Category: blog

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podcasts: who listens?

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.

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shark awards: we have winners!

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.

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seth godin: who’s there?

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.

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2D:4D

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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

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tibook acting strangely

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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.

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lily composite

Gilding the Lily

This is a composite of a colour and infrared image. The camera was mounted on a tripod, then various bracketed exposures of the infrared image were taken, followed by a colour image in the same position. I chose a well exposed infrared image and combined it in Gimp with the colour image using overlay.

Because of the long exposures in infrared, I’m getting some weird noise artifacts and occasionally dead pixels. I thing the Ixus does a lot of processing internally when it takes long exposures to reduce the amount of noise, and it’s for this reason that I’d like to experiment using RAW format, which my camera doesn’t do.

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infrared and XP2 redux

I suppose I’m a little despondent about the digital IR results to date, but there again it’s early days. Seeing that the old Yashica will be fixed sometime in the near future, I wonder what results I’d get if I loaded it with XP2 and used the Hoya R72.

Thanks to Rob Novak for showing me why this idea won’t work…

From usenet: alt.photography

Rob Novak wrote:

XP2’s response drops greatly after 630nm, and has virtually no response to wavelengths below 660nm. The R72 filter’s transmittance curve doesn’t even start until 700nm, reaching peak transmittance at 750nm.