Is Clubhouse going to kill podcasts? Nope.
“The thing that amazes me about Clubhouse”, says a friend, “is that everyone has to have a take. They can’t just quietly use it. They have to have an opinion in it.”
So, here I am, with a few opinions on Clubhouse, since it seems everyone else has to.
It won’t kill talk radio
Talk radio superficially seems easy. Have a Bloke (and it’s almost always a Bloke) who has an Opinion. Bloke states the Opinion to either a) ensure he gets a ton of people phoning Bloke to agree and to add an Important Point; or b) make every listener angry at the Opinion…
High quality MP3 audio is great: but it is pricing out a whole generation of potential listeners. Can we do better?
In South Africa, Vodacom has around 45% of the cellular market.
Worked out using Vodacom’s R99 per GB “pay as you go” price as a percentage of the average wage (3.6x less than the US), the cost of data is stunningly high.
Mobile data costs a typical South African the equivalent of US $23.50 per GB of data.
Or, to put it another way, download the latest episode of This American Life and the 66MB for the episode will cost you the equivalent of $3.52.
This American Life isn’t a particularly data-thirsty podcast. It’s just over an hour long, and it’s a pretty standard 128kbps stereo MP3 file. It sounds nice.
Is it better than WearOS? Or just different?
Smart watches have plenty of promise. Ever since I lost a lovely Mondaine watch in a Canadian hotel room, I’ve been hopping between WearOS smart watches, which used to be called Android Wear until Google changed the name because Google is a company seemingly run by toddlers with attention spans of five seconds.
I started with an LG square Android Smart watch; graduated to a round LG one; then a Huawei one; then a Fossil Sport. The Huawei one was probably best, but the screen became horribly burnt-in; the Fossil Sport should have been excellent but was hampered by an…
The plan to charge Google and Facebook for linking to news stories seems driven by jealousy, a failing business model, and rampant self-interest
Look, I get it. It must be terrible for the news companies at the moment: they’ve seen the internet take away the most lucrative product they had: the classified ad. Now, they’re also seeing news consumption changing dramatically: again, because of the internet. The print media, particularly, is having a torrid time.
The largest print publisher in Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owns the best-selling newspapers in almost every state capital city. It owns every single major newspaper in Queensland, Australia’s only national newspaper The Australian, the Foxtel satellite TV service and Sky News Australia. It has two-thirds of Australian…
I love Pocket Casts. But as it loses millions and puts itself up for sale, who would buy into it?
Podcast app Pocket Casts is looking for a buyer. NPR, which owns 34.6% of the company, reports their share of the company’s loss was $812,000 (p15): which could put the company’s net loss at more than $2m, though the company denies this.
I’ve used Pocket Casts for a long time. To me, it has two unbeatable features:
1. A really, really good audio player - the skip-silence and the voice-boost is light-years ahead of anything that anyone else has produced (with the possible exception of Overcast, but I don't use it enough to know)
Apple Podcasts is surprisingly keen to share information with podcast hosts, it turns out.
You’d think, from some of the coverage on privacy, that Apple is the saviour of the internet, and single-handedly saving us from those that would spread our personal data as far as it’ll go.
Apple is, undoubtedly, doing some good. The new privacy label in the App Store is certainly alarming some companies, as it should. The EFF, which I’m a personal member of, calls it “one more step in the right direction”, and I’d agree.
Apple are using their heft and scale to force change for online privacy. This is a good thing.
But not all of Apple’s products…
I take the plunge and reinstall Mac OS on day one of a new release. What could possibly go wrong?
After checking whether the two daily-drivers that I use were fully compatible with the new MacOS release of Big Sur, I followed some rather arcane instructions to produce a USB install key for Big Sur, wiped my hard drive, and started afresh. This machine dates from 2016, and I suspected that after four different versions of OSX it was time to have a clearout.
I’m keen to run the latest builds of things, since I suspect that the security is better. …
Is it a worthy replacement for an Apple iPad? Here’s why it is — and why it isn’t.
(First off: this isn’t one of those reviews which lethargically go through the features of a product. I’m assuming you already know all of that; but are more interested in how it actually works. And if you don’t know all that, there are plenty of pages that are product descriptions disguised as reviews for you.)
This is an updated review, after more use.
I knew what I was hopefully letting myself in for. I have a Samsung Chromebook Plus, a beautiful piece of hardware with a lovely screen, a pen, and it folds back to be a tablet. It’s brilliant…
What can we, as podcasters, learn from his time at the podcasting and music giant?
Yes, Joe Budden is leaving Spotify. He had an exclusive podcast on the service for two years: but he won’t be signing that contract again.
In almost two hours, which you can watch below, he goes into the detail of what happened, and why. Or, you can read a barely comprehensible machine transcript. Either way, there are invaluable lessons for all podcasters in here.
Invaluable lessons to learn
1. If you accept a contract that doesn’t let you take any vacation time, you’re an idiot.
2. If you accept a contract that makes you read advertisements, and then you…
Is this class action lawsuit against Gimlet the right potential solution? Or is it a bit more complicated?
Spotify’s Gimlet is the subject of a class action lawsuit in the New York courts. In the complaint, the plaintiff, Kahlimah Jones, argues that Gimlet violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by failing to provide closed captioning on various podcasts. Here’s the complaint in full:
The central point of the complaint is:
§5 [Gimlet] has chosen to post podcasts without closed-captioning, or with limited closed-captioning, that are inaccessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.
Podcast transcripts
A podcast transcript — here’s one — is the contents of a podcast, written out, so people can read it. …
