In line with our continuing quest to provide you with the world’s finest podcast listening experience coupled with a minimal creative commitment on our part, we bring you Bobcast: The AcoustiBobs Podcast!
Starting March 25, you’ll be able to listen in on the private conversations of DenBob and PeteBob* of the AcoustiBobs. Ladies: learn how guys really think! Guys: learn how guys really talk when they think ladies might be listening!
You can expect Den and Pete to talk about music, movies, girls, toys, cars, intellectual property law, and girls. They’ll also plug their band ad nauseum. Remember March 25: tune in and have more fun than you’ve had in hours!
*And maybe DaveBob and PaulBob, but don’t tell them.
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January 23, 2010 by Peter ·
Now two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. One of them said, “My lord, this woman and I live in the same house. I had a baby while she was there with me. The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us.
Conan O’Brien wrapped up his era on the Tonight Show last night. Most of us thought his run was too brief, but for NBC execs, it was far too long. If only the network brass had demonstrated the same level of commitment in 1993, when the unknown comedy writer took over Late Night under the first of a series of one-year contracts. Conan would still be relatively anonymous, the Simpsons would be a little edgier, and Jeff Zucker would have a bit more hair.
“During the night this woman’s son died because she lay on him. So she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. The next morning, I got up to nurse my son—and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn’t the son I had borne.”
Conan is gone now, and Jay Leno will soon be back. I’m not sure what Leno will say when he returns and I don’t much care. I won’t be watching.
The other woman said, “No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours.” But the first one insisted, “No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine.” And so they argued before the king.
I don’t usually write about TV. In fact, aside from maybe two or three shows at any given time, I don’t even watch much television. And I couldn’t care (much) less about this latest edition of the late night wars. Render unto NBC that which is NBC’s. But I did muster enough curiosity to watch Conan’s last show, and it wasn’t what I expected.
The king said, “This one says, ‘My son is alive and your son is dead,’ while that one says, ‘No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.’”
Winking sarcasm is the order of the day on late night TV. It has been for a long time, at least since Letterman. Probably longer. I don’t claim that to be a bad thing. After a long day oozing safe situation comedies and Jello commercials and overwrought dramas, TV and viewers deserve a chance to laugh at the world and themselves and whatever celeb has done something ridiculous that week. Everyone and everything is fair game.
Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”
Given the plastic humility we’re used to seeing from public figures, one could expect (and forgive) a tearful farewell from O’Brien. He was, after all, giving up a job he had wanted all his life. What he said, was this:
“I have had more good fortune than anybody I know. And if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-11 parking lot, we will find a way to make it fun.”
He was wrestling with his emotions. You could tell. But he refused to break. He knew what he wanted to say and he got it out. He thanked his fans, many of whom have picked up his cause on the internet, many of whom camped out in the rain to be on hand for his last show.
“To all the people watching, I can never ever thank you enough for the kindness to me. I will think about it for the rest of my life, and all I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people that watch: please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.”
Conan turned to the band, fronted by Will Ferrell in an impossible beard. He gathered up a guitar and together, everyone jammed on Freebird. There was cowbell.
The woman whose son was alive was filled with compassion for her son and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!” But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!”
O’Brien could have kept his job under a compromise deal that would have pushed the Tonight Show back half an hour to make room for an abbreviated Jay Leno Show. Conan thought the later start time would hurt the Tonight Show. He chose to walk away and give it back to Leno.
Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.”
The Tonight Show returns March 1. The wrong guy will be in the chair.
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December 10, 2009 by Peter ·
Once upon a time, there was excitement in the Land of the Podcasts. Books were written and flowed through the shipping departments of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. Dozens of podcast directories were dotted across the Internet. The technology attracted the attention of large companies such as Yahoo! and Apple. And in a small house on the south side of Chicago, a younger and more innocent author of this site began producing a podcast designed to showcase acoustic musicians he’d recorded himself.
That was many, many years ago, of course. At least three. With my recent reentry into the world of podcasting, I decided to do some research so this time, at least, I could get it right and perhaps build up something of a listener base. I purchased a book, Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, which came highly rated on Amazon.com. Although the book dated to 2006 (there were very few more-recent choices), I though to myself, “How much could things have changed?”
Ha.
I understand that technology changes quickly. But I’d wrongly assumed that, three years on, there would be more interest and greater opportunities in the world of podcasting. Imagine my surprise when I began typing in the addresses of the sites listed in the book, only to find that many had been replaced by those fake links pages (“thebestdoughnuts.com—the best of the internet and more”). Yahoo!’s podcast directory was gone. Many of the sites that remained from “the old days” were loaded with spam or hadn’t seen any updates for months or years.
To be fair, a few are left, but nothing that retains a level of user activity reflective of the kind of vibrant podcasting community that apparently once roamed the Great Plains in numbers that would shock visitors from the East.
Obviously, something had gone fundamentally wrong. So I started to dig a little deeper. I looked at books, I checked out websites, and although hard numbers are hard to come by, I started to put together an image of what must have happened to podcasting as a whole, and it boils down to one fundamental problem: incest.
Many of the references I found regarding podcast promotion focused on promoting your show to other podcasters. On some level, this makes sense. Why promote to people who have no interest? But let’s consider the following scenario:
Timmy produces a podcast about classic motorcycles. Tommy has a podcast about indie bands. Timmy offers Tommy a deal: play a promo from my show on yours, and I’ll play your promo on mine.
Great. So now Timmy listens to Tommy’s show so he can hear his promo played, and Tommy returns the favor. And they’ve both doubled their number of listeners, not counting their moms. Anyone see a problem with this business plan?
The key to successful podcasting, I think, is reaching people who wouldn’t ordinarily listen to podcasts. It’s not enough to target a community of hobbyists content with slapping each other on the back. And there’s the rub.
Now that the podcast community seems to have receded a bit, I humbly suggest that the (non-illusory) opportunities are actually greater than they were a few years ago. For one thing, there is less chaff to get in the way of finding the wheat, meaning that one no longer has to search through 1,000 podcasts to find one worth listening to repeatedly. Perhaps only 100. Still not a great ratio, but an improvement for sure, and that number can probably be reduced further by limiting one’s search to podcasts that have been regularly produced for a certain period of time. We can only assume that practice makes better, at least.
Additionally, Internet access is finally ready to become truly portable. Not only are many phones and laptops capable of grabbing the Internet pretty much anywhere, but the Internet-enabled car stereo is on the horizon, providing a potentially real alternative to satellite and terrestrial radio.
Time-shifting, the practice of listening to or viewing a show at a time other than when it is broadcast, is becoming part of our culture. Arguably, watching movies on videotape was the beginning of this trend, and now we’ve progressed to digital video recorders and on-demand programming. I watch House regularly, but I only recently learned what time it’s on and I have only a vague idea that it’s on Fox—the Tivo grabs it and I don’t sweat the details.
I suspect my situation isn’t uncommon. Listening to podcasts, via digital audio player or an Internet connection, provides the same level of convenience for what we might in the broadest sense call “radio.” I don’t even remember the last time I listened to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! over the air.
Big-name radio types such as Steve Dahl and Adam Carolla have begun the heavy lifting—promoting podcasting to a whole new audience, i.e. that non-enthusiast gang that needs to get sucked in if the technology is going to become truly mainstream.
I created the Big Noisy Bug Movie Podcast with the goal of getting into the habit of regularly producing a show. It’s grown listeners at about the rate I expected, and although I don’t think it will ever be the most-downloaded podcast, I believe it’s improving over time. I have quite a few ideas for other shows, and over the next year I hope to begin producing several of them. If Internet radio does take off with the public, I plan to be on the ground floor.
In the meantime, want to swap promos?
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December 1, 2009 by Peter ·
In technological terms, “podcast” is a pretty bad name.
Why? Because podcasts became popular right around the same time as the iPod taking over the world. That relative plethora of pods leads many people to believe that podcasts and the iPod are tied together somehow, and that they need to own one in order to listen to the other. I find this confusion even among some computer-literate people, so don’t feel too bad, okay?
Just to save time, I’ve created a little mnemonic trick to help you remember that that’s not the case. Here it is: YOU DON’T NEED AN IPOD TO LISTEN TO PODCASTS. Okay, that’s not really a fun mnemonic on the order of Roy G. Biv (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet: the colors of white light when it’s broken apart as in a rainbow) or “She made Harry eat onions” (the Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario). Still, it’s just as true, and just so you don’t forget, I’ll run it past you one more time: YOU DON’T NEED AN IPOD TO LISTEN TO PODCASTS.
So what do you need? It’s got to be kind of complicated right? Actually, assuming you have speakers connected to your computer, you have everything you need right in front of you.
First, click this link. Seriously. It won’t bite and I promise you won’t get Rick-rolled or be forced to send any money to Nigeria. Done it? Okay, on the page that came up, you’ll see a list of links. They’ll be labeled something silly like “Episode 10 – The Life of Emile Zola (1937).”
Find a link that piques your interest and click on that. You might hear audio right away, or you might have to click a “play” button, which looks like a little triangle pointing to the right. That’s it. You’re now listening to a podcast!
To answer your unasked question…yes, you can also listen to a podcast on an iPod. You can listen on almost any digital music player ever made. The iPod is just one option, but almost anything will work, including that bulky computer on which you’re reading this.
What’s the difference between a podcast and a plain ol’ audio file on a website? Not much, really. The podcast comes with a little code that lets some web browsers and other software programs look around on the Internet to let you know when there’s a new episode. That’s it! That’s what we mean when we say you can subscribe. You don’t have to. It’s just a way of making things more convenient. Like a Tivo for audio.
So my advice is, don’t get too hung up on the word “podcast.” Especially the “pod” part. It’s just a word, like “table” or “femur” or “aglet.” The important thing is that you can hear it. Now go out and see if you can find a few more! There are some good ones out there. But don’t forget to come back and listen to ours. Or better yet, subscribe!
April 19, 2008 by admin ·
One of my favorite albums of all time is Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.” His first album–the one that would later produce a string of hits for Manfred Mann–hadn’t sold so well, and the band was reduced to making its next record in a way-off-the-beaten-path studio with a creaky piano.
It’s hard to describe, but the album has a…a sound. Springsteen was 24 when he made it, and it’s one of those rare recordings, kind of like the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul,” in which you can tell that the artist really hasn’t made up his mind what he’s going to end up sounding like yet.
The result is an album that contains hard pumping blues, goofy disco horn rock, and sappy, jazz-infused folk ballads. I love it. I spent a million hours as a teenager laying in my room with a pair of gigantic headphones on, listing to it by the glow of the stereo.
One of the keys to that album is Danny Federici. For much of his career, he was Springsteen’s “other” keyboard player, taking a back seat to Roy Bittan. But in the early days, his organ and accordion playing (yeah, that’s right–accordion) were a fundamental part of the band. He was never flashy, but he was always there, and it’s hard (okay, impossible) to imagine what songs like Sandy or Wild Billy’s Circus Story or Backstreets would have been without him.
For the last three years or so, Danny Federici had been fighting melanoma. In November of last year, he left the Springsteen tour to pursue treatment. On March 20, 2008, he made a brief, surprise return in Indianapolis, and played accordion on Sandy. On Thursday, he was gone.
“The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle” is part of what made me me. Danny Federici was a big part of that. I’ll raise a glass in his honor and wish him well on his journey. He’ll be missed.
