Podcasting proliferation (procrastination)

I note with some interest that WSG regular Sydney and Melbourne meetings are being recorded and will, at some time in the near future (i.e. after the meetings have happened), be available for download somewhere. Earlier, WSG event Web Essentials ’05 was made available for podcast download. On Sunday, my church announced they were making sermons available for download (and, just for the record, their site is getting re-done :P So ugly-factor will soon disappear, and I’m hoping to figure out a way to make the podcasts more accessible when that happens!)

Last time I checked (and I keep a fairly close eye on these things in a web context), bandwidth and disc space didn’t get dramatically cheaper. Nor, I hazard, did recording equipment. So what gives? Suddenly we all decide we can be bothered? Is this just buzzword-compliance 101?

One of the reasons I have for being wary of podcasting is not so much bandwidth (which can be paid for if exceeded and so forth without too much difficulty), but storage space! Storage space, unless you’re buying a server, is generally rather scant. Especially next to bandwidth: most hosts assume that your entire site will attract enough traffic to have it downloaded in its entirety several times over. To be fair, so does base10solutions — but our storage is geared to the size site that, relative to its bandwidth, could conceivably attract enough traffic to go over without difficulty. What I’m talking about is people with blogs on 6GB accounts with 100GB of transfers — it’s utterly disproprtionate.

The web doesn’t have much respect for permanence. Which is probably one reason why low-storage accounts have lasted so long. With podcasting, if I put something online I want it to stay there permanently, because it’s content! A certain image gallery won’t stay there forever, but to me that’s okay as it’s acting in a ‘closed community’ context — the only door is my website (to the best of my knowledge, few, if any, other people have linked to it).

So I have some burning questions about where all these resources are coming from, and if they’re sustainable. It could just be that people have decided they’re prepared to spend money on hosting now, and more money in the future if storage/bandwidth costs don’t scale as quickly as anticipated. Or — and this is what I think is most likely happening, though not necessarily with the examples cited — people are hosting things without thinking what they’ll do when they come to “that” — “that” being, of course, the inevitable wall at which point they need to expand/upgrade/reach further/… or delete content.

The other question, of course, is why now? We haven’t seen any quantum leap, so it must be that people are only now realising the potential of the medium. You could argue for broadband uptake, but I’d argue back that as podcasting is mostly spoken-word content, its bandwidth requirements are no greater than that of talkback shows that have had 28.8kb streams since 1997. Maybe it’s just awareness. That’s where I’m leaning. I think it’s people seeing a buzzword that’s been given some degree of credence — though little recognition outside of web circles, according to a handful of surveys (I’d meant to find links for that but haven’t got time… there was something on CNet News.com a few months back) — and attempting to catch the wave as it rises.

On the note of waves rising, it should be noted that, yes, I am one of the nay-sayers that believe this “Web 2.0″ thing is a farce and will see some setback. We might emerge more semantic or application-oriented or whatever because of it — just like Web 1.0 left us with a bunch of empty stores and Flash websites that we’re still trying to get rid of/turn into a more appropriate use of the platform –, but money is going to be lost. So there are my thoughts on that, whilst trying to clear my mind of various “I know nothing” stress before going to bed and sitting my last exam tomorrow. Hence “procrastination” in this posts’ title.

cat-scan live

It’s live!

If you’re seeing a boring directory listing, wait another hour or five til the DNS change has propagated… we changed nameservers last night, Sydney time, so it should be through soon.

Be the first to comment on it over at the cat-scan blog!

N.B. If you haven’t got working DNS yet, try http://209.59.176.82/~catscan/blog/ and http://209.59.176.82/~catscan/. Links will be broken using this method.

Things to come

About to launch a new site. Exciting. This is the first site I’ve fully designed in a graphics app (namely Inkscape — yes, a vector graphics app! Worked really well!) before introducing CSS: I dropped the idea of “CSS-based design” for a while and think it turned out quite nicely. The project was gratis for an open-source project mentioned before on this site, encompassing logo and site design. This is the “more visually complex” design I alluded to two days ago. It mightn’t seem particularly dark if you have a large screen, but the content area is certainly less bright. It doesn’t have a ‘dark’ feel, though — quite the opposite.

The design is about primary colours, which represent the purpose of the project itself. From that you might have guessed what I’m talking about, but I’ll continue to be dramatic until I’m ready to say “hey, it’s launched, go look.” Well, actually, it won’t be “launched” until early December in a marketing sense, but the site will be ‘live’ sometime in the next 48 hours, albeit with some content missing.

I hope my usual standards of markup propriety have been upheld — I even bothered to validate this one before launch, catching two potentially embarrassing unencoded ampersands (because I completely forgot we’re meant to do that. I haven’t used them for so long, but the typeface has nice ampersands so I wanted to!) — but most of all, at least for me, this design is about design. I say without hesitation it’s the best I’ve ever come up with.

I’m hoping to enjoy working with Inkscape as a design tool more in the future, because it really is excellent! Expect an announcement about the site’s launch in the next 24 hours — until then, feel free to try and guess what it is! ;-)

K2

Far out. K2 is awesome. I’m currently ripping code from it for live search stuff, because it’s written sensibly. Unlike various plugins and other “howto” guides out there.

I’m reluctant to use it, as I am reluctant to base any WP theme I make on Kubrick, not because of any perception of it as being banal and overused (though I suppose there is some of that), but mostly because it’s a very comprehensive place to start from, and I find myself with larger quantities of redundant code.

This theme has a freaking Options page in the admin panel! I didn’t even know you could do that!

Anyway. Back to trying to make things work…

WSUS: Windows updates with no activation required

A little birdy told me that using WSUS means you don’t need to have activated (i.e. legit) versions of Windows or other Microsoft products. I’ve had instances where, on reinstalling Windows XP (slipstreamed SP2), over-the-net activation wouldn’t work at all and I didn’t get a chance to phone activate for about three weeks. Wasn’t a huge problem because of course IE wasn’t the default browser and I refuse to let people install MSN Messenger (if they’re using Windows, they have to use the no-frills, relatively secure and quick Windows Messenger!), and there was anti-virus stuff installed, but that’s a while to be running unpatched Windows.

In a small bus environment, WSUS means you can avoid potential headaches like that. In a paranoid reluctant-MS-user environment, it means you can (illegally) crack your (legally purchased) operating system, and enjoy updates without having to hand out your details on a platter. Or, alternatively, if you’re a comprehensive Microsoft pirate from the server to the desktop, you can take further advantage of their hospitality by enjoying the fine update services they have to offer. ;-)

Hey, if you’re going to steal software at least do it well!

More generally speaking, WSUS just looks like a cool tool. You download once, apply many, and manage what patches do/don’t get installed from a central location.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried WSUS, this is just second-hand. We only use appropriately licensed Microsoft products here. I’m publishing this because being subversive is fun, if a little childish, and this could conceivably (legitimately or otherwise) be of use to someone.