Wholesome 8===D

This link will take you to an MP3 of the National Lawyer's Guild's "Know Your Rights" pamphlet. It's part of the massive, but dated, rotation on Radical Radio.

http://www.mediafire.com/?4okj32ea1gv

If you're like me and your attention span is short enough that reading the pamphlet is out of the question, listening to it will only take fourteen minutes and fifty two seconds.

OCTOBER 7TH I POSTED THE AUDIO ADSENSE IDEA AND TODAY (TWO MONTHS LATER) I SEE THAT GOOGLE HAS BEGUN TESTING RADIO ADS (AS REPORTED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, NEWS.COM).

HOW ABOUT THAT?!?


You know... If I'm not running the world by the time I'm 40 I have only myself to blame.


Did someone from Google read my blog and start implementing an audio ad project, or is this something they've had on the drawing board there for a long time? You are part of the mystery.

Radio stations that have internet streams I listen too usually don't play ads, at least not on the stream. I know this is partially for legal reasons, and partially because it's it's a pain in the ass even for large radio stations to have specialized ads for their internet stream -- not to mention small time internet radio stations and podcasters.

I don't know why the magic of contextual advertising hasn't been applied to online radio yet, but it would probably be easier than it sounds. Though maybe harder for podcasts than for streaming radio.

Companies like Google that are all ready good at data mining could feed an audio stream through an AI that would determine a context of the audio and send specific ads to listeners during commercial breaks. Though that wouldn't be necessary. You could probably do just about as good with the name of the show, songs, and standard location information about the listener (location of IP address), etc. It picks from databases of audio ads, plays them for the user.

The difficult issue would be bandwidth and playing specific ads for users. Server software would need to be changed to communicate with the ad-embedding companies servers to get the information and then send specific ads to specific listeners. Failing that, companies interested in contextual advertising with audio would need to setup their own streaming servers for stations to use. Either of these options are in the grasp of Google-sized companies, and would produce a fairly high return on their bandwidth. AOL could easily do it with WINAMP/Shoutcast.

Podcasts would be more difficult since they're pre-recorded. But, the shows and their metadata could be ran through the AI after being produced and ads recommend for commercial breaks. Podcasters would have to create some kind of contract with the advertising company. Or the advertising company could host the podcasts and embed their ads within the podcast to guarantee to advertisers that they're being inserted and listed too. Of course, this also re-creates the TiVo problem -- people could fast forward through them. That doesn't seem to have deterred television advertisers, however.

Once upon a time, I used to be a News Director. Suddenly, that stopped. Then, suddenly, someone asked me where I used to find audio (now commonly embedded in RSS feeds and called "podcasts") before I, suddenly, stopped being a News Director. Here is the information that I, suddenly, gave them reproduced here for anyone else who may, suddenly, be curious.

http://www.radio4all.net/

You can get a podcast of all of radio4all.net programs (but that will probably be too much for you). If you find a series that you like (the ones that appear on the main page in red), you can get a podcast of that series with the link behind the podcast icon next to the series name at the top. I haven't really taken a close look at all the new shows on radio4all in a long time. The shortwave radio report was usually pretty interesting -- that's the only one I can remember off the top of my head. I mostly just picked individual shows, I was never a loyal listener to a particular one.

http://radio.indymedia.org/news/?category=&medium=audio

This collects indymedia audio produced for indymedia sites all around the world. You can create a podcast of particular shows, but I'm not sure how that works.

http://www.prx.org/

PRX was dreamed up right around the same time the RPRN was, but they
beat RPRN to implementation by a few months. They work a little like RPRN was supposed too, but they cater to a an semi-professional NPRish kind of content producer.

http://www.audioport.org/

This is audio newsish stuff submitted to or produced by Pacifica stations.

http://www.archive.org/details/audio

Archive.org hosts plenty of newsish audio (including Democracy Now and Lectures from Naropa), there's a list of it at the link above.

http://www.radicalradio.org/

Radical Radio kind of collects the best of the pinko radio shows on the internet each week and streams/podcasts them. Except they've been on vacation since sometime in may and they've mostly been playing some bullshit.

Here's a few more generic podcast directories.

http://audio.weblogs.com/?action=home&contentTab=podcasts

As I've heard the history, weblogs.com was one of first sites to attempt to aggregate blogs. It historically has provided a list of the most recently updated ones as it gets pinged by their servers. In addition to blogs it also has a service for podcasts, that I linked above. I'm not sure if the animated scroll of updates on the site is truly "real-time" but you could certainly use it to find a lot of random podcasts.

http://ipodder.org/

I'm pretty sure ipodder.org is the associated directory with the ipodder software. I'm not sure what you have to do to get on there, but it is a directory of podcasts. :)

http://freshpodcasts.com/ and http://www.podblaze.com/

freshpodcasts.com hosts a directory of 100 recently updated podcasts. It's affiliated with (or is also) podblaze.com (the larger directory), which my podcast (livejournal voice posts) is proudly listed on. :) I used to be the only Democrat, but now I'm in competition with a former Virginia Governer: http://www.podblaze.com/browse.php?cat=Democrats

http://www.blogexplosion.com/podcast/

blogexplosion.com, in addition to be a blog directory is also a podcast directory. My voice posts are listed there too: http://www.blogexplosion.com/podcast/details.php?PodcastID=1502

http://odeo.com

odeo is probably the largest directory and server of podcasts on the internet.