Reading Radar

Johnny Ming (John Swords in RL) sent a reply to one of the posts about the Orange media event today, and that plus a little reflection made me want to post my response to him. I emailed him a copy so he’d get it personally as well. Thanks, John, for your input, and here are my thoughts in response.

Yes, you’re absolutely right that Secondcast was notable in that it was all people who were in it were all very active residents in second life. That showed in the passion you guys had in the topics you talked about. I remember hearing banter back and forth between your group over things and you could tell it was genuine and that you were residents of the place, not people who were podcasters who happened to be in SL as well. One thing I’d also point out is the humor many of you had and enjoyed bringing out in the podcast, lest anyone think I was taking your comments as arrogant. I don’t believe you are an arrogant person in the least. The very few times I’ve had occasion to come into contact with you, you’ve always been accessible, humble, and seemingly very easygoing. I like that in a high profile podcaster. I wish it were more common.

I was actually thinking about this tonight as I woke up (can I blame a cold for making me grumpy today?) and had to admit, in that context, some of us owe secondcast a nod as an inspiration for doing an SL related podcast done as SL residents. You were definitely the first real SL podcast I listened to, although IIRC, Goddess and Banana claimed to be the first, but since I wasn’t around when they started, I couldn’t tell you who came first. I never listened to them. But I did learn about SL from you guys as I started off my journey through this particular metaversion known as second life in 2006.

One thing I would like to stress in all my comments here is that I’m not mistaking myself as some important high-profile representation of the new crop of SL podcasters. While I am a current SL podcaster, let’s be honest here, I’m very small time in terms of listeners and certainly impact in SL. I’m not confused about my place in the world, and I hope I didn’t come across that way. I’ve never achieved anything on the level of anyone on the panel, to the best of my knowledge, and I’d like to acknowledge that fully.

So what bothered me particularly about the Orange media panel was not the credentials of anyone on the panel. It seemed on first blush that Orange was not grokking the current state of podcasting in SL, and that’s what bothered me. I interact regularly with a number of various podcasters who have current, apparently popular podcasts in SL that I think should have been included. I know we keep bring up the example of CC, and while he’s certainly a big name in podcasting I don’t really think he’s been a big name in SL podcasting. I know that whether you agree or not, you can understand the distinction, since your group WAS individuals who were residents first, from very early on.

Having said that, I enjoyed the panel a lot once you steered it to the future. I think you’re a person who will be involved in exploring the evolving forms of podcasting as things continue to change, and I’m looking forward to subscribing to your upcoming podcast, The Shack.

Most of all, I’d like to say thank you for being a good sport about all this and for doing a good job listening to the chat at the event today and being fully engaged with the audience. That’s greatly appreciated.

Ok, aside from going over the past too much, and at times being kind of monopolized by two people, I actually enjoyed the Orange thing. Not because I think it was the best panel for talking about podcasting in SL. But once John steered the conversation towards the future of podcast media, it got a lot more enjoyable.

I picked on the event and the panel a little, and that’s probably not 100% fair. Let’s be honest - I’m a podcaster of little note, and small following, and each of the people up there has achieved more than I probably ever will in media. So fair enough. But all that aside, John did do a pretty good job. I think Stuart could have been given more questions but then again he knows more about the other panelists, and it’s not easy to not go to what you know.

What I am looking forward to from him is is upcoming podcast, “The Shack,” which will apparently be about various virtual worlds and some of the key players. It’s good for SL types to get outside their SL-centricity sometimes because, just like fiber trumps dsl, something better will surely come along at some point. LL and SL will have to work hard not to get moved aside before long. The advantage is the content creation and the wide range of communities, but anyone in SL should pay attention to other worlds, and things like OpenSim.

I’m looking forward to hearing this one.

Johnny Ming just said that he thinks that they covered all the pioneering stuff and while there’s still stuff to talk about, they covered the momentous stuff.

EVERY generation thinks that after they step aside and let others come in. EVERY generation thinks they covered the important stuff.

Secondcast did cover some interesting stuff. And I have respect for Johnny. But this statement just seems absurd. Technology will ALWAYS be changing in SL and there’s always going to be things that the people of the time feel are momentous, whether they really are or not.

Henry Ford probably thought he covered all the important aspects of automobiles too.

On Orange Island they are doing a show about old timers. And stuart!! he’s no old timer! Yay.

Anyway, a podcast panel with only one active SL podcaster.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Orange%20Island/204/208/22

Listening to two of them talk about how they are marketers. Yawn. Torrid says she’s got no credentials compared to them, but don’t worry Torrid. Anything’s better and more interesting than a marketer.

Between Sougent and I, we made a decent (partially used) 6-pack. He made the plastic “ring” thingy and I made the cans. Yay, beer.

Actually these will be props for an upcoming project, believe it or not. If you’re gonna get involved in a project, make sure that project involves beer. That’s all I’m gonna say.

The php script Dedric Mauriac gave me relies on the xml DOM’s open method, which under php apparently must use fopen under the hood. At any rate, the fact that my host has allow_url_fopen false in the php.ini means it won’t work.

What I did instead was rewrite it to use curl to grab the rss feed for parsing, and it seems to be working. Once I get the bugs ironed out, I’ll pass it on to Dedric in case he wants to make use of that method as well.

The fun part is that, although I’ve never programmed with php, my asp and asp.net and now LSL background has made it pretty trivial to pick up on what’s going on and modify things as needed. Very fun, since I always wanted to add php to the list of things I’ve at least used, and this project forced me to dive in and do just that.

At any rate, it won’t be long before I’ll be done with both the php and the LSL and have nice rss players for audio or video podcasts that we can copy (and therefore rez on demand) and let the podcasting community make use of. All credit will go to Dedric and if you have any scripting or gadget needs, please check out his stuff or IM him about your project. He does do custom work projects and he’s very good at what he does.

Dedric Mauriac, the original guy with blue hair, took time out of his busy schedule tonight to come help me get set up with what I need for running a php script on my server for converting rss feeds to SSS. I was looking for a way to get rss parsing onto my own server and have flexibility on how to implement the LSL scripts in-world to call that, so that we could create video players for the SLPN headquarters and the Destination Station on PI for video podcast viewing which are fully copiable so that they can be rezzed from a variant of Itazura’s RezzHud.

This kind of help goes above and beyond the call of duty and it shows the really giving side of community in SL. Huge thanks to Dedric for setting me up.

You can find his store on his Woodbridge sim next to Edloe, or check out his products on SLExchange. And finally, here’s a video from an SLCN tv interview with Yxes Delacroix.

One thing I almost forgot to mention, there is another scripter in SL with a free podcast player who states on his slexchange page that he’ll help people get set up if they want to run the php scripts on their own servers. I contacted him via IM and notecard (which he accepted) but never got a response. Even a simple “I don’t have time for this nonsense” would have been fine, because that’s an answer I can completely understand. The moral of the story is to support people who have a history of collaboration with others. Dedric’s always been really involved in helping others find answers to their problems.

After a lot of babbling for the podcast, Stuart turned the SLPN building on Nowhereville physical and we all fell down. It seemed like the right thing to do… after all, that building had never hurt anyone in its life, and that seemed kind of stupid. Time to fix that little failure on its part.

They need some warning stickers about falling buildings being dangerous. I got hit on the head a couple times. How was I supposed to know?

As I took a moment to put in a boomerang boardwalk on tiny beach on podcaster island, I listened to the end of Crap Mariner’s latest “Podcasting in SL” episode with Dave Peck. A couple things struck me about the interview.

The first thing was that Dave naturally saw the Adam Curry days as the heyday of podcasting in SL. I disagree. It was the heyday of podcasters in SL, maybe, but not podcasting. I’d wager most of those guys didn’t get SL, only came in because of Adam Curry, and bailed in short order. They’re gone. Good riddance. If we needed simply a 3d chat room for people to talk about what they do outside, in RL, without really utilizing the environment they were in, then those people would be perfect. But that’s not what SL is, so they got lost and got out in short order.

This view was reinforced by the fact that he felt a lot of them got out because of twitter. Twitter lets them market, make contact, etc, without going in world. If they can’t see the difference between the two, then.. yeah. They don’t grok SL. Period.

Secondly, when asked about advice for podcasters in SL, he pretty much assumed they all wanted to monetize… which is really not necessarily the case with the people that I call the SL podcasters. Sure, a couple of us have an ad here and there, but clearly if we really were serious about monetizing, things would be different. That’s not what it’s really about.

I don’t really miss the old days. Some of those podcasters were nice enough people, but they never did figure out what to do with SL besides preach to the choir about their podcasts. Very few of them figured out how to really do much in terms of content creation or collaboration that really impacted or became part of the second life culture at all. I can see in the current crop of podcasters that podcast about SL that they’re a totally different breed.

Those old timers? Nah. They didn’t get it. The Golden Age of Podcasting in SL is now. So instead of wasting any more thought on that, I think I’ll wander off and work on a script I should have had done a long time ago.

Every so often listeners of the podcast tell me they came looking for me and couldn’t find me. They do know that Podcast and Podcaster Island are two good places to try though. But what about other podcasters? There’s a few great Second Life podcasts out there, and what about finding those people?

In this episode of SLPN In Your Face, which was actually made as a screencast for Crap’s SL5B podcast build, Chug and I thought we’d show you some places where podcasters can be found.

Podcasters abound in Second Life. Find the shows you like, and don’t be afraid to ditch those you don’t. Egos have no place in podcast, IMO. They just guarantee it’ll be harder to reach out and finally REALLY get to the masses.