DefinitiveInk

AudioBlogger shuts down

Too bad. From AudioBlogger. It was a nice service that I used a few times. But their note points to others that will fill the space.

As of November 1, 2006, Audioblogger will no longer accept phone
calls. MP3s made with the service will continue to be hosted and
served but you will no longer be able to use Audioblogger to post
new audio.

Audioblogger is an independent product, run by Odeo, Inc., a small
startup company in San Francisco, CA. We are not affiliated with
Google or Blogger except that we operate and provide the
Audioblogger service.

Given our limited resources, we have to make tough decisions
about what projects to focus on. And we've come to the difficult
decision that Audioblogger demands too many resources, time, and
money for us to continue its operation.

However, there are several other services that offer similar
functionality. Odeo is not affiliated with any of these services,
we only suggest them only in hopes that one or the other will be
a good alternative for you.

Gabcast.com is a free service for recording by phone
Hipcast.com has a seven day free trial and lots of features
Gcast.com is another free service for phone recording

All of the phone posting services listed above are compatible
with Odeo in that they produce podcast feeds, which can be
imported to Odeo. Any audio file at Odeo can be posted on a blog
by copying and pasting some embed code.

Odeo would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has
tried Audioblogger. If you are interested in keeping up with our
other blog-friendly projects, please have a look at Twitter.com
and our customizable audio players.

Thanks,
The Odeo Team

Philly SoundAbout Reviews

I'm going to post some of the reviews/links that SoundAbout is getting here. My earlier post about it is here.

GoogleMaps Mania:

Philly Sound and Maps Mashup - Here is a fantastic new Google Maps mashup from the "Official Visitor Site of Greater Philadelphia" (gophila.com) that combines sound with Google Maps. It's called Sound About Philly. Various guided audio tours bring you through Philadelphia's history, "flavorhoods", and residents' perspectives of this great city. You can also create your own sound mapmash and leave it for others to view. It's a model mashup for other city tourism sites!

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Blinq blog:

Philadelphia has a promotional podcast. The news is that as a walking tour, it's not totally lame.

The idea behind Sound About Philly was to create a series of audio bits for visitors and locals to hear while sauntering around town with an iPod  - or for someone listening in Peoria by laptop.

It debuted yesterday, this project from the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp, and it's got promise. Teams of interviewers have roamed about, telling stories of the usual places as well as the unsung spots that give this city its charm....

Nice comments from  Shel Holtz (who is helping with the online marketing of the tours)

Tribeca Film Festival Neighbohood Tours

American Express commissioned some neighborhood tours with everybody's favorite NY guide Barry Lewis and Billie Cohen from TimeOut  NY. She plays the David Hartman role with fun comments as he lectures and towards the end she talks about places to shop and eat.  They seem to be sort of general chats about they neighborhoods and I found them a fun listen. Lewis just loves the city. The audio runs 15 minutes and is filled with neat factoids and I like the fact that it seems to have been recorded outside. I also like the fact that this is not a "tour" with any sort of walk this way or look at this element. They are really neighborhood chats you don't get a real "tour" as in walking block by block. I actually like this.  On the iTunes version they've placed a very rudimentary map as the album art. In all they give you a great sense of place. A gmap would have been a great addition.

A  post by Brent Gustafason on the Walker Art Center blog about wrestling with the definition of podcasts. He seems to have reached some of the same conclusions about the term as I have;

I kept getting stuck in the notion that if the idea of podcasting was to broadcast new “radio shows”, then letting someone randomly select artist interviews to listen to wasn’t the same as a podcast. But really all a podcast is is a list of MP3s one can download, they don’t neccesarily have to be in order, or flow together, or be time sensitive. When thought of like this it makes more sense. We can publish our entire list of available artist stops online in our podcast RSS, and people can then select which works interest them, and only download those specific MP3s. So the idea still works.

But we don’t want to limit the ability to recieve these MP3s to podcasts or podcast software. So in addition to building a podcast RSS feed for people to use, we’re going to build an index list online in the Art on Call website, for people to check off which work MP3s they want to download and then let them take those files and put it into their iPod from the web itself. This gives people without a podcast reader, or iTunes, or even an iPod, a way to get the same audio from our website. In reality, we’re just distributing MP3s, so why not give people some different options on how to recieve them?

Hmm, he also seems to be building something that sounds familiar but that is happily not the same as something I am building...

Museum Audio Tours

Article about cellphone based audio tours for museums.

More on this as Acoustiguide offers cells phone tour service. They are not down for the count in this space.

The Walker Art Center's blog posts on the development of their Art on Call service. It follows the emerging space very well.

TurnHere.com - a startup for local tour videos and real estate promos

Turnhere.com looks like a well funded new startup  aimed at local video but with a strong neighborhood tour and home tour angle. There is a tour of East Hollywood and also one of the penthouse apartment in the Piano Building in NY. Yahoo mapping is one way to navigate.

LibriVox - the people's Audible

LibriVox is a project in which people read and create audio files of books in the public domain. Sounds like a really nice project. TechCrunch)

Around my office SoundTour Stop #1: Little Egypt - 226 West 37th Street

A short podcast about Little Egypt, the exotic (for Victorian Times) dancer who met an untimely end around the corner from my office in the early 1900's, at 226 West 37th Street.

 

Soundscape mapping a list of links

This morning I attended a few sessions of the Knowing the World Through Sound Symposium at NYU. I wanted to see the first panel about the New York SoundMap that is being created by the NY Chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology. The* NY Sound Map is a Google map mashup which links to audio clips of sound recorded in the urban environment. Nice start. They handed out a great list urban audio ecology projects that I've listed below. It really opened my ears to what a vast field and way of thinking. some people map decibel levels, others through soundwalks create more meditative experiences. The work below has already made me broaden some of the audio ideas I'm playing with. Some of the links below are very academic in nature. Ones with *'s seem to approach more of what I'm interested in.

Noise mapping concept for the uk sound map.
U of Minnesota sound map project
Soundmaps for the visually impaired
Brooklyn/Flatbush soundmap
Soundmap of a house
*Soundcities
* Berlin Soundmap
* The Sonic Memorial Project
*Tony Round Soundmap
*Toronto Island Soundmap
Ultra-red Sounding the Naked City
* SoundTransit
*Puget Sound Soundscape - yes that means unbderwater sounds!
* NE Scotland Soundscape - including some background noise from one of my favorite distilleries.

Chickenfeet at Triple 8 Palace

On Sunday a group of us went to Triple Eight Palace for some post Thanksgiving dim sum. I brought along my new digital recorder to try to make a small sound tour of the experience. Melissa Clark, a good friend and cookbook writer, has been a fan of chicken feet since she was a little girl and here she talks about how to eat them properly. (photo by niznoz)

Download chickenfeet.mp3

Ricky Gervais is doing a podcast on the Guardian

Starting December 5th we will all be able to download a weekly podcast show by Ricky Gervais from the Guardian's web site.

 

But they have decided not to go   back to the GCap-owned London station, and will instead make the programme   available for download over the internet.

 

"I want to do a radio show where   I can say what I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for   anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world," said   Gervais.

 

"We didn't want it to just be the best   bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show that is   straight-to-Pod-cast. I suppose we're trying to create an exclusive club. We'd   prefer this to be a few people's favourite show than a huge samey ineffectual   broadcast."

SF Chronicle Podcast Tours

The SF Chronicle has several podcast tours up on their site. Two of the De Young Museum and two of the food scene in North Beach. Yum. These are posted on a blog with comments, permalinks etc.

Lecture Podcasts

The NYT has a small article in their Sunday Education Supplement about podcasts of lectures at Purdue and other schools. Here is the link to the Purdue Podcasts. I think it will be fun to listen to some of the agricultural ones.

Noted:
IT Conversations - "New idea through your headphones."

The University Channel- A collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world
-- for you to view, listen to, stream or download.

The Little Gray Book Lecture series podcasts.