Podcasting, DYNDNS and Yahoo! Music

I've been listening to usual plethora of podcasts from Podcast Alley. I find some of them very interesting, but quite often rather than just not putting out a show when they have nothing to say, they just waffle for an hour about this that and the other. I guess some people find it interesting hearing about the day to day events of all these different people, but personally I feel there are just too many other factual podcasts to bother listening to someone give me a rendition of their walk outside, or what the inside of a hotel room they are staying in looks like. However the awesome thing about this of course is that you can just flip between different podcasts or fast forward though the waffle. I think what I like about the technology is just the live and raw feel to it. Most of them don't have the polished often over produced babble we sometimes here on the radio, but people just being themselves.

I was listening to the Mike Tech Show yesterday and heard him talking about DYNDNS.ORG . Beside being a host provider for DNS services, they also provide you with a way of assigning a static name to a dynamic address. If you are running a host then you can download a client to update their site with your dynamic address, but if you have a firewall such as some of the higher end Dlink consumer models, they inherently support this feature. It works great. You can simply refer to the "hostname.gotdns.org" and you'll be forwarded on to your home's external network interface.

Another bit of news which I'm a little stoked about is the introduction of Yahoo! Music for US$4.95 a month. It's only for sites in the US right now, but man, FINALLY there is someone offering a reasonable price for subscription based music. I hear a lot of debate over how you really don't own the music, but come on, do you really want to own 150,000 songs, or do you just want access to them whenever you want. Granted this means they can raise the price on you and have you by short and curlies, but honestly the competition on this arena is only going to increase, and so the prices shouldn't go up too much. Either way I'm quite happy to spend $75 a year and have access to any song I want on my PC or MP3 player.

Broadcast Flag Shutdown

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and have found the most productive sessions to be those with discussions involving individuals with great insights into the industry. I just listened to a podcast from MAKE magazine where Cory Doctorow (an accomplished blogger, author and more recently advocate for consumer rights with the EFF ) gave a very entertaining account of the recent demise of the broadcast flag in the U.S. I'm not going to go into a lot detail about it since I really couldn't do the flagrant attempt at inhibiting and controlling competition and innovation with DTV by the National Broadcasters Association and the MPAA justice.