Dan Misener dot com

I’ll be on Go for the first time this season tomorrow morning, Saturday, November 15, 2008.

I’ll abandon all my previous personas (Dieting Dan, Discount Dan, Dan the Love Man, etc.) in favour of a new one: Dan the Man Man.

Dan the Man Man will be a bad advice column for men.

Update: Whole show is here, and my segment is isolated in the player below:

Shhhh…

cbcpodcasts.wordpress.com says it’s “for the CBC shows that fall through the podcast cracks.”

It liberates Jowi Taylor’s excellent series The Nerve from Windows Media hell.

It lets you easily download Terry O’Reilly’s fantastic Age of Persuasion (which is not impossible via cbc.ca if you know how to click “View Source,” but it’s needlessly difficult).

Plus, they have a couple of other CBC radio shows that didn’t get podcasts.

Grab ‘em now before they’re gone.

I think a lot about Spark, the radio program I work on. I talk a lot about Spark, too — mostly to Liz and Nora (my co-workers), to listeners, and to other radio people.

This past weekend I attended Zap Your PRAM, a non-conference organized by Charlottetown-based silverorange and Reinvented. I was asked to give a talk loosely based on “how being involved with a radio show that tries to use the web in new and interesting ways has actually worked out.” And it was a genuinely refreshing experience. Mostly because (I think) I wasn’t talking to a group of radio people. I was talking to a group of technologists.

The format of talks at Zap lends itself to interjections, questions, spontaneous discussions, and derailments. Which was wonderful. Rather than walking in, presenting my prepared points, playing my prepared clips, and taking question at the end, the flow of comments and questions seemed to start almost immediately, smack dab in the middle of what I thought I was going to talk about.

As someone who’s used to performing off a script, it was scary. Terrifying, even. People asked questions about points I hadn’t made yet. People questioned things I take as givens. And through it all, the participants got me thinking about the work I do in ways I hadn’t thought of before. (A particularly helpful comment came from Rob Paterson, who mentioned NPR’s Bryant Park Project, Planet Money, and the difference between radio -> web and web -> radio.)

And I think that’s sort of what made Zap wonderful for me — the ecclectic mix of people with perspectives that I would probably never otherwise have access to.

Did I make all the points I wanted to make in my talk? No.

Did I properly articulate anything about how I see the relationship between public broadcasting and social media? Probably not as clearly as I would have liked.

But in the “inline discussion” during my talk, and in the various chats I had with people one-on-one afterwards, I picked up some very useful nuggets from some very smart people that may help our radio show continue to improve. Hanging around designers for a weekend’ll do that, I guess.

Between the talks, the venue (beautiful), the amazing food, and the great people I met and talked to, Zap was a great success. Congrats and thanks to Steven, Dan, and especially Peter, who not only invited me, but took me on a Sunday afternoon tour of Charlottetown after the conference was over. The Überloo was a touchless wonder. Consider me zapped.

Kottke chimes in on This American Life’s two excellent programs on the American financial system:

This radio program made the rounds last week, but I finally got caught up this weekend so I’ll add my voice to the chorus urging you to listen to This American Life’s episode on the financial crisis, Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Paired with The Giant Pool of Money from back in May, this is an excellent overview of what’s going on in the financial markets right now. The hosts of the two shows are also doing a daily blog/podcast thing at Planet Money In addition, the last half of this week’s TAL concerns the political angle of the financial mess. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.

I don’t have much to add to this beyond my own endorsement of these two programs, and also (because both shows have slipped into TAL’s archives) two direct download links to the MP3s:

Another Frightening Show About the Economy

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/365.mp3

The Giant Pool of Money

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/355.mp3

Along with the re-launch of Radio 2, CBC created four new streaming “genre” channels: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Composers, and Canadian Songwriters. You may have heard the heavy advertisement for them on both CBC Radio 1 and 2. To hear these new channels, you have to listen at the Radio 2 website, or listen in iTunes under “Radio” in the sidebar.

But what do you do if you don’t want to leave a browser window open? Or if you’d rather stream using VLC, or WinAmp or something?

Because I can’t seem to find one anywhere else (including CBC’s own Windows-Media centric Direct CBC.ca URLs for listening to CBC Radio page), I’ve put together a full list of CBC Radio 2 streaming “channel” URLs list here:

Classical

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-canadianclassicalhi-192

Jazz

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-jazzhi-192

Canadian Composers

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-composershi-192

Canadian Songwriters

http://atl2.fla.abacast.com/cbc-songwriterhi-192

How did I find these?

1. In the “Radio” section of iTunes, I browsed for each of the four channels
2. I dragged each of the stations into a new iTunes playlist
3. In the playlist I right clicked on each item, I clicked “Edit URL” and copied the URL (For example, the Canadian Songwriters URL was http://pri.kts-af.net/redir/index.pls?esid=6ae4b0420afe423a4f04585b4c0b1ed1&url_no=1&client_id=7&uid=68efed4d03ec7e45fd3978262c107180&clicksrc=xml)
4. I pasted that URL into Firefox, which downloaded a .pls file
5. I opened each .pls file in Textedit, which gave me the above URLs.

Interesting:

• Abacast (abacast.com) is an American company
• It looks like the Live Streaming service costs either $395 or $695 per month per channel, depending on the package
• Though the URLs (and iTunes Radio listings) suggest the bitrate is 192 kbps, my copy of VLC reports otherwise, between 112 and 160 kbps. Perhaps that’s a limitation of my broadband connection, though.
• Abacast lists complete listener statistics as part of its streaming audio packages. I wonder how many people are listening. I wonder if these numbers will ever become as public as BBM reports.

Once upon a time, you could download old episodes of This American Life by grabbing MP3 file locations from the M3U files posted on their website. The MP3 files lived here:

http://audio.wbez.org/tal/SHOWNUMBER.mp3

But that stopped working.

And these days, though you can still listen to TAL archives, downloading them has become a bit trickier because the shows are hidden behind a flash player. But, that flash player is still pointing to an actual downloadable MP3, and Christopher Soghoian has figured out where they live:

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/SHOWNUMBER.mp3

Come on… that directory structure is pretty hilarious.

Replace SHOWNUMBER with the episode number (338 for example), and you’re good to go.