Category: other lesser codologies

Techdirt:Ok, Forget It. No One Has The Slightest Clue Who Listens To Podcasts

A little side project of mine which I’ve been wittering on about lately is about using podcasts in the Irish market and whether or not anybody, and I mean anybody at all would listen to them. The link above seems to point in two completely different directions for data gathered in the States.

One survey would suggest that it’s the 45+ group who are listening in (people who actually listened to spoken content in the past on the radio), but I’m not convinced that 54-year-old Uncle Diarmuid from Boyle, Co. Roscommon would be too inclined to strap on his iRiver and listen to the latest, cutting edge content about peanut crops from Agnews Weekly. I may be wrong, perhaps he does.

Another survey suggests that it’s the 18-34s who are inveterate Podcast listeners. This result makes sense to me even though I’m outside this range myself, but there again I’ve been involved in geekery for most of my adult life in some form or another. This is the market I’m interested in, although there is no publically available data relevant to Ireland.

I’ve just returned from the Shark Awards Festival in Ennis, where the RTE News Promo, directed by John Butler and post-produced at The Farm won a BRONZE in the newly created category of TV PROMOS | Best News / Current Affairs / Factual Promo. Well done us!

We also had a medal winner in the TV PROMOS | Best Film Promo for RTE: movies to engage your mind, directed by Jim Booth and designed and exectued by Laura Brooks, Niall O hOisin, Brian O’Durnin and me.

Seth’s Blog: Who’s There? the new ebook (free for now)

I’ve been reading Seth’s excellent new(ish) ebook and trying to relate it to the Irish experience. Obviously markets here are much, much smaller, and to a very large extent I think the way of doing business here is a helluva lot different from northern California in particular and the US in general.

I’m thinking about trying to persuade some contacts of mine here in the property business to do a podcast on their website. I know that this will be a bit of a departure for them, and might be difficult to get them to splash out the inital outlay for the requisite studio time. Probably even more of a battle will be to get their IT dept to stick it onto their website. IT departments can be very precious here, as I’ve discovered.

My biggest problem will be to convince them (and I haven’t quite figured this out for myself) why they should bother doing a podcast, as opposed to spending large amounts of money in more traditional media, namely print and TV. I guess I need to persuade them to do all three, and then atke a view further down the road.

The demographic that I would like to target is first time buyers. These are typically in their late 20s or early 30s and are mostly employed (I guess). So, is there an advantage getting them to download a podcast instead of opening a newspaper on a Wednesday or Thursday?

Yes.

I watched a program about female sexuality on C4 last night which dealt with, amongst other things, the 2D:4D ratio or the digit ratio for short. It would appear to have correlation with a range of phenomena such as aggression, Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism, muscial ability, maths etc etc. Google 2D:4D digit ratio

Strange things are beginning to happen to my old TiBook. Three years old this month and it had never really been turned off, so it doesn’t owe me much I guess. I took this screen capture after it awoke from sleep and behaved strangely, and surprisingly enough the weird pixels were captured, which I was surprised at. I think that this may be important in tracking down where the problem might lie. I’ll have to head off to Apple Discussions for a read.

Last week I wrote:

For the current models, the prices look like:

Eur 1,329.75 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.33GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)

Six hundred euros in the difference.

Well, I was incorrect about the rumours, new iBooks came out all right but not the fabled widescreen model, only modest speed bumps and 512 MB RAM as standard. The prices now look like:

Eur 1,131.40 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.42GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)

So for the new iBook: a modest speed bump, faster graphics, the motion sensor thingumajig in case you drop it, the scrolling trackpad, bluetooth (can’t remember if it’s in the previous version).

What concerns me most though about this machine is its resolution: 1024×768 is just too shaggin’ small, considering I’m editing images which are (natively) more than twice the width. That’s a problem for me. From what I gather, the VGA video output is still stuck at 1024×768, so there’s no scope for hooking it up to a bigger external display.

I just want another PowerBook.

My current workhorse is a TiBook 800MHz – a 15″ PowerBook G4 which I’ve had since May 2002. It has been a great machine and has served me well for over three years, but it’s beginning to show its age. Getting a bit chipped around the edges, not the racehorse it used to be (!) and I’m getting slightly electrocuted under certain conditons. I also think it’s time for a dvd burner which I don’t have.

What to do?

I have a limited budget (three kids and a mortgage) and I was thinking of a G5 iMac or, if rumours prove true, one of the new widescreen iBooks. Alternatively, another PowerBook. Basically I have to decide if I’m going to be portable or deskbound. I’m probably going to miss portability, so chances are it’ll be a ‘Book of some sort.

For the current models, the prices look like:

Eur 1,329.75 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.33GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)

Six hundred euros in the difference.

So I’ve put up a more traditional about page, available from the top navigation bar, and on that page I’ve added an email address, an alias to my normal .mac address. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s harvested anytime soon. I also tried doing one of those random imageg php things you can see on the banner above, but with mixed format images – i.e. portrait and landscape, and while the random php script worked fine, the mixed results just looked stupid.

Might try doing one of the random banner things in one of the other templates.

I know I’m a hobbyist and not a professional web person, but it seems to me that the documentation for Movable Type is deliberately obtuse and only after hours and hours of fiddling, have I been able to achieve anything. It seems that you need to know a little php, html and a lot of css to achieve anything worthwhile. Perhaps this is just because mine is an individual non-profit installation, and therefore pretty much unsupported. I guess the folks at Movable Type need to make a living too.

Trying to find out how to use a navigation menu in the banner. Having difficulties with margins and padding in an attempt to get the tiny type aligned.

OK so I realise that it’s just my ignorance of the way stylesheets work. I’ve used the tag “padding-left” to move the text to the right. Must try to find some sort of CSS primer somewhere.