Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
May 25, 2005

Thoughts on Podcasting

by Kevin Dangoor

Podcasting has received a lot of attention. I don’t think I’ve written a single word about it to date, despite being a longtime reader of Dave Winer and a creator of a news aggregator. The reason I haven’t written anything to date is that it’s not something I’m really jumping up and down about. There are many other things going on in internet audio that are more compelling: the move to subscription services, heinous DRM — and when consumers will finally revolt against it, the ongoing availability of AllOfMP3.com.

And now, I don’t have to write my thoughts about podcasting, because Seth Godin has summed it up perfectly. Podcasting doesn’t work as well as blogs for reaching a broad audience or sustainable. Check out Seth’s further thoughts as well.

In order for podcasting to work, it needs to provide an experience similar to what I get with blogs: it needs to be searchable, and it needs to be indexed. There are some blogs that I subscribe to, but there are many, many blogs that I read via searches and such. Usually, I’m interested in one topic, not an entire 1 hour show worth. I need to be able to do a textual search that links me directly to a ~1 minute space around the topic I’m interested in. Give me that, and podcasting may work.

Even with that, however, it’s not a certainty. The segment that talks about the topic I’m interested in may be 10 minutes long. With a blog article, I can scan for the specific item of interest. This is a lot harder to do with an audio file. Like I said, there’s a serious UI challenge to overcome before podcasting really works as well as a blog.

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May 25, 2005

Zesty News alpha delayed

by Kevin Dangoor

I had, until very recently, been aiming for releasing the first alpha release of Zesty News Lite on May 31st. I do believe in “release early, release often” as a way to make great progress on a project, even a closed-source one. However, I also believe in not wasting the time of the people testing my product. That means balancing the desire to get features out there with a bit of stability.

The point of the alpha release of Zesty News is to get the foundation out there, showing off the basic concepts, and then build features based on my plan and feedback I get. The foundation should be solid, so that I can react fairly quickly without spending too much time retooling.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I needed to do some retooling to handle concurrency better. Though I could have done this work between the alpha and beta releases, I decided that it’s a better idea to get this done before I release at all. There are other benefits to this change, as well: my code will be easier to test and more code will be covered by automated tests as a result, the distributed package has shrunk by about 10%, and programming for the web interfaces will be easier going forward.

When I’m done with the change, I’ll write more technical details about it.

Odds are that this change will take about a week, which is not too bad. After that week is over, I’ll spend the following week or so working on what I had originally planned to do this week and ongoing testing of the big change I’m making now.