Recently in Podcasting Category

The 2007 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary awards are now open for nominations. People I'd like to see win this year:

1. Alan O Rourke
2. Conn
3. Red Cardinal
4. 2Bscene
5. Damien Mulley
6. Dave Davis

The category list is below: Social Contribution Technology Journalist Innovation eGovernment Internet Marketer Web Designer Web Developer Online Trader Educational Contribution Internet Entrepreneur Mobile Internet Application Best Online Banking Service Best Podcaster Best Blogger I'll try to put together a proper list of people I'd nominate under each category over the next couple of days ...

The Nokia N95 is a thing of beauty. It's got all those funky features that every geek dreams of:

• GPS
• Bluetooth
• Wifi
• 3G
• MMS
• SMS
• Camera

And you can make phone calls too !! It's also got a radio and a few other little gizmos that make it a fun piece of kit. Paul and I decided last Friday that enough was enough and that we'd simply buy ourselves new phones, so we did! It's a really neat device. Yes it has got terrible battery life and the memory card isn't the biggest at 1 gigabyte (though I still remember using PCs with less space on their hard drives a couple of years ago ....) Krystian has an older model (not sure which one) so he's been trying to persuade me to load lots of cute bits of software onto my new toy, though I haven't actually got round to adding anything as yet. If you're a blogger you should like the free software that comes with it - "Life blog". I haven't tested it with Wordpress, but Movable Type 4 supports it, as do other SixApart products and services. You can also download a free podcast reader from Nokia, though it doesn't integrate properly with the browser ie. RSS feeds don't get automatically handled by it, which is a pity Paul goes into some detail about the features and their technical specs, so I won't :) The kind of things that really interest me, however, are native GPS support. I spend a lot of my time trying to get to meetings in towns and cities that I don't know too well, so if I have some semi-decent maps installed this will save me a lot of time and headaches (driving in circles round Mullingar brings back "fond" memories). Now I'm off to get more ringtones .....

Over the last few weeks I've mentioned Movable Type 4 several times. Byrne and his team made a release candidate available last night and the change log is simply huge! I'll be wiping my beta install and replacing it with RC1 later today / this evening ... Hopefully they'll have ironed out those bugs that were driving me mad :)

The Movable Type team have released the 7th beta of MT 4 in the last few minutes. Not only does this release include bug fixes it also includes "out of the box" support for podcasting, which should make a lot of people really happy. Byrne Reese has all the details.

Brian Greene is the IIA guest blogger, which I mentioned before. He's just posted his "plans". It could be very interesting depending on who agrees to submit themselves :)

I started writing this yesterday evening, but then I got distracted .... Anybody who knows me will happily agree that I am not a morning person - not unless I've had enough caffeine to kill an ox! However yesterday morning I was up at 7 in order to drive down to Waterford for BarCamp Southeast. Since there were a few of the Blacknight team going down we had arranged wakeup calls, which after the previous night's shenanigans were probably a really good idea :) I picked up Keith shortly after 8am and we hit the road. I must say it was a lovely drive down, as there were hardly any cars on the road! I pity Keith, though, as I have an awful habit of chattering away incessantly ..... The directions we'd been supplied with were spot on, so we'd no issue in finding the venue and actually arrived earlier than we'd planned. (I'd had visions of driving aimlessly around Waterford for hours!) Coffee and pastries devoured the other delegates started to drift. There were plenty of familiar faces, such as Damien, Jon, Donncha, Keith B (not to be confused with Keith G), Berni, Conn, Laura, Grainne, Elly and plenty of others (Do you really want a list of names? :) ) The venue, which is nestled in the Waterford countryside, is beautifully equipped and there was wireless access throughout. The lineup of talks was overwhelming, but I did manage to get into a couple of them, as well as trying to learn to juggle. With my total lack of co-ordination that was no easy task, though I did sort of manage to juggle (more "sort of" than "manage"). The first talk I got to was on podcasting, while the second was on a slightly different topic - death and divorce in a digital world (which deserves a post of its own) After the last talk a bunch of us headed down to the Ramada Viking. Most of us were staying there that night, so it was simply a matter of booking in and dropping bags off in rooms etc., Over the past year or so I've stayed in a lot of hotels. They all seem to merge into one. The Ramada Viking's staff, however, were extremely helpful and the room was fantastic. I've stayed in a few of the supposedly "good" hotels in Dublin and been completely underwhelmed, whereas this time I paid a lot less and got fantastic service in charming surroundings. After a couple of beers in the hotel we all piled into the city for food (which we were sponsoring) and then back out to the hotel for beer and banter. Unlike the first barcamp I actually made it into my bed before dawn :)

I've been interested in the inner workings of podcasting for some time, though I still haven't actually got round to doing anything about it! In any case yesterday's BarCamp featured some really interesting people talking about cool stuff (not all of it was that geeky!). The first session that I made it into was given by two podcasters that I truly respect, Bernie Goldbach and Conn Ó Muíneacháin. Conn has been podcasting as gaeilge (the Irish language) for some time, while Bernie not only podcasts regularly, but has a wealth of experience in teaching other people to do it. The talk was a combination of talk with slides and practical workshop. Bernie kicked off by explaining what he was going to do ie. put together a podcast in about 20 minutes or so and then Conn gave us a load of really useful tips on getting started. What was fantastic about the talk was that they made it all seem so accessible and easy, so even my non-technical companion at the talk was able to follow the entire process with ease (at least I think she did!). Hopefully Conn's slides will be available soon, though I know he's having issues with his broadband On a sidenote I took a couple of photos that you can see here

Brian's just posted about last night's online shenanigans.. I was chatting to him last night as we tried to sort out his blog issues, so he decided to demo a Real stream for me. Next thing you know there were seven of us on a skype chat all listening, while Brian played a really cool selection of tunes. So who was there? Well there was myself, Brian, the entire team of SpoiltChild and some girl who is a friend of Brian's. Great fun! Now how can I do that? :)

The shortlist for the 2006 Net Visionary Awards was announced earlier today. We won't know who the winners will be until the night of the event, so it should be quite exciting. I have been shortlisted in two categories, which I wasn't expecting - blogging and entrepeneur. It's nice to see that there are so many familiar names on the list, though, as usual, there are also quite a few that I don't recognise at all!