May 2015 archive

FIR #807 – 5/11/15 – For Immediate Release

Geeks Bearing Gifts book review is up; Clammr CEO interview coming, Quick News: Nothing fair about fair use at SoundCloud, Second Life is a forgotten wonder, new data on native advertising's disclosure issues, Facebook I'm a Voter button gets more than a million clicks; Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop; News That Fits: Uber seeks an editorial director, Foremski takes a content job, Reddit sets up video division, mattress company builds a sleep-focused online publication, listener comments, Dan York's Tech Report, SnapChat makes QR codes cool again, the last week in the FIR Podcast Network, Igloo Software promo, catching up with GaggleAmp; music from Gusher; and more.

Celebrating 15 Years of Blogging! Starting with Advogato…

Just keep bloggingFifteen years ago today I did something that I had no clue would transform my life in the years ahead. On May 10, 2000, I was sitting in cavernous basement office of Linuxcare on Townsend Street in San Francisco. It was after 9pm and being a visitor I was just working late. Sitting there, I created an account on a site called Advogato and...
... I started blogging!

Well, in truth it wasn't called "blogging" right then. On Advogato it was called a "diary". The words "weblog", "blog" and "blogging" were still working their way toward becoming the conventions they are today.

Still, it was the start of my journey into what we call "blogging". Oh, I had been writing online for many years before that... after all, I'd first gone online in the mid-1980s. And in fact the reason I was sitting in that office in San Francisco was because of a series of articles on the Linux Gazette site that had brought me to the attention of the Linuxcare founders, who then funded me to help create the Linux Professional Institute (LPI).

But that first post on Advogato was my entry into personal writing on my "own" page and in a form that interacted with others.

15 years later - and THOUSANDS of blog posts across many different sites - and several jobs that came about because of my blogging... it's kind of fun to think back to where it all began.

Look Back At My Blogging Journey

As I look back on that very first entry (still online! (and numbered "0" in typical engineer fashion)) I can notice a few things:

  • It was long, as per usual. (As I note at the end - and it's still true today - "no one has ever praised me for my brevity!")
  • I was working with the CVS version control system. I haven't touched that in many years and now, of course, use git for version control.
  • I had just picked up a paper book about DocBook. I would go on to write and speak about DocBook at many events, and would use DocBook as the source format for all of Linuxcare's documentation in a single-source publishing system. MANY years later in 2011 I would write my "Migrating Apps To IPv6" book for O'Reilly entirely in DocBook.
  • The Cluetrain Manifesto was new! :-)

I love that I included this line in the entry:

I decided to join this experiment... let's see if I actually keep up with it.

I would continue to write there... close to 400 more (typically long!) entries until June 2004 when a 5-6 week site outage (Advogato was at that time one man's labor of love, not a dedicated hosting site!) would see me and a number of other folks move over to LiveJournal. I posted only very rarely on Advogato after that, although a few years ago I set it to pull in and cross-post the feed from my Code.DanYork.com blog.

Starting in 2004 dyork.livejournal.com would become my "personal home" on the web (under the domain-name blog.danyork.com) for a few years until 2008-2009 when I switched to my DanYork.com site I still have today.

Meanwhile, in late 2005 I decided to split off my telecom/VoIP writing and also my PR/marketing/social media writing into focused blogs at:

Those two remain the main places I publish my own personal content, although they are not the primary places I write these days.

Years later I would come to regret splitting those two topics as they would come crashing together and the lines would blur... but at the time, working for Mitel Networks, I wanted a separate place to write about telecom and VoIP.

In 2007 when I was "synergized" out of a job at Mitel after their acquisition of Inter-Tel, it was a couple of blog posts that brought me to the attention of Jonathan Taylor and RJ Auburn who brought me into Voxeo where I had a wonderful four years.

It was amusing... I had been trying for most of 3 years to get Mitel to have a corporate blog, but they were at the time reluctant to engage in the more conversational medium. (They have a blog today, of course.) At Voxeo, within 3 weeks I had a corporate blog portal up and over the years that would grow to a peak of having 20 separate blogs for different people, channels, audiences and products.

I also had the most amusing title I've ever had: "Director of Conversations". (Yes, that was on my business card!)

The deep experience in WordPress would serve me well when I left Voxeo in 2011 to join the Internet Society where I was charged with very rapidly getting a web site online to help accelerate the adoption of key Internet technologies. The result was the Deploy360 Programme, a site where I still write quite frequently today.

It was, in fact, my blogging as well as my speaking that had brought me to the attention of the Internet Society.

My blogging over these many years would also lead to:

  • MANY different speaking presentations at conferences and events around the world.
  • My two latest books (on IPv6 and VoIP security) came about due in part to people finding me due to my writing.
  • Countless other opportunities and conversations.
  • Learning an insane amount (because to write about topics you need to know them!).
  • Getting into podcasting... both audio and video.
  • All sorts of new connections and ideas.
  • Friendships with some great people.

This last one is important... the Internet is ultimately about people... and it is through the sharing of information on sites like blogs that we get to learn more about our shared humanity.

Today

Today, in 2015, I write across so many different places that I had to build a site to aggregate my feeds just so that *I* could keep track of them all! That is:

https://danyork.me/

My main personal sites continue to be Disruptive Telephony, Disruptive Conversations... and also increasingly CircleID. There are a number of others I list here:

http://www.danyork.com/blogs.html

The great part of today is that my regular daytime job is focused around blogging! As I explained back in February my new role at the Internet Society is to look at our content across all our different sites and blogs. As a result I'm writing not only on Deploy360 but also on the main Internet Society blog and other sites we have. (A curious new aspect is that sometimes I am ghost-writing posts for other people, which is something new for me... but that's a good topic for another post...)

Though the role of "content strategist" didn't even remotely exist (at least as a title) fifteen years ago, it's a sign of how far we've come in the distribution of writing / content creation that roles like mine now exist.

A Long Strange Journey

It's fascinating to me to look back and reflect where that action 15 years ago has ultimately taken me... but it also reflects what I've been saying for all these years:

There has never been a better time to tell your own story in your own words through your own channels!

The traditional ways we communicate have been fundamentally disrupted... and the opportunity is there for anyone who can consistently create high quality content that others find helpful.

It's been an amazing 15 years... and I look forward to seeing what happens with what we now often call "content" over the next 15 years!

DNS-OARC 2015 Spring Workshop This Weekend (May 9-10) Covers DNSSEC and DNS Security

dns-oarcThe 2015 Spring Workshop of the DNS Operations Analysis and Research Center (DNS-OARC) takes place this weekend, May 9-10, right before the RIPE 70 meeting in Amsterdam. As per usual the agenda is packed full of all sorts of sessions related to DNS in general, with a number getting into DNSSEC and overall DNS security.  Here’s the full agenda:

https://indico.dns-oarc.net/event/21/timetable/#all

There are currently 137 people scheduled to attended representing a broad range of participants across the DNS community.  I will not be there myself, but know a great number of the people who will be in the room.

Sessions of Interest

Saturday looks to have some great sessions related to operational experience with various attacks against the DNS, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.  These kind of actual case studies in handling attacks are incredibly useful to get out to the wider community.

Sunday morning begins with a series of DNSSEC-related talks:

  • Observations on DNSSEC and ECDSA in the wild – by Geoff Huston of APNIC
  • Effects of Increasing the Root Zone ZSK Size – by Duane Wessels of Verisign Labs
  • Signing DNSSEC answers on the fly at the edge: challenges and solutions! – by Olafur Gudmundsson of CloudFlare

All of those are ones I’d love to see – I’m hoping there will be a video recording as they start at 9:00 am in Amsterdam… which is 3:00 am here on the US East Coast where I live.  As much as I’d like to see them… well… I can’t see me getting up that early! :-)

The remainder of Sunday includes a great number of talks that I’d personally find interesting, diving into various tools, analytics, testing and more.  A couple of interest to those focused on DNSSEC include:

  • 14:30 – Plan for Decommissioning the DLV – by Jim Martin of ISC
  • 17:05 – Update on the DNS Root Key Rollover work – by Ed Lewis of ICANN

This last talk, in particular, should be useful to hear the status of the work related to the Root KSK rollover. (See our background page on why this matters.)

Remote Participation

I don’t see any information on the DNS-OARC website right now about remote participation, but the sessions are almost always streamed live.  Given that the event is co-located with RIPE 70, I suspect that they may make use of the RIPE 70 live streaming. I’d watch the RIPE 70 remote participation page or the main 2015 Spring Workshop page for more information.

The good news is that all the materials should be available from links off of the main agenda page, so at least we who are remote should be able to see what slides were discussed.

I also see Stéphane Bortzmeyer is among the attendees and when he is at an event he is usually tweeting out a good bit at https://twitter.com/bortzmeyer, so that’s another way to stay up to date, along with the #DNSOARC hashtag search.

If you are there in Amsterdam, I hope you do have a great DNS-OARC meeting and I look forward to hearing the results.

Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application Platform

Tropo siteWOW! In companion blog posts today Cisco and Tropo announced Cisco's intent to acquire the Tropo team and platform:

As someone who was at Voxeo in 2009 and helped launch Tropo (and wrote many of the early blog posts about it[1], as well as some of the python samples), I'm thrilled for the team there now that this is happening.[2]

Congratulations to all involved!

Over the years since leaving Voxeo, I've written about Tropo from time to time and continued to watch its progress. I've continued to be very impressed by what they've done over the years. They've truly made it easy for people to create powerful applications using simple programming languages.

It looks like the Tropo website is struggling right now so here is a snippet of their announcement post:


Six years ago we launched Tropo with the idea to make it easy to power phone calls through a simple API. Since then, we’ve empowered thousands of developers to add voice and messaging to their applications.

From our very first sign-up in 2009, to powering thousands of mobile and voice applications, our mission has been the same: to make real-time communications more accessible and productive through great APIs.

Today we’re thrilled to share that Tropo is joining Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group. Together we’ll enable completely new ways of communicating by opening up Cisco’s collaboration products to every developer on the planet (and maybe some off the planet…hey, they need collaborative tools on the International Space Station!)  :)


Knowing a good number of folks at Cisco, too, I think this is a great win for them in that they'll be able to make some of their products and services more accessible to developers.

I remember well back in 2009 when Jonathan Taylor (then CEO of Voxeo) brought in the Adhearsion team and "Voxeo Labs" was set up. Tropo was the first of the Voxeo Labs products, along with a number of others that were released over the following years. I watched as Voxeo Labs was then spun off from Voxeo in 2012 as a separate company and then Voxeo was acquired by Aspect in 2013... and Voxeo Labs was renamed to Tropo.

I watched, too, as the Tropo team continued their heavy involvement with WebRTC and brought that technology even deeper into their various services.

Congratulations to Jonathan Taylor, Jason Goecke, Johnny Diggz and all the rest of the Tropo team on this acquisition!

I look forward to seeing what Tropo and Cisco will do together to make it even easier to create voice, chat, messaging and other kinds of applications!


UPDATE #1: Jonathan Taylor has published a post on Facebook that outlines some of the history that led to this announcement. He includes this information related to Cisco:

We were even more surprised when Cisco approached us about acquiring Tropo. Selling Tropo was the last thing on our minds. But the potential was clearly huge for both companies, and over the course of the discussion, the deal terms clearly quite attractive. So here we are today!

UPDATE #2: A number of news stories are appearing on Techmeme.

UPDATE #3: Writing over on NoJitter, Zeus Kerravala dives into more detail about the acquisition based on his pre-briefing with Cisco's Rowan Trollope. Zeus' article: Cisco to CPaaS Providers: Game On!


[1] Although in the time since I left in 2011, my account was understandably removed from the Tropo site and the author on all those posts I wrote between 2009-2011 was changed to someone else. :-)

[2] In full disclosure, I should note that I am a very minor shareholder in Tropo after exercising a few options upon leaving Voxeo in 2011. I had no knowledge of this acquisition and have not participated actively with Tropo since leaving in 2011.

Another Great DNSSEC Statistics Site For Second-Level Domains – rick.eng.br

Want to know how many domains are signed with DNSSEC under each top-level domain (TLD)?  We now have another site to help!  For over a year now, every week I use a great site that Rick Lamb maintains at:

http://rick.eng.br/dnssecstat/

so that I can find out what new domains I need to add to our DNSSEC Deployment Maps database. By default he shows a reverse-chronological list of all the TLDs that are signed.

BUT…

… if you look over on the right side Rick has added something new!  Two new columns labeled “% Signed” and “Misc”.  These show you:

  • The percentage of total domains that are signed with DNSSEC;
  • The raw numbers of signed domains / total domains.

What’s very cool is that you can click on each heading to sort the columns. Click once to sort from lowest to highest. Click once more to sort from highest to lowest.

This second sort is where it gets interesting.

With the “% Signed” you have to scroll down a bit because of course brand new TLDs that only have one domain (often nic.TLD) and also have that domain signed score 100%.  But as you go down the list it starts to get more interesting.  Here’s a view part of the way down:

DNSSEC Statistics

What I find MUCH more interesting, though, is the raw numbers showing the number of DNSSEC-signed domains.  Click on the “Misc” heading cell twice and you get something like this:

DNSSEC stats

That shows us that .NL has the most with 2.4 million domains signed followed by .COM with 491 thousand domains and then .CZ, .SE and onwards.

What you will notice that is different here from the ntldstats DNSSEC stats site I wrote about last week is that Rick’s site pulls in data from some of the country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and also some of the original generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .COM, .NET, etc.    The ntldstats site is (understandably) only about the “new gTLDs” whereas Rick’s site covers the wider range of TLDs.

Notice that I said “some” of the ccTLDs and gTLDs.  Rick can only incorporate data from TLDs that provide some kind of feed he can use.  If you scroll on down the list you’ll see that there are TLDs there that have no numbers next to them:

DNSSEC stats

However, we know from NIC.BR’s statistics page that .BR has 747,000 domains signed with DNSSEC, which would move it into the second position above .COM in the listing.  Similarly .ORG has many signed domains, too.

Over time hopefully we can get these other TLDs to offer statistics feeds in a way that sites like Rick’s can consume them and help provide a more solid view of overall DNSSEC deployment.

Meanwhile, it’s fantastic that Rick has made these updates to his site and it is a great service to the larger Internet community that he maintains this info. (Thanks, Rick!)

I’m looking forward to seeing these numbers grow!

P.S. If you’d like to help these numbers grow, why not head over to our Start Here page and find out how can get started with signing your domains with DNSSEC?

TDYR 244 – Please Help ReConnect Nepal

After the devastating earthquake on April 25, there are many excellent efforts underway to help the people in Nepal. As the initial surge of help continues, the Internet Society's (ISOC) Nepal Chapter is working to help rebuild the communication and Internet systems in Nepal. In this episode I talk about that and ask people to help. More info at: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/chapters-members/2015/04/people-nepal-need-our-help and to donate directly: https://www.internetsociety.org/form/donate-nepal

The Power of SoundCloud As A Podcast Publishing Platform

Podcasting soundcloud 660

Why do I like SoundCloud as a podcast hosting platform? What advantages can SoundCloud offer podcasters? Why should you consider SoundCloud as a place to distribute your podcast?

Last week SoundCloud announced that its podcasting features were now publicly available to everyone [1]. Given that I've been using SoundCloud's podcasting feature in their beta program since May 2012, I want to share some of my reflections on why I think SoundCloud has great potential as a powerful platform for podcast publishing and promotion.

To set the context for my comments below, I started using SoundCloud three years ago to see how it could work for the "rapid creation of audio content". I wanted to just be able to push record in an app and then publish and promote my podcasts. I wanted it to be super easy. The result has been my "The Dan York Report (TDYR)" podcast that I publish now at:

https://soundcloud.com/danyork

From the start it's been an experiment to try out SoundCloud as a platform because I have several other podcasts I'd like to start. So TDYR has been my testbed to try out ideas and tools. I do pay for their SoundCloud Pro Unlimited plan which at $135/year works out to what I consider a reasonable $11.25/month for the hosting of my audio files.

As a result of all of this, here are 10 reasons I find SoundCloud powerful for podcasters.

1. Speed And Simplicity Of Creating And Sharing Podcasts

Here's all I do to create a new podcast episode:

  • Open up an app on my iPhone.
  • Press "Record" and record whatever I want to say.
  • Press "Share to SoundCloud" (or "Upload"), enter in a title and hit the button to start.

Boom!

That's it. The podcast is uploaded to SoundCloud and then shared out via the RSS feed to iTunes and also via social media to Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

That's seriously it.

Super fast creation and sharing/promotion of audio podcasts.

Now, of course, you could make the process more complex if you want to. I record my TDYR episodes as just raw audio without any kind of post-production and without an intro, outro or any other kinds of audio segments. In my case, I want the simplicity and rawness. But the beautiful fact is..

2. Many Applications to Create/Record Podcasts

... there are many, many, MANY applications that yet you create audio and share it up to SoundCloud. Applications are available for iOS, Android, Mac OS/X, Microsoft Windows and many other operating systems. SoundCloud has a whole directory of applications that can be used. Although many of them are for consuming/listening, they do have a whole list for creating/recording. Many of these are targeted at music producers, but many can also work for podcasters.

Because I am aiming for speed, I typically record on my iPhone and find that I'm generally using either:

I've been primarily using Opinion for the past while but recently they rolled out their own podcast hosting (competing with SoundCloud) and now give that preference in the export/sharing part of the app. I'm a bit concerned that they may continue to promote that service and make it harder to publish out to other services. On the other hand, the Hindenburg Field Reporter app doesn't seem to be frequently updated... although that may not be necessary, really. It's a rock solid app!

I've also used AudioCopy, a free app that SoundCloud started recommending when they removed recording from their own SoundCloud app. It's fine, but I like the editing capabilities of the other two apps.

The key point is that there are many choices of apps that will connect and share to SoundCloud.

And, of course, SoundCloud just lets you upload an audio file in a variety of different formats. So you can record your episode using any kind of device or application. I've recorded some episodes using one of my Zoom Handy audio recorders and then just copying the MP3 file from the SD card onto my laptop and uploading to SoundCloud through their web interface.

3. Automatic Sharing Out To Social Media

A great part of the simplicity is that when I post an episode to SoundCloud it gets automagically shared out to whatever services I've configured. I've set up a default configuration and then can override that sharing from the apps during the upload process. The beautiful thing is it supports multiple accounts for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+:

Soundcloud connections

And, as noted below, you can use services like IFTTT to distribute podcasts out to even more sites and social networks!

4. Insanely EASY Embedding of Podcasts

Another huge advantage of SoundCloud is that it is incredibly easy to embed podcasts in a blog post or web page. SoundCloud supports "oEmbed" and so very often all you have to do is drop the URL of your SoundCloud episode into your software and... ta da... that's it! This works great for all my WordPress sites. It also works great in chat clients such as Wire.

If your site/application doesn't support oEmbed (such as TypePad, the site I use for this blog), it's trivial to get a snippet of HTML code that you can then drop into your post (as I will do at the end of this post):

Soundcloud embed

This also works with social networks, too. Drop a URL for a SoundCloud episode into Facebook or Ello, for example, and the embedded player will automagically appear so that people can listen right there in their feeds.

5. Comments At Specific Points In The Podcast

Engaging with listeners is always a critical part of building a community around your podcast. Typically you get comments as replies to the blog post about your podcast or as replies on social media.

But what's cool about SoundCloud is that you can get replies AT THE POINT IN TIME within your actual podcast. If someone wants to reply to something specific you said, no longer are you trying to get to the point in the episode where you said whatever it was to remember what you said - the comment can be left right at that point of the episode.

Now, this DOES require a SoundCloud account. And so many of your listeners may not want to register for a (free) SoundCloud account just to be able to leave you comments at specific times. But some of your listeners might, and so for them it becomes a great way to build interaction.

6. Open API Makes Integration Easy

SoundCloud understands the power of becoming a platform for developers and they provide rich support through a SoundCloud developer program and much more. One result is the many applications I pointed out in #2 above, but another result is services such as IFTTT (If This, Then That) that allow you to easily set up actions involving SoundCloud. There are many IFTTT "recipes" for SoundCloud that are already available:

Soundcloud ifttt

As the screen capture shows, the integration can go both ways - in or out of SoundCloud. For instance, I had a recipe for a while that would trigger whenever I published an episode to SoundCloud that would post a link out to my App.net account (until I pretty much stopped using App.net). I also plan to set one up that will post to a specific WordPress site every time I publish a new post. Going the opposite direction, you can see that there are recipes that will publish to your SoundCloud account every time you put a file in, say, a Dropbox folder.

Now, IFTTT is just one site. There are many other sites that have their own integration with SoundCloud... all because of this open application programming interface (API).

7. Search and Discovery

SoundCloud as a web site / service is all focused around the consumption and listening to music and audio. Like any social network, people with an account can "follow" you and get all your recent episodes. SoundCloud makes it very easy to search and find episodes. It supports hashtags.

Now obviously this is again using the SoundCloud site, which your listeners may or may not do... but this becomes a way that you can potentially find new users.

8. Downloads

Just as the embedding of a podcast is easy, so is the downloading of a podcast IF you enable people to do so. This is a choice. But if you want to allow people to download an episode, all they need to do is to go to the episode page (an example) and the download button is right there.

9. Spotlight

If you create a good number of episode and want to highlight some of the episodes you think are the most important, SoundCloud lets you put up to 5 sounds in the "Spotlight" area of your SoundCloud profile page. A nice way to help people coming to your site to see what you think are your best or most important episodes

10. Statistics

Typically as a podcaster you want to know how many people are listening, right? As I've written about before and we've talked about over on the FIR podcast, statistics are difficult because you can know how many people downloaded a podcast, but not whether they in listened.

SoundCloud has many statistics and can perhaps obviously give more statistics about user behavior when your podcast episode is played from the SoundCloud site or apps. For regular "RSS downloads", you still do get a good bit of information, although, as mentioned above, it's challenging to know what the stats truly mean. Here's the "RSS downloads" of my last week of TDYR stats:

Stats on SoundCloud

Apparently I'm interesting to people (or someone) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! Who knew? And then Southbury, CT... (but I have family and friends in that region :-) )

Anyway, a good number of statistics are available

Others...

There are other reasons why podcasters may like the platform. For example, it's great that Creative Commons licensing is available for those who want to allow others to share their audio content under a CC license. There are also monetization options available that I, quite frankly, haven't explored yet (since I don't see TDYR as something that people would want to advertise on). The whole "social network" aspect of SoundCloud can be compelling, too, for building an audience. For example, people can "repost" your episodes and share them out with followers.

I'd note, too, that you don't have to use SoundCloud as your exclusive hosting platform. A friend, Donna Papacosta, primarily hosts her podcast on Libsyn[2] and then also uploads it to her SoundCloud account as an additional distribution channel. C.C. Chapman also posts some of his episodes to his SoundCloud account. So it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing. You can experiment!

Issues

While I'm obviously rather pleased with SoundCloud, there are still a number of issues I would love to see them address:

  • Support for IPv6 - Given the work I do with the Internet Society, I'm looking for hosting platforms that realize that all the new mobile networks and the efforts to bring the next 4 billion people online are going to need to use IPv6 in their networks. YouTube, Facebook and all of Google's properties all work over IPv6. SoundCloud needs to get there, too.
  • Use HTML5 instead of Flash - Similarly, SoundCloud really needs to ditch their Flash player and use HTML5 audio instead. Flash creates so many issues on my various systems. We now have HTML5 audio support in most modern browsers. SoundCloud has had experimental support for HTML5, but they need to move that out of beta, too, and make it the default.
  • Finish the transition to their new website user experience - SoundCloud has been in this strange transition from their "classic" website to the "new" website for a year or more now and it still provides a strange and bizarre user experience. You click some link in your account settings and... ta da... you are back in an old user experience... and then you have to find your way back to the regular "new" view. They need to just finish this up.

Hopefully those are all things they will continue to work on to make the platform even stronger.

Getting Started with Podcasting On SoundCloud

If after reading all this you want to get started with a podcast on SoundCloud, they provide a very simple guide to begin:

http://on.soundcloud.com/creator-guide/podcasting

Basically, you create an account, set up the RSS feed settings, get some app that will upload to SoundCloud... and start publishing!

That's it!

If you are already using SoundCloud, all you should need to do is go into your "Settings" and to the "Content" tab where you will see your RSS feed and can set up any specific fields you want to configure:

Soundcloud content settings

As you can see at the bottom of that image you can configure your defaults for all uploads in terms of the license and whether uploads are automatically in the RSS feed.

Again, the Creator Guide for podcasting has more info.

I was admittedly rather skeptical of SoundCloud in the early years of my experimentation. Their "support" of podcasting in their beta program was pretty weak three years ago and it seemed all they wanted to do was build their own "walled garden of audio" and try to get everyone to come onto their platform.

But with this public launch of "podcasting" (which really amounts to exposing RSS feeds!) they've finally opened up those walls and made it so that you can use the SoundCloud platform for hosting your podcast - giving you all the advantages I've outlined above - but then making your content available to everyone out there to consume in whatever applications and systems they choose.

I look forward to hearing many more podcasts on SoundCloud... including yours! Please do feel free to follow me on SoundCloud as I continue with my experimentation. I'd love to hear from you what you think about all of this, either in the comments here or, of course, on the accompanying audio version (TDYR 243) of this post up on SoundCloud.



[1] For more stories about the launch, see Techmeme and Mediagazer.

[2] In full disclosure I also use Libsyn for hosting some of my podcasts (and have since 2005) and find their services very useful, too.

Photo credit: A merger of a Flickr CC-licensed image from Colleen AF Venable and SoundCloud's logo.

The Hobson & Holtz Report – Podcast #806: May 5, 2015

Intro: Neville is in Boston, Gini Dietrich is guest co-host; Steve Rubel is hosting a new podcast, Content Convergence; Geeks Bearing Gifts book review coming this week;

Quick News: Converse knows how to work with fans, bad tweets from the Houston Rockets and the City of Cleveland prompt different apologies, Johns Hopkins University students will no longer eat chicken, a change to Promoted Tweets gives more ammunition to native advertising’s critics; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop;

News That Fits: Bud Light promotes misogyny, Virtual Reality is coming to journalism, listener comments discussion, Walmart laid off employees and then provided well-being health advice to them, Igloo Software promo, Dan York’s Tech Report (including ISOC support for Nepal earthquake victims, how to test your website, certificate pinning, WebRTC voice chat web app, and Soundcloud as a podcast platform), the last week on the FIR Podcast Network, PR needs more SEO (and vice versa);

Music from David Peck; and more.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report for May 4, 2015: An 80-minute podcast recorded live from Chicago, Illinois, and Concord, California, USA.

Links to websites, blog posts and other content we discuss in the show are posted as Delicious bookmarks to facilitate your connection with the discussions and sharing of that content.

Messages from our sponsors: Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir; Igloo Software, providers of an intranet you’ll actually like, delivered securely with our cloud platform: learn more at www.igloosoftware.com/fir.

So, until Monday May 11…

The post The Hobson & Holtz Report – Podcast #806: May 5, 2015 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

FIR #806 – 5/4/15 – For Immediate Release

Neville's in Boston, Gini Dietrich is guest co-host; new Steve Rubel podcast; a chat with Gini; Quick News: Converse knows how to work with fans, bad tweets of the week, JHU student's won't eat chicken, Twitter's bad native ad decision; Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, News That Fits: Bud Light promote misogyny, VR journalism is coming, listener comments, Walmart's health advice to laid-off employees, Igloo Software promo, Dan York's Tech Report, the last week on the FIR Podcast network, PR needs more SEO, music from David Peck; and more.

TDYR 243 – The Power of SoundCloud As A Podcast Publishing Platform

Why do I like SoundCloud as a platform for podcast publishing? What are some of the reasons podcasters should consider it? I dive into detail in this episode... (and a companion post on http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/ will be available later today)