Wired Reading - What Fun!

With Maria studying in a paralegal program now, we have had less time together. Tonight we got out for a great budget meal at Laughing Planet and followed that with a visit to Barnes & Noble where Maria picked up some reading material (where she gets the time for leisure reading I don't know). We decided to head over to Vivace, one of our favorite coffee shops to read. I brought along a novel by James Rollins called Black Order. But after sitting down, I brought out my new phone, a TMobile Dash, aka the HTC Excalibur and browsed over to my Google Reader where I read some interesting blog entries, most notably one by Adrian Holovaty, a programmer-journalist, a citizen journalist who developed ChicagoCrime.org and EveryBlock


Reading what Adrian is doing, creating mashups that serve local communities, I had a moment where I realized that what I was doing was a completely different take on the passive art of reading. Holding a lightweight phone (with a small but very clear screen by the way) in my hand, I could absorb news or opinions from anywhere in the world instead of limiting myself to the one book, one author of a hardcopy book. Ya this is nothing new but the act of reading took on a more exciting, electric feeling for me.

I was brought a little back to earth when I then tried to write a blog entry about this topic right on the phone. Unfortunately, Blogger required me to send a message to an email address they provide, get back a code and then when I get back to my computer, go to Blogger and give it the code which it sent to my phone. Not exactly a simple write and publish, one-stop process!

Podcasting with the H2

Part of this week off I've spent researching where to host an audio podcast and playing with my new Zoom H2 mobile recorder. There are plenty of good hosting sites from what I can see but libsyn.com (Liberated Syndication) seems like a good place and it's hosting some very popular podcasts. I like their pricing: you pay for a maximum disk space usage each month starting at 100MB for $5.00 and incrementing from there. So if it looks like you're going to surpass your limit you can just upgrade another $5.00 and get a lot more space per month. Easy.

The H2 is pretty cool. Although I'm no pro when it comes to these devices, I can see that it is packed with a lot of functionality in a small package and at a good price. I recorded my voice at different settings, downloaded the wav files to my pc using the USB interface cable and listened. I'm impressed with the quality of the recording as well as microphone options: 2/4 channel stereo. I recorded to a 4GB SDHC card (that's the largest the H2 supports, but it's plenty given that it reported I had well over six hours of remaining audio space after just recording for about a minute).

So I now know that I can do either in-studio recording (that would be in my home office) or field recording. The H2 comes with a wind sock and a detachable handle for convenient interviewing. I'll have to do some practice to get the sound right, as well as brush up on journalistic interviewing skills. But the real hill to climb for podcasting is going to be getting an audience. Right now my blog is not widely read (but you, dear reader, I do thank you for your attention!) and the blog and podcast topics are not aligned with my full-time career in software engineering like some other technies I know.

But that's no reason to not do it. As one of my heroes, RFK, said

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope."

I would like my participation in Social Media (i.e., blogging, podcasting, social media sharing sites like FaceBook) to be used to make the world a better place, not just to have online friends and a place to go to when I'm alone in a coffee shop with my computer. I don't mean to imply that that's not okay for someone. But I've passed the half-century mark and I feel that I can more effectively use my remaining time. Ughh, that sounds gloomy, but it's not meant to.

I'm going to try to narrow the focus of my blog (maybe I'll create a separate blog for personal news of interest mostly to my family and closest friends) and align the podcast with it. So I've got to get thinking about how to do this. Any advice from readers is very welcome!