YugaTech | Philippines, Tech Reviews Blog

Band of Bloggers Podcast, Episode 6: Barney in Punta Fuego (Special Travel Edition)
Hosted by: Jose Maria Vicente Fernandez & Abraham Olandres
Guests: Maria Aileen Apolo, Sharon Manuel & Enrique Vicente Mossesgeld
Time: 22 minutes, 23 secs.

Show Notes:

Would you read your blog if you’re just a blog reader?
News today is that journalists are getting killed. Will news in the future include bloggers getting killed too?
Virginia Tech Massacre
Is Technology slowly enslaving us?
Globe 3G & Smart’s upcoming HSDPA USB SIM card dongle
Barney and the last song syndrome
Do you believe in magic (Marcelle’s magic that is)?
Do you like our podcast? Email us! Send us your feedback!

Thanks to our sponsors for this podcast — Marie Chua (our host at Punta Fuego) and Jun Asis of Mabuting Balita for his USB microphone. We were drinking all night so I apologize if we’re incoherent and all (ipagpatawad nyo…).

Band of Bloggers PodCast, Episode 4: Of Banana Splits & Relationships
Hosted by: Yuga & Jayvee

Guests: Aileen Apolo, Sasha Manuel, Rico Mossesgeld, Gail dela Cruz, Marc Villanueva

Time: 22 minutes
Show Notes:
Social Networking Sites & Offline Relationships
EMI and Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Philippine Blog Awards After-Math

We recorded this podcast over at Iceberg at Metrowalk last night after our badminton game at Smashville. That’s one of the less noisy places we could find to hang out, have some halo-halo and banana splits, and get this podcast ready for publish before we head of to a Lenten week-end getaway at the Macalua Mansion and Resort at Bataan. Watch out for the inevitable rant on the podcast. Soundtrack credits to Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Advanced Happy Easter to all fellow Christians.

Band of Bloggers PodCast, Episode 2: Luk4 Angel Locsin
Hosted by: Yuga & Jayvee
Guests: Aileen Apolo, Sasha Manuel, Rico Mossesgeld
Time: 20 minutes

Show Notes:
Google Adsense Pay-per-Action (PPA)
Luk4 Mobile Yellowpages (http://www.luk4.com/)
Google Zeitgeist – Pricess Hours, Naruto & Angel Locsin
Palm selling to Nokia or Motorola
Genuine Opposition Blog
Sigma APO 200-500mm f/2.8 EX DG
Finalist of the Phil. Blog Awards
iVote.ph & COMELEC Online Voters Registration Database
b5media & Google Job Openings
Bayanihan Blog Network

This was supposed to be uploaded last night but my net connection was killing the uploads via Twango and Podomatic. I’m now running this using the PodPress plugin.

We recorded this on the sidewalk in front of Aileen’s house using my Compaq Presario laptop and its dual built-in mic. I wish I had GarageBand but Audacity was good enough. There were cars passing by and some random ambient noise so we had to repeat some of the recordings. We don’t have a dedicated blog for this yet as we couldn’t settle for a domain.

Tonight’s the Davao Blog Party! We’re currently here at Casa Leticia in the heart of the city of Davao thinking of some really good title for a new podcast project hosted by me and Jayvee. (Special thanks to the Casa for the free accommodations.)

The first one we did in Puerto Galera a couple weeks back was good (The Bugged Cast) and we’re listening it it right now trying to strike off some stuff that doesn’t need to be disclosed to the public (like Jayvee’s new love interest or Marc’s upcoming wedding). *hehehe*

So, we’re going to do a new one with a new name and a new format. I hope it’ll be interesting enough for you guys to listen. Watch for that here and on Jayvee’s blog later tonight.

As part of my workshop in podcasting, I did a quick podcast of my own to demo to the attendees. I called it The Daily Taipei Show and this one is my debut episode:

Click here to get your own player.

The laptop microphone was good enough and the script is just about 2 minutes. I got them laughing loud with this one so i thought I’d share it with you guys.

P.S.
If you’ve been emailing me and haven’t gotten a reply, my aplogies, my GMail has about 280+ unread emails now and haven’t read for days. Sitting down, talking and running around people could be quite tiring and I find myself hitting the sack right after dinner.

Last April 6, I got an email from Ben Pimentel of the San Francisco Chronicles requesting for a phone interview about the blogging scene in the Philippines. Most of what we discussed were about PinoyTopBlogs and a bit of “who’s who in the Philippine blogosphere”.

Just a while ago, Ben sent me an email copy of their press release of Pinoy Pod, a Podcast for Filipinos:

March 23: The San Francisco Chronicle announced today its launch of Pinoy Pod, a weekly program of interviews, news features and information about the Filipino experience in Northern California, the Philippines and beyond. This bold experiment, the first of its kind by a major American newspaper, can be downloaded at www.sfgate.com/blogs/podcasts.

“The Pinoy Pod allows us to use multi-media technology to connect very powerfully The Chronicle/SFGate to the vibrant Filipino community here in the Bay Area, throughout the country and overseas,” said Phil Bronstein, editor of The Chronicle.

In addition to English, some episodes will be in Tagalog and other Philippine languages. Topics will include arts, culture, entertainment, business and political and social issues. Pinoy Pod’s 10- to 20-minute podcasts will be posted Tuesdays.

The Pinoy Pod crew includes some of The San Francisco Chronicle’s most experienced journalists: Deputy Managing Editor Leslie Guevarra, editorial writer and columnist Pati Poblete, podcast producer Benny Evangelista, business reporter and Pinoy Pod producer Ben Pimentel, reporter Cicero Estrella and copy editor Michelle Louie.

A podcast is similar to a radio show, except it’s in the form of a computer file that you download from the Internet and can listen to at your convenience. You can play a podcast on your computer or on a portable digital music player.

To download a podcast, simply click on the appropriate link on the podcasts page and save the file to a place on your computer that’s easy to access, such as your desktop. For more information, send an e-mail to pinoypod@sfchronicle.com.

The San Francisco Chronicle is the Bay Area’s leading news and information source and has been connecting the region with its award-winning journalism since its founding in 1865. Combined with its online partner, SFGate.com, The San Francisco Chronicle reaches nearly 1.5 million Bay Area residents daily and more than 1.6 million on Sunday. The six-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Chronicle is the nation’s 10th largest daily newspaper and SFGate.com is the nation’s fourth largest newspaper Web site with 7.4 million unique monthly users and more than 75 million monthly page views.

Tune in to the initial podcast of Pinoy Pod here.
Check out the Tech Chronicles at www.sfgate.com/blogs/tech

While listening to The Liberal Times Manila podcast, one of the hosts, Dr. Meinardus, was discussing about the growth of podcasting as an alternative to radio.

Stats-wise, podcasts has now outnumbered radio stations all over the world. Podcast Like A Champ quotes SiliconRepublic which pegs the total number of radio stations worldwide to 36,000.

While the iTunes website only has a figure of 35,000 podcasts , Feedburner is serving around 44,099 podcasts as of today.

The figure could be much higher than that. Will podcasting replace radio? Maybe not (yet), but it sure eats away some of the airtime.

[tags]podcast stats, radio stations, radion shows, podcasting[/tags]

Somebody asked me that last week and I sort of said more on the negative side. Mostly, I’m optimistic when it comes to the area of blogging but with podcasts, I’m still a bit skeptical. I actually don’t know. Maybe in terms of podcast listeners, it would pick up fast, but not so much with the number of podcasters.

Here are some of the technical and not-so-technical reasons I had in mind:

• As Leo Laporte once said in TWiT, podcasting is all about the “long tail”. Meaning, you get the precipitates in traffic. People could happen to visit your blog but not necessarily listen to your podcast.
• Timeliness. Podcasts are not as fast as your regular blog. It takes time to record, edit and publish. Most of the time, it’s stale news or about last week’s issues.
• Technical barriers. Not everybody has a mic or knows how to edit a recording and convert them to .H264 or MP3.
• It just takes more effort. If a regular blogger can’t manage to post a single entry on a daily basis, much more for a podcast.
• Podcasting is more than just the content, it’s about personality and delivery — and not every blogger has that. It’s basically an internet radio show.
• ROI. Yes, there’s Fruitcast but that’s it. Even Diggnation and TWiT had a hard time coming up with revenues to offset their server costs. Imagine, the bandwidth for the TWiT RSS feed alone costs over $200 a month!

Well, these are inherent barriers actually and are not limited to the Philippines. However, if you add factors such as the number of people on dial-up which cannot easily download the podcast, the number of people accessing the net via internet cafes that have download restrictions, and the number of people accessing the net thru their work offices which do not have PC speakers or even sound cards for that matter — that just makes your potential audience a wee bit thinner.

Come to think of it, a lot of the long-standing Pinoy podcasts I’ve been listening to are not recorded in the Philippines. Despite that, I still hope I could add myself to the pinoy podcaster stats sometime soon.

[tags]free podcasts, ipod podcasts, video podcasts, vidcast[/tags]

Microwarehouse sponsors the Philippine Podcast Channel which features their top picks for the different podcast channels ranging from Gay Speak of Danton Remoto, technology magazine T3, lifestyle channel on Health and Fitness by Chinggay Andrada, politics by Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Twisted by Jessica Zafra and Halikinu Radio show from the Ateneo campus.

Some of the other channels are derived from existing television talk shows (Mommy Talk, Digital Tour, etc.) which I doubt is a real podcast in the truest sense. What they could have done is stripped off the video and re-packaged the audio for download or via web audio streaming. The one of News Central is actually a vidcast and not a podcast.

High-profile podcasts there (since most of them are by celebs or TV personalities) but I’d rather they include live@usa.ph and Fr. Cuying’s podcast.

Update: The IT Girl adds that the The Philippine Podcast is not even a real podcast at all.

[tags]philippine podcasting, podcast portal, ipod, apple[/tags]