Monthly Archives: December 2005

Podcast Interview with Norris McDonald over Gizmo Project

1 Reply

The above link is an interview I did yesterday with Norris McDonald, President of the African American Environmentalist Association (AAEA). We talked for about 18 minutes about a variety of topics including:

  • The AAEA Blog and the AAEA Hollywood Blog and Norris’s experiences with his constituents on these blogs.
  • Will podcasting take off or do most people prefer their talk on the radio and music on their iPods?
  • Nuclear power. The AAEA supports it as the solution to all the problems of fossil fuel dependency. Norris also argues that advocating for decreased consumption in the US is unrealistic. He recommends the site GreenSpirit for more info.

The interview was done via the Gizmo Project a VOIP program very much like Skype. Gizmo was every bit as easy to use and has a one-click record function, something that is a real nightmare in Skype. To read more about Gizmo Project check out this reviews on the bottom of the Gizmo page. Gizmo saved the call onto my desktop in .WAV format with a filename based on my caller’s username. Much thanks to my sound engineer brother who cleaned up the background info and um’s. I think it sounds great. Hopefully this is the first of many interview podcasts we’ll be doing.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Four Visitor Mapping Services Compared

Leave a reply

Visitors to this and many other blogs may have noticed the proliferation of maps used to visualize the geographic location of a site’s readers. I use Clustrmaps myself and recommend it to others in most situations. But there are alternatives, and each service probably makes sense in different circumstances. Here’s an overview of 4 of the most popular visitor map services I’ve come across online. People love maps on blogs. Love them.

  • Clustrmaps.com shows a nice looking map on your site’s front page, with red circles of varying size to indicate how many visitors have come from each location. You can click on the map to get a full page view. Paid subscribers can focus in one particular continents and have the Adsense removed from the top of the full page maps. Subscription is aprox. $10 per year. The maps can also be set to go blank and begin anew at intervals of your choice. These folks also have awesome customer service. I believe this map is good for sites wishing to demonstrate world-wide readership, but for which networking is less important than it is for business type sites. I’ve set one up, for example, at The Committee to Protect Bloggers. Much of the blogging there concerns the Middle East and Asia, so it’s interesting to compare subject matter and location of readership. Their map shows that there are many readers living in the areas written about.
  • Frappr is a very full featured service. In addition to a scrollable Google mini-map on your site, there’s a click through full screen with extensive fields for community networking. In addition to posting photos, messages and links to the Google Maps used by Frappr, visitors can also send private messages to the site admin. Frappr asks visitors for their zip code and posts flags on the map accordingly. Users (“members”) can subscribe to email updates of new items posted to a map, admin can set up a slide-show of recently added photos, and who knows what else can be done with this amazing service. It appears to be supported by AdSense and AdBright. We’ll see how this service holds up under heavy adoption. You can browse a list of maps in use at the homepage of Frappr. This is a very impressive service, but may be too complex and over-featured for many blogs. There also doesn’t appear to be any support for RSS here.
  • GVisit is like a way pared down Frappr. The interface is very dull, Google Map on grey background, and there’s no mini-map for your front page so you have to just put in a link. There are, however, some desirable features. A list of recent cities visiting, the time of visit shown when flags are clicked on. You can also display the cities of recent visitors on the front page of your site via RSS to HTML. The RSS feed of visitor locations is also subscribable. This service is free, but with a donation of any amount they will track your most recent 100 visitors (up from 20) and remove all advertising from your map (lately there’s been some pretty obnoxious AdSense). I think this service would make sense for people interested in displaying the text of an RSS feed of recent visitors’ locations on the front page of their site, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.
  • Geo-Loc is a very cool French service. Past visitor locations are in red, visitors currently on the site are in green, and the countries where the current visitors online live are scrolled along the bottom of the map. I think this is rad! You can see the service in action over at the hilarious Barking Moonbat Early Warning System blog, about halfway down the right sidebar. (For those who don’t know, a Barking Moonbat is a raving leftist.) Or you can visit the Geo-Loc home page and view it there with more visitors. I can’t describe the service in depth as i haven’t done French since the 7th grade, and for now it’s beside the point anyway. I’m sad to report that according to the Subscribe page (and Google Translations)

    The significant number of inscriptions requires a maintenance. The inscriptions will be available soon. Thank you for your comprehension.

    That’s a shame, as this looks like a very cool tool for busy sites with global readership! I set up an email alert with Changedetection.com to let me know when the subscription page changes and new accounts are available again. I’d recommend this service to people who can read French, or who have a large number of readers who can. Just kidding, the map itself has only the words “now online” in English and the country names scrolling. Totally usable once you’ve got it installed.

Well, those are my little reviews. I’d love to read thoughts, horror stories, good experiences, interesting applications and alternative services if you’d like to leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Google Not Alone at Top of Search Mountain

1 Reply

Did you know that eBay handles as many searches each month as Google does? It’s a strange world, isn’t it? I wonder how many of those searches are performed manually by humans. A much higher percentage at Google, I’d guess.

Related and also from John Battelle’s blog, are the following images.


I’ll never forget the first person who told me about Google. It was discussed as if it were some kind of underground secret. I still have someone ask me every once in awhile if I know about Google!

Comparing Features in Podcast Search Engines

2 Replies

I just discovered Podzinger via Emily Chang’s eHub, itself a site you should make sure to check out if you haven’t. I was excited to look at a new podcast search engine, as the you never can have too many good options.

The things I look for in a podcast search engine are these:

  • RSS feeds for my search queries – this is by far most important to me.
  • Can I listen to excerpts where my search terms are used?
  • How big is the engine’s index, or is it able to find shows about my topics of interest?
  • Is it easy to submit a podcast for indexing?
  • Is it easy to download the podcasts from the search results page?
  • Are there any other features that I didn’t expect?

So what are our options and how do they compare?

Podzinger
RSS feeds are included, this is what interested my in this service. According to the search results page though, “RealPlayer and IE 5.0 or higher are required for audio playback.” You’ve got to be kidding. That means I won’t be listening to excerpts. At least the occurence of my search terms is time stamped. Podzinger has indexed is 20137 podcasts, seems to be growing and finds good results in my areas of interest (non-profit, social justice, ecology, etc.) It is very easy to submit a podcast to be indexed. Unexpected features? Check out the Podzinger registration page, where you can find code to insert a search for your own podcast into your web site. Nice, but does it rely on RealPlayer as well?

Conclusion: I’ll be subscribing to feeds from Podzinger and might consider recommending it to people who want to add a search function to their own podcast’s web page. I won’t be visiting the Podzinger site itself very often as I find its requirements to listen to excerpts frustrating.

Yahoo Podcast Search
Feeds? Nope, and that’s surprising given how well RSS is embraced generally at Yahoo. Can I listen to excerpts? Nope. Listening is through a proprietary Yahoo podcast listener thing that I don’t really trust, but worse than that – you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download the files! Once I do that even, I’m taken straight through to loading the audio file on my browser! I want to click a button and chose to download the file onto my hard drive, thank you. I don’t see how many files are indexed, though I imagine lots of people have figured out how to submit to this service. I am so upset by how dumbed-down and locked up this interface is that I don’t even want to look at Yahoo podcast search anymore! As for interesting features, the searches do separate podcast series that are described using your search terms vs. episodes in which your search terms are said. Additionally, there are listener reviews, tagging, etc. Yahoo has so much money and status that I’m sure you can probably find lots of interesting things with it, but the difficulty in downloading, the lack of an RSS feed and the requirement that I login with a Yahoo ID all make me so angry that I will probably never recomend this search engine to anyone.

Blinkx.com
I love Blinkx. They were the fist service I found that offered an RSS feed for searches, and their customer service has been incredibly helpful and engaged with problems I’ve had with them! I love them! Unfortunately, there are problems here too. Search results only deliver the episode title and not the source show or podcast series name. That’s strange. You can’t listen to excerpts around your search terms, that too is a real shame. But it is very easy to download the files in your search terms. I can’t tell how many podcasts they index, but it is very easy to submit podcasts for indexing. Innovative features include a slider to prioritize date or relevance in the order your search results appear in. I like Blinkx best of all of these options, though I wish some of the feature omissions weren’t an issue.

Podscope
I rarely use this service because there is no RSS feed for my searches! Executives from the company said in an interview I listened to that they would be supporting RSS soon…and that was months and months ago. Whoa, I take it back! Upon visiting the site again I see that they have added RSS. Yay! This is a new contender for my absolute favorite. The search results are displayed beautifully. You can easily listen to excerpts based on your search terms, it’s easy to download the files, there are great links to the podcast’s home page, the search-discovered episode’s permalink and the podcasts RSS feed. It is easy to submit a podcast for indexing and they too now offer a search box for your show’s site. Wow! This is great, go check it out and click on some Adsense.

Conclusion: I think that Podscope may be my new favorite. I am so excited to see the changes they’ve made.

Feedster Podcast Search
I love Feedster. They offer customer service almost 24-7 via IM! And it was really helpful customer service when I contacted them. They do, of course, offer feeds for searches. You cannot listen to excerpts around your search terms, you can select either series descriptions or episodes to search inside. Download is easy and you can chose either date or relevance as priority for display of your search results. I can’t tell how hard it is to submit or how big the index is. The front page says “Currently Indexing feeds from different podcasts.” Well isn’t that nice?

Conclusion amongst conclusions: When I have multi-media research needs for myself or a client, I am most likely to subscribe to feeds for my queries from Blinkx, Feedster and now Podscope and Podzinger. If I am doing a one time search for audio content, I am going to search inside Podscope so that I can listen to excerpts around my search terms. If I’m looking for shows about a certain subject, as opposed to particular episodes that mention my search term…I might begrudgingly use Yahoo.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,