I just got the leftovers

So, youngest brother, Paul, has made sure that I am not the only one in the family making podcasts. He was recently interviewed for a show called THE LABMAN ...

April 2008 click the link to listen

Designing Experiments the Automated WayExperiments tend to work better if they're planned, and experiments are less laborious if automated. This month The Lab Man explores the combination of both - Automated Design of Experiments. It's all about software to design great experiments and then sitting back and watching your automation carry out the plan!

It is only when you listen that you realise in the eternal scheme of things, when God was dishing out the old IQ rations to the Taylor family, he held back on the first born, and had a bunch left over for the last born!

New Casting Hope episodes out

Casting Hope is a podcast I do for Feba Radio, and there have been a couple of new shows released since the last time I said anything on this blog. You can listen directly of the page http://www.feba.libsyn.com/ or you can subscribe to the feed http://www.feba.libsyn.com/rss

SWIKIRI - sweet mama africa!

In the past couple of weeks I have come into contact with Alexander Lau, who had found my Paradise Lost podcast. Seems that Alex has a deep love and passion for Africa (he's a US citizen) after some years living and working in Southern Africa. Have a look at swikiri.com for starters, and then his music loops project. Sounds like an interesting fella.

BBC podcasts

Rose and I quickly became fans of BBC Radio 4 when we moved to Worthing - 'thinking people's radio' I have heard it called, and that sounds nice to us! People living around the world who cannot tune in to Radio 4 by terrestrial radio can get a great selection of their programmes via podcasts. Fancy hearing the longest running radio drama in Britian (maybe the world) - you can get The Archers via podcast now.

BBC policy is to make their programming available online for 7 days after broadcast, but if you subscribe via a podcast, you will get it and be able to keep the MP3 permanently. I always travel with a great selection of podcasts on my ageing but trusty old iPod mini, and having some good radio to listen to on demand in some pretty remote places, is always fun and often comforting.

Getting Olonga with Henry

For Show 16 of my Paradise Lost podcast, I was very happy and privileged to get time to interview Henry Olonga, currently in southern England on a speaking tour. He talks about his cricket, his singing, and how he feels today about the 'black armband incident' during the 2003 World Cup Cricket, which forced him into an exile from Zimbabwe. This man is a role model par excellence, and now that I know he can be lured back by the smell of a fine oxtail stew, I hope it will not be the last time Paradise Lost listeners get to hear from him. On the show, and with Henry's permission, I feature one of the songs off his new CD, Rise Again, which is a haunting lyric about what could be for Zimbabwe ...

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PODCAST is word of the year

The New Oxford American Dictionary have named podcast as their word of the year, beating other words like bird flu, persistant vegetative state and squick in the process.

Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, said: "Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a completely different story. The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon."

"Choosing the word of the year is incredibly difficult," said McKean. "Not just because of the enormous amount of data we look at-everything from blogs to technical journals to suggestions sent to dictionaries@oup.com-but because everyone has such strong opinions about what makes a word Word of the Year material. You'd be amazed at how hard our editors campaign for their favorites. I'm surprised nobody tried to bribe me -- except that the only thing I really want is more cool new words!"

You can see my recently updated (big time revision) of my website PodcastSA or you could listen to my own podcasts: Reflections and Paradise Lost.

Recording SKYPE conversations

Trying to find an easy way to record Skype conversations for podcast interviews is proving to be more difficult than I imagined, but Jeff Sanquist seems to be using Adobe Audition and XP, same as me. I still have problems with the two sides of a Skype interview being at completely different sound levels, and not sure if there is an easy fix to this?

Podcast SA now has a blog of its own

I have recently added a blog to my new webpages about podcasting in Southern Africa. It can be accessed from the webpage but is also available as an RSS feed. Need to know more about what RSS is? Click here.

What is a Podcast?

That's a question a bunch of people are asking, and here's a very clear description of what podcasting is from Jon Wright, from his own web pages.