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This is the personal blog of Don McAllister, the host and producer of ScreenCastsOnline.

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Tuesday
Nov142006

Installing the Zune... sucked - Engadget

Oh dear! Am I surprised?

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Monday
Nov132006

RIP Gillmor Gang?

So is that it? I hope not, as the Gillmor Gang proved to be one of the most thought provoking nuggets of wisdom (and BS) in the podosphere. It must have been pretty special to have maintained any sort of regular listenership due to.... well count the obstacles:

  • Crappy audio quality
  • The bizarre use of 20% of each segment just for brain numbing repetition of pretty abysmal ads
  • The frankly bonkers idea of splitting up each show into up to five 25 minute segments and then publishing them all on the same day! Which often (always!) meant that iPod syncing never worked as you'd only get the last part during a sync on my configuration
  • I was always sure there was a really good reason for this but Steve never explained and I was always too scared to comment for fear of being told "f*ck you" as so many brave soles before me did. Perhaps it was to prove they really did have our attention? Well you did Steve, despite all these barriers to listening and the remarkably shabby way I felt treated as a listener. No, I still hung in there, I still manually went into iTunes to download the other parts and yes I scrolled through those adverts to get to the meat. It was worth it to catch the occasional spark of brilliance, to listen to the frustrations of the gang, to change my opinion of Jason and to get an insight into the workings of SV. So now it's gone and we're left with a partial show and no real sign off. Pretty much par for the course but you know what, I'll miss the gang. Technorati Tags: , ,

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    Saturday
    Nov042006

    The River of News - Google Reader Style

    River of News-styled reading is a good idea for some, if it suits your mood.I ended up wanting to categorize it into the organized form I used to read it in. I’m not in the mood to read everything today, I’m in the mood to read certain topics and people.

    I tried ‘river of news’ style but… at Eric Rice

    Eric Rice is pushing back against the "River of News" metaphor that seems to have become so popular in certain quarters.

    I've gotta agree with him!

    That's why I was such a big fan of NetNewsWire as it let me categorise feeds into folders and I could pick what I wanted to read depending on my particular need at the time. I'm subscribed to over 200 feeds and no way could I cope with a deluge!

    In some ways, Google Reader is even better in that I can assign multiple categories (or tags) to feeds so that a feed can be in both my Mac related category and my Notables category. If I feel like reading about mac related stuff, all my mac feeds are agregated into a single list which I can skip through and read using the "j" key but it also includes all my "notable" mac related people as well. If I feel like reading about people, it's easy just to click on the "notables" and read all the agregated posts.

    I can of course see who has posted and just jump straight to that feed.

    Even better is it's on the web so I can do it from any machine anywhere and always be current.

    Bliss!




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    Thursday
    Nov022006

    The ScobleShow

    Just noticed that Scoble has posted a show on Google Reader and interviews some of the Google Reader team. Excellent, I'm a big Google Reader fan (props to Scoble for making me look a bit closer at the app after initially first dismissing it). But that's not the point of this post. Just some observations on the PodTech/ScobleShow thing as constructive criticism, I'm not Scoble bashing :-) Look, I'm no brilliant editor myself but Robert is sorta high profile and I don't know but I tend to expect high production values on his output, especially video stuff. Audio can hide a multitude of sins but Video, well it's kind of in your face. The actual video quality is great, but I would have expected better user of the format? Or is it that new media shouldn't worry about production values? Perhaps it shouldn't! But there are still people to convert to new media and there needs to be some compromise between raw content and a final semi-polished version? People are used to high video production values and we can't just dismiss that fact. Would it really hurt to turn this into a two camera shoot? 30 minutes on a fixed frame shot is really not that interesting to watch. Why not a couple of close ups, a couple of inserts, etc. Yes, it makes it much more complex to shoot and it increases both the cost and the production time but without it, you may as well just listen to the audio. Technically it's really not that difficult, even in the editing process in FCP. You can virtually do it in real time. It may just be that Robert is gearing up and I know there is a new editor coming on board so we may see more sophisticated episodes further down the track? I hope so. And as for sponsorship by Seagate, I've really no problem with that. The more major league sponsors that move into the podcasting space the better - heck, I'd love a major sponsor for my show :-) But you just need to be a bit more careful with how you position them... "without them I couldn't bring you what I'm doing here tonight.." Hmmmm....I seem to remember that Podtech received $5.5 million in Series A funding funding back in March so I'm sure he could actually do a show without them. Perhaps he couldn't due to the setup within Podtech but I'd be really surprised if he wasn't able to do a show without a sponsor! Just a minor point, but it just grated a bit knowing the background. It probably wouldn't even be picked up the majority of the viewers. Again, I'm not bashing the show but just offering up some suggestions. More power to your elbow Robert, as the more you can popularise the medium the better for all of us working in the same space. Anyway, I'd better get on with recording my show for this week! No $5.5 mill funding for me but at least I'm making a living doing this new media thing full time!

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    Thursday
    Nov022006

    iPod Shuffle Design

    I'm not really in the market for the new shuffle but you've just got to gasp at the amount of work Apple have put into these little beauties. Just astounding!

    Yes, this is the bottom!

    (Via TUAW.)

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