If you are feeling Star Trek IV-ish today you can help save the whales with this cool
Whale Remix Music Masher from the folks at the
IFAW. It's a neat idea, you remix actual recordings of humpback whales with regional music and then share, download, or save the mp3.
If we let people kill the whales then we will be totally screwed in the future when a giant alien space probe descends into Earth's orbit looking for the only beings who can communicate with it. Duh.
Posted by Biz at 6/28/2006
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Have you ever heard of the
TED conference? It's an exclusive gathering of amazingly smart, funny, and otherwise gifted individuals that takes place every year in Monterey, CA. Ev and I were invited to TED in 2005 where Odeo was demonstrated on stage and it was the best conference I've ever attended.
Well now the folks at TED have managed once again to top themselves. They are putting the presentations online for free!
Each year, TED hosts some of the world's most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now, for the first time, we're sharing them with the world at large... Each week, we'll release a new talk to inspire, intrigue and awaken the imagination. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. (They have a cumulative effect.) If you have a curious soul and an open mind, we think you'll be hooked.
The video of the talks are hosted here at
TEDTALKS. You have got to check them out. If you'd rather listen to high-quality audio podcasts of the talks we've got you covered.
TED Talks on OdeoOur good friend Tom Rielly who helps make TED great tells us that there are more of these talks on the way. Awesome, can't wait!
Posted by Biz at 6/28/2006
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One more thing I forgot to mention. We squeezed in RSS feeds for Starred Audio with today's deploy. You can find the link to your starred audio feed on your Profile page and on your Starred Audio page.
Here's mine. (We'll make make the UI better this week but it's in there now so you can start using it if you want.)
Posted by Biz at 6/12/2006
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We just released a new feature that allows you to tell Odeo to scan through audio every 5, 15, 30, or 60 seconds. It's part of the PlayNext feature which makes discovering interesting audio more likely.
Scan works like scan or seek on a car radio. When you click the scan button, Odeo will cycle through various audio files until you click it again. (If you don't get to it in time, just click back on your browser.)
Now maybe this guy can strike number three off his
list of why he doesn't like podcasting.
Posted by Biz at 6/12/2006
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Doug Kaye tells us how to better record live events in the latest
Podcasting Survival Guide. Even in this short podcast Doug gets into really helpful specifics. For example,
here's a nice tip. And here's a link all six minutes and eight seconds of how-to goodness:
Podcasting Survival Guide: Recording Live Events.
Posted by Biz at 6/12/2006
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Came across this reminder of a long-standing Odeo annoyance:
BizPodcasting: "Randy's complaint (and a LOT of other people, I might add) is that files that are uploaded to Odeo frequently make the podcaster sound like a chipmunk when played back....
I feel obligated to point out that this isn't an Odeo issue - this is a Flash player issue."
Emphasis mine. Indeed it's true. There is a way to avoid it, podcasters, as Jon points out in his post (
as we do in our FAQ).
Posted by Ev. at 6/09/2006
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Tom over at Plasticbag.org asked his blog readers to come up with some questions for him using Odeo and then he republished a half text and half audio post:
Answering your Odeo questions. Neat!
Posted by Biz at 6/08/2006
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We just added a fun new feature: Starred Audio. When you find an audio you like, click add star. The audio gets listed on your profile and your new starred audio page. Here is
the audio Evhead has starred and here's
my starred audio.
We almost called it "More Cowbell" instead of "Add Star" but the stars work well with our logo and it turns out there's just
not enough thumbs to go around here in the Bay Area.
Posted by Biz at 6/08/2006
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A little while after we gave Odeo Studio
it's very own site we turned on free audio uploading without much fanfare. Now you can upload Mp3s of audio that you have legal rights to distribute.
Share your Mp3s in a podcast or just
use us for our players. (Every audio at Odeo sports a selection of flash players that you can put on other sites.) But what's the catch? You knew there was going to be a catch, didn't you?
In exchange for hosting your honking-big audio files, we will attach a
three second audio intro but only when people play the file
outside an Odeo player (for example, on an iPod), to help spread the word about Odeo. This is what the intro sounds like:
"One Reason to Listen to Odeo"It's got electro-techtronic bird noises! Anywhoo, upload away.
Posted by Biz at 6/07/2006
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We made a change today so that the OPML files we generate for your inbox and in other places should work with
Share Your OPML and other sites that accept the format like
Bloglines.
So feel free to share amongst yourselves.
Posted by Biz at 6/06/2006
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We just added a feature that could end up being a whole big thing. If you sign in and head over to your
account settings you can now change your Privacy Settings to make your Odeo Inbox public.
When you make your Inbox public, people can browse, subscribe, and listen to all the stuff you took the time to find and add. For example, I just visited
Evhead's Public Inbox and realized that I'm not subscribed to
The Onion Radio News—what's up with that? Meanwhile,
my public inbox is a little heavy on the
Slate Magazine Podcasts.
If you've added some friends to Odeo and they make their inboxes public, we'll list them out for you in the sidebar of your inbox. So, if you have a friend you suspect is hoarding lots of good audio, ask them politely to show you what's in their Odeo.
Update 3: Now working!
Update: This feature is slightly broken at the moment (i.e., error pages abound). So much of launching features on Friday.
Update 2: Scripting News points out that this new feature is a bit like what folks are doing over at
Share Your OPML—a place for sharing subscription lists. In fact, Odeo generates an OPML file of your Inbox (look under the the RSS link).
When we get the kinks worked out, we'll make sure it works with Share Your OPML in case people want to try that It works!
Posted by Biz at 6/02/2006
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