Month: February 2005

podcasting, more

Posted on by jessamyn

Damn you Greg Schwartz, for making me listen to your podcast to see what you had to say about me! Fascinating stuff, though once again I would have rather read it quickly than listened to it slowly. Greg on the other hand, probably liked getting to talk rather than type for a change. Plus, he has a mellifluous voice, so it was a painless and rewarding eleven minute intro to the podcast world, thanks Greg. I wonder if my “Why I don’t listen to podcasts.” pronouncements sound like my friends when they tell me they just don’t use RSS, or me when I explain why I don’t TiVo. There are two parts to these arguments I think

1) I don’t need the new technology to improve the experience I have [“I read blogs pages by page, who needs RSS?” or “I have an answering machine who needs voicemail?”] versus the subtly different

2) what the new technology brings me is something I don’t feel that I need in the first place [“I don’t need a cell phone.”, or “I don’t need an MP3 player.”].

There’s more room to move and convince in the first kind of argument than in the second. As for my personal choices, I have an answering machine, MP3 player, RSS reader and no cell phone, all pretty much intentionally.

This has more to do with technology adoption generally than podcasting in specific. Greg makes some really good points about the strengths of getting your news and/or new music this way. If you listen to a lot of radio, you should look into podcasting. The radio I listen to here has my traffic reports, weather updates and the status of the parking garage demolition. I’m sure over time I’ll be refining my “why I am not listening to your podcast” line like many people greet me with the “why I am not reading your blog” line but right now my answer is “I’m waiting for the local podcasters” Tell me if you find them.

snapshot of Vermont’s broadband saturation

Posted on by jessamyn

A sidenote to the podcast talk: if you want to participate in podcasting, you’ll probably also want to have broadband since Greg’s 11 minute podcast is about 5MB. This got me thinking about the digital divide again, and how it relates to new technologies. One of the things I love about RSS is that it actually saves me bandwidth because I’m not loading a lot of formatting and ancillary web page fluff that I’m not interested in [for the truly lovely sites, I’ll still go look at the pages, natch]. The content to bandwidth ratio is high. I only got cable modem recently in Vermont and my house up North still has dial-up. There is one ISP there with a local number and they don’t even have have a web page. It’s a different world. My options there are dial-up, satellite broadband, or nothing.

As of mid-2003 17% of Vermont households had broadband. I’m sure that number has shot up, but how high? I’ve been reading through the Vermont Telecommunications Plan from the end of 2004, and it’s fascinating stuff. 66% of Vermonters surveyed in late 2003, early 2004 had Internet access at home. Of them, roughly 25% use cable or DSL with the rest on dial-up, WebTV or other workarounds.. So… a little quick math… and we’ve got about 15% of Vermonters who have cable Internet or DSL. I’m sure this number has also increased, but how high? That’s about 100,000 people more or less. Want to know why it isn’t higher? Check out these two graphs I pulled from the report, paraphrased “Why I haven’t used the Internet recently” and “Why we’re not getting faster Internet at work” What does a library, or a librarian do about this?