts and videoblogs improved the value in their content, I started to see a trend in myself. I stopped listening to the radio. I stopped channel surfing in front of the boob tube. I became a lot more discriminating in what I chose to spend my time listening to or watching.

But my tastes were not changing. I was simply choosing to only watch and listen to that which was within my tastes. I now see TV and radio channel surfing as wasting my time looking for mainstream media to put something on that I might like. Instead, I pick out podcasts and videoblogs with content I really care about, TiVo or download those TV shows I know I enjoy, and spend my time consuming that. And best of all, I don’t have to fast-forward through commercials.

This has resulted in my gaining several hours in my week, which were previously spent bored to death flipping channels. And by moving my pre-selected video watching to the weekend, my weeknights are now totally open. I now have more time for friends and family.

Every two to three months, I switch on the car radio to see if there’s anything new, but I find the exact same songs as two or three months ago! Even the radio commercials haven’t changed! Meanwhile, I get a dozen different artists’ songs in a single day from Indiefeed and Music 4 iPods, with no annoying, repetitive, boring, commercials. It’s not that the commercials on Indiefeed and Music 4 iPods are better. These podcasts have no commercials at all. Update: I am not against commercials in personal media, I’m just glad there are no commercials in these feeds right now. I am more of a believer in listener support, through donations, of the podcasts I really enjoy.

I am not the only one that is noticing this change in how we increasingly engage with media. Established radio and TV producers that have turned to podcasters and videobloggers themselves have noticed, that the people that watch and listen to their online productions “talk back” a lot more than mainstream media consumers used to.

Dave Raven, of BFBS Radio 2, has been in mainstream radio for many decades. He produces and hosts a one hour blues radio program that is broadcast weekly in the UK, Raven ‘n’ the Blues (RnB). He started podcasting RnB in late 2004. He has noticed that he has a more engaging audience in the podcast listeners, than in the millions he ostensibly reaches through the radio waves.

There already is a large number of podcasts and videoblogs out there, and the growth doesn’t seem to be abating. There is clearly a market for personal media. Personal media not only challenges, but improves on what the mainstream media offers. Personal media does this by either filling a niche that mainstream media choses not to fill (i.e. podcasts and videoblogs about hacking and open source software), or by doing a better job (as in the case of the indie music shows.)

As mainstream media continues to throw away their money on DRM and in lawsuits, trying to defend their business models, personal media will continue to grow and attract more people by being open. I find it hilarious, that in trying to defend their business, they are only marginalizing themselves in a world growing daily with more open media choices.

The smart producers and artists will jump ship and start producing and creating personal media before the mainstream media boat completely sinks. Those remaining will be the incompetent, lazy, and money grubbing. They will sink with the Titanic. Hopefully they’ll take with them more than a few corporate IP lawyers for good measure.

I say, good riddance.

Technorati Tags:
personal media, creative commons

1 Comment

I enjoy Tim Bray’s writing at his weblog, titled Ongoing. I began reading in late 2001, and I was hooked by his digital photography, his excellent writing, and his deep analysis of technical and cultural trends. His series on multi-core, multi-threaded, parallelism is required reading for any self-respecting 21st century enterprise-level software architect, which I am. (OK, OK, I admit I’m also quite the geek, having learned Intel 8008 machine language at the age of 7. As of February 2006, I’m 35, and I still luuuv this kind of deep hardware detail.)

And Tim’s weblog platform fascinates me. Instead of using Movable Type, or WordPress, or Bloxsom, etc., he has implemented his own weblog engine, using what he claims is a 2200-line Perl script, a MySQL metadata back end, and a little XML.

His weblog engine features a webpage template with a rotating image header, and a sidebar with a rotating random image from his substantial digital photography collection. This past week, he says he fixed a problem he had with the sidebar image, adding
a bit of AJAXy goodness or other to his sidebar. Not the least bit surprisingly from Tim, the entry goes into more than a bit of detail about how his weblog engine is put together, and what he has done to fix the sidebar image issue. And it is awesome! Tim is definitely an über-h4×0r.

You see, the weblog runtime is entirely filesystem-based! Unlike WordPress, Typo, Bloxsom, and other weblog engines, he doesn’t use a runtime database and templating engine, and does not bother with much dynamic HTML generation for each weblog entry requested by a visitor. His weblog platform is automated, in the sense that he doesn’t write the pages from scratch all in HTML, natch. He has a Perl-script generate the website content from XML-based templates, and the entries are written with pseudo-HTML style tags.

Having the content be generated and stored on the filesystem means two things:

• His weblog is very robust under stress, since there are no, um, “moving,” software parts besides the OS, a filesystem, and Apache.
• Even on a modest server, it should withstand a whole lot of slashdotting (or is it diggs that we have to worry about now?).

I have to admit, I am more than a little bit jealous. Being a hopeless geek myself since an early age, I’ve always been fascinated with the inner workings of computers and software. And my mind wants to grok how things work, and I enjoy making my own things.

Now I too want a filesystem-based weblog engine to call my own! I too want a weblog with spiffy graphical headers, and AJAX goodness, and metadata. Really, what geek doesn’t enjoy goofing around with a little metadata? It will all be put together and crafted by my own mental powers and some clever typing in some clever little language.

So starting this week, using my copious free time, I am going to write my own simple filesystem-based weblog engine. Details to come as I get my butt in gear.

Technorati Tags:
weblog engines, web architecture, tim bray

1 Comment