We’ve just completed some new podcasts for Leading Edge BC. These feature business and industry leaders who’ve relocated to British Columbia.

Guests include:

Glenn Entis, the Senior Vice President and Chief Visual and Technical officer for Electronic Arts Worldwide.

Dylan Collins, CEO of DemonWare. They’re based in Dublin Ireland and create middleware for networking ingame players on all platforms.  Do check out these pictures of the DemonWare crew on Flikr (Dylan is in the back)

Very interesting stories and sure makes you realize how lucky we are to be in British Columbia. Leading Edge BC does an amazing job making it easier for companies to settle here – not to mention providing tons of resources in person and online.

You can get the podcasts at feeds.feedburner.com/lebc

If you want the cool enhanced version for your iPod, and you’ve got iTunes already installed, follow this link to launch – or do it the old fashioned way and search Leading Edge BC at iTunes.

 

I finally get to do something with Roland ! Yah!

Roland Tanglao from Bryght and I will be hosting a session on Podcasting for New Media BC.

It’s coming up January 26th, at the Vancouver Film School on Homer.

If you’re wondering what podcasting is all about, how to do it, and what it can do for your company, this will be a great session.

20 $ for NMBC members, 30 $ for non-members. Register at New Media BC

Today I decided to do something productive with all that spam. I’ve got at least 4-thousand emails filtered away, the spoils of the last couple of months of spam.

I’ve opted for a fresh new approach.

It’s a variation on Re-use/ReCycle.

No sense filling the trash bin with all that content, as useless as it may be.

So, I decided to create a new musical genre.

I call it SGC. Spam Generated Content.

Here’s what you do.

Take the subject line, plug it into a text-to-speech synthesizer, then lay down some tracks.

Presto.

I admit, it’s not exactly the wall-O-sound…but I’ve got enough raw material here for years, and there’s more showing up every day.

Here it is, my Christmas present to the Internet. Oh, and if any of you spammers want to share the royalties on this sure winner, just let us know who you are…

The Spam Song – Runs 2.30 (bigsnit – mapl)
In glorious < < < S T E R E O > >>

Sony’s Play Station Portable now supports RSS feeds.

The real news here is for podcasters.

Because the PSP has a built in wireless connection, and because of the way Sony has configured the RSS function, the PSP is now essentially a streaming audio player.

I’ve been walking around my home office listening to podcasts on my PSP, streamed from Internet RSS feeds.

No need to store them when I can listen to them wirelessly.

This is getting good.

My guess is that over the next few days, hundreds of thousands of baby iPods will be unleashed from their Christmas wrap and set out onto the Internet.

All you new iPod owners are going to be looking for gigs and gigs of stuff to load, so here is our self-centred promotion:

The New Media BC Podcast.
If you’ve got iTunes already installed, here’s the direct link.
Or pop it into your RSS reader from our feedburner link.

The Raincoast Books Podcast.
If you’ve got iTunes already installed, here’s the direct link.
Or pop it into your RSS reader from our feedburner link.

Have fun.

The Raincoast Books inaugural podcast with Jim Lynch is getting some interesting reactions. This from BlogCritics.org

…what they really get right is in packaging it as self-contained entertainment, too, for those who want a bit of insight into a writer’s mind and an enjoyable, bite-sized tale from the novel.

Read the whole article at Blog Critics.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we’re working with New Media BC on their podcast, and today we released Episode 1 of what we hope will be a regular series of podcasts for NMBC.

If you’ve got an interest in how technology, culture and art interact, you’ll want to hear this.

Episode One features interviews with:

Kelly Zmak – the new Chief Operating Officer and Senior VP at Radical Entertainment. He’s a video game vet, and has some intrigueing things to say about where the video game industry is going, and how the ‘culture’ of gaming is changing.

Lynda Brown – the president of New Media BC. She’ll talk about her vision for BC as a world new media hub.

Mark Pesce – engineer, inventor, author, professor. When you’re preparing for an interview, a guy with this kind of background is totally intimidating. But, he’s a blast to talk to, and we cover some interesting ground including thoughts on Web 2.0

You can grab the podcast at iTunes (go to podcasts and search NMBC) or at feeds.feedburner.com/nmbc

(Oh, and as an homage to my former days in rock radio, we did a little teaser as well)

The New Media BC podcast is about to be unleashed. It’s the latest podcast project for us and it is WAY too much fun. Here’s the gig – interview really interesting people who are involved in new media across a broad sector; from video games to web to animation to e-learning.

We’ve got a teaser here.

Stand by for the full hour long podcast, 39 meg of glorious stereo, featuring :
– Kelly Zmak, the new COO of Radical Entertainment in Vancouver
– Mark Pesce, software engineer, VRML pioneer, self-proclaimed mad-scientist, in Sydney Australia
– Lynda Brown (she is soooo downtown) of New Media BC

It should be out within the week. You can subscribe to NMBC’s podcasts at feeds.feedburner.com/nmbc

We launched the new podcast series for Raincoast Books today, featuring author Jim Lynch and his book The Highest Tide.

Raincoast is a great company to work with, and getting a chance to meet and speak with Jim Lynch was a real treat.

We’re using Feedburner for the Raincoast Books podcast feeds.

Have a listen and subcribe here. You can also find them in the podcast section of iTunes, just do a search on Raincoast. Please tell your friends !

Hardly a frightening sound, but I thought with Halloween around the corner, I’d share my local owl with you.

One of the great things about living on the Ravine is the wildlife. Just last week we had a black bear completely trash the composter, and most nights the local owl wakes me up around 2am as it hoots its way through the night.

Pop this on the MP3 player, turn on LOOP, and patch it through the stereo for a nice little Halloween touch.

Owl is here

One of the things we’re doing at At Large Media is custom podcast production. One of the companies we’re working with is Raincoast Books based in Vancouver.

Last week we produced a podcast with author Jim Lynch. He’s written a wonderful novel called The Highest Tide, which has been getting great reviews.

The Highest Tide tells the story of thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley who lives on Puget Sound and knows everything there is to know about the sea and its creatures. When he becomes the first person to sight a live giant squid he is hailed as some sort of prophet. The media descend and everyone wants to hear what Miles has to say. But Miles is just a self-described “increasingly horny, speed-reading thirteen-year-old insomniac” who navigates the mysterious world of adults as the strange events continue over the summer, culminating in the highest tide in 100 years.

Jim was in Vancouver for the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. I met him at Granville Island where he was staying, and we headed down to the water to create the podcast.

Our podcast productions are all broadcast quality and done ‘on location’. I carry one jam packed gear bag with the latest integrated chip recorders and a variety of mics. Part of our philosophy is to go to where the person is, rather than force them into a foreign environment like a studio. We sat out by the water and Jim talked about the book, his background as a journalist, and what inspired him to tell this story.

You can hear an excerpt here. I’ll post the link to the full podcast once it’s released.

Today’s blog comes with a companion podcast. Get it here

If you love it so much you should marry it !

My love affair with my Play Station Portable made another leap this week. The PSP is an awesome game device, and its screen makes watching movies a treat. The built in wireless to date has been unexciting, since all it did was check for software updates.

That was until this week. All that changed with Sony’s latest software update, which includes control over the desktop theme, support for more types of audio, image and video files, and best of all, a web browser. Oh baby.

Entering URL’s is a bit of a pain, but a few customized link pages will solve that – and it stores favourites just like your desktop browser.

For months now I’ve been raving about the video quality on this device, and being able to load up demo reels for clients is a real asset. Since it will play still images in a slide show mode, I’ve even converted a few of my powerpoint presentations to play on the PSP’s wide screen. Say it with me now, Oh Baby.

This week also marked the release of the PSP in Europe, look for lots of PSP innovation in the months heading into the Christmas rush. Now if Sony would just open up the market on the clamshell disc so we could record movies on them instead of memory sticks – we’d all be screaming Oh Baby.

The news just takes itself too damn seriously.
(with apologies to my friend Anton)

Who needs CBC comedy shows when we’ve got the daily papers. Two stories in today’s Vancouver Sun, apparently completely unrelated. Hmmmm ?

And taking things a bit too seriously…

The lockout at CBC seems to be frying some brain cells. Quirks and Quarks producer Jim Handman claimed in a letter to the editor that his team created podcasting to CBC. This was in reply to an earlier article quoting a manager who made reference to new technologies, like podcasting, and how they are changing the landscape at CBC, and how it is important for CBC to keep up to these rapid changes. Jim’s rebutal was super cutting, saying how his team of STAFF employees (not contract employees) came up with this [podcasting] innovation. It’s a nice argument, but it’s incorrect.

Back in the mid-nineties, we had gigabytes of audio available for download. This was for our show RealTime, which was live in real time, across Canada and around the world on the Internet. Produced at CBC Vancouver (by a bunch of contract employees, not that it really matters) we had an impressive archive of material available, until CBC got nervous about downloading and told us to remove the files. Joe Lawlor at CBC Toronto was also doing the same. As everyone knows, podcasting is just another form of downloading files; after all it’s an RSS attachment of an mp3 file. So Jim, it’s terrific you guys are doing it, but sorry dude, you didn’t start it, not by a long shot.

Today’s blog is a wee podcast to whet your appetite. Shorter than your average pop song, but so much more dynamic range. Tweaked for ultimate ipod listening, it runs 2:50. Simply an introduction.
It’s here

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