A special podcast: Episode 31.5 is available

Welcome back to a very special episode of the Noisecast. I felt it was important that I take the time to explain what’s happening here. We already released an episode on Monday, as is our pattern. So why another one so soon? The reason is that we decided to experiment with the show a little bit to try and find a way to improve it.

Of our original staff of 14+ active podcast voices, we’ve since reduced to a more manageable number and this has made the old scheduling rotation almost meaningless. We’ve long suspected that the current system of having 6 or 7 people on each episode was too raucous, and of late we’ve had increased incidents of people talking over each other and failing to cover topics. This was bothersome, however, we’ve come to enjoy our chaos and banter. In fact, that chaos is what makes us what we are and we wouldn’t trade it for anything. The question became, how do we address the crowding without eliminating some of the tangents and the banter?

This episode and the next few to come will represent our experiment in finding a solution. For one thing, we are reducing the number of on-air voices to 3 or 4 at most. We are mandating (though we shouldn’t have to) that each voice familiarizes themselves with the topic list and does their own research so that not everything is shot straight from the hip. We will be interacting more proactively with the live listeners on the stream and trying to find active ways to include them directly. We will also be experimenting with adding new segments to each episodes given the popularity and success of the WTF! News. we have no formal plans, these are just experiments that we will try as time goes by till we settle on a comfortable medium.

The objective is to make the Noisecast a more enjoyable deviation while at least being informative. After all, despite all the lulz, we are still geeks and are expected to occasionally tell you something you don’t know about the geekverse. Most importantly, we are experimenting for SCIENCE! This particular episode doesn’t have all the structural changes we will be experimenting with over the next few weeks. We will start small. This episode just has a smaller cast. As always, you can see the show notes and topic list after the jump. So give this episode a listen right here and tell us what you think.

Episode 31.5 Topic List
Date: 5-24-2011, Time: 8EST/7CST
Roster: Steven, Kevlar, Ron, Kaiser

  • New Barnes & Noble Nook: http://t.co/zH1WU3j — Look, I’m not certain how I feel about this. On the one hand, it is good. I prefer the Nook color, but as direct competition to the Kindle 3, they hit this one out of the park. This is an excellent device. but when purchasing these things, we are also buying into its ecosystem. Despite B&N being the larger bookstore, Amazon has continued to dominate because it has a larger ecosystem. We already buy so much from them, they have our information and it’s convenient. The benefits, such as Nook having 2 million books and Amazon only having 1.5 million are almost meaningless. I’m not going to read all those books. The books that matter, the hundreds of thousands of public domain books (many classics) and all the new books coming out are available on both, so that benefit is honestly quite meaningless in the larger scheme of things.
    The same thing goes for the battery life situation. The Kindle can go a month between charges, and the new Nook can go 2 months. So? If i find myself in a situation where I can’t charge it for one month let alone two months, I have much bigger problems than my e reader. The greater the battery life, the greater the difference has to be to matter. So one month to two months means very little to me, but one month to six months is a big deal. – Agrippa
  • Microsoft officially unveils Mango; Hundreds of improvements on the way http://t.co/FtmKoD3 http://bit.ly/m70c0S
  • Automotive Black Boxes, Minus the Gray Area – http://t.co/MMUdRrb
  • Facebook assembling a team of ambassadors – http://bit.ly/l17SrIGoogle phone in 2012 not powered by Android? (sorry for the print link, the normal article doesn’t make it obvious that there are more pages to it) – http://bit.ly/lI3kx9
  • HTML5 revamp of skydrive http://bit.ly/mbV33e
  • France attempts to “civilize” the Internet; Internet fights back http://t.co/GFFIHVp — Ugh! UGGGHHHH!!! Shut up, shorty! I summarized my opinion here. (The final news item).
  • Apple forces Samsung to hand over Galaxy prototypes in legal spat – http://t.co/954WaTe
  • Google Said to Plan Mobile-Payment Service Unveiling in New York on May 26 – http://t.co/Oie1aBe
  • Twitter reportedly finalizes buyout of Tweetdeck for over $40 million – http://t.co/42tvAVS [Is Twitter going about this all wrong and digging its own grave?] — Here’s my take. No, twitter isn’t digging its own grave. It’s saving itself. Twitter isn’t just buying these companies to kill the competition. It isn’t shutting down these services. it’s taking the skill, the coders and engineers, and folding them into Twitter. It’s taking their innovation into itself, because these people are doing what it can’t. Twitter didn’t just buy TweetDeck. It hired TweetDeck’s programmers for $40 million. The problem is, besides it’s many users and its millions of active users; besides its social penetration, both media and meatspace; Twitter has been utterly unable to monetize because the majority of interaction with the system has been through third party apps. Like Ron said, he didn’t even realize Twitter had a website for a long time. Imagine the situation they are in where they are left with the burden of keeping the site and service alive while trying to create a good mobile app, while other services are figuring out how to monetive their inventions. Think about that for a moment. Everyone is profiting off your invention but you.
    However, on top of that you have these varying services that offer their own specialties and efficiencies but are also widely different in quality.  The twitter experience isn’t consistent. This is what Twitter gains: They gain new technology, wide (direct) user base, access to every mobile device without much extra effort, the gateway to monetizing their own creation and justifying the investment, access in a deep and innovative way to Facebook’s stream (ergo an ability to generate revenue on the back of Facebook as well), and the ability to create a consistent experience across the board. Not trying to purchase these services would have been the dumb move. They were eating twitter’s lunch before Twitter even finished cooking. – Agrippa

WTF News:

  • Human Ashtray – http://bit.ly/kIXDOr RON IS DOUCHEY
  • Pornstars wonder if they’re in Bin Laden’s ‘stache – http://bit.ly/kVprq8 — This information is of vital importance to our national pride.
  • Man fakes mugging to cover for failure to get Oprah tickets – http://yhoo.it/kgNoaR
  • Utah mother Felicia Rea McClure tried to sell daughter’s virginity for $10,000, say cops: http://bit.ly/iZuhF2 no reserve  ←-LOL!!!!* <– you’re fucked up for laughing at that.

*we do not condone loling at sexual misconduct with minors

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  1. Pingback: Noisecast Roundup 5-25-2011: I’m tired of the French

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