Eric Rice on MSN Spaces

Object-Name: TD SLBlog Terminal - MSN Spaces
Region: Slackstreet (239616, 258048)
Local-Position: (127, 137, 25)

I'm standing here with Morpheus. Long story.

Click to listen.

Sure, it's got a silly theme song, and I'm no fan of Paris Hilton, but the podcast seems to follow some basic, common themes with podcasts. (feed)

First, it's not organized like some radio show.... Paris starts off talking, semi-candidly, followed by an interlude of music and then completes with the goodbyes to the David Letterman crew and into the throes of the paparazzi.

The timing of this short podcast also worked, because as I flipped through the channels, I saw her on Letterman (and boy, what a painful experience that was). So this did provide a little behind-the-scenes of Paris' adventures... from the gracious, organized appearance (and exit from) Letterman's studio, to the raving lunacy outside the theatre.

What I'd like to see more of, is celebrities doing the behind-the-scenes in realtime. I had an opportunity to videoblog while taping a segment on Call For Help and it went from the picture perfect TV set to the off-camera gnarliness that is television production.

I can live with that. After all, it's fun, too.

The irony of me being me, videoblogging podcast meetups. Makes ya think. Toronto Podcasters Meetup video redux. (note to MSN Spaces team: the code I posted here so people could watch videos right from my Space was auto-deleted.... )

I spend most of my life over on www.ericrice.com and visit my Spaces site periodically to see what's new. Not too bad! Still shiny.

More later.

I write for a most excellent site named Corante EventLab, and we interviewed Paul Anthony of Rumblefish, whose team worked with Adidas to produce an awesome online-music-meets-old-school-street-party event. Check out the Check it out and you might be able to win an exclusive invite to an event. Oh yeah, it's a podcast, too. Now if you'll excuse me, I got some old RUN DMC to crank up.

Acoustics 101 is a helpful introduction on acoustics that's provided by Auralex, the company that makes the foam isolators I just purchased for $40.

Found at Rolling Stone: Jay-Z to Head Def Jam

If you love a topic and you like to talk, you can have your own show. Eat your heart out ESPN and FOX. Brutal Deluxe Football League

I just downloaded a short interview with Daniele Davoli, podcasted from London. From Podcasting News:

Heineken has jumped into the commercial podcast world with an exclusive interview with Thirst Resident DJ Daniele Davoli. He speaks freely about his experiences with Thirst, his latest projects, the global dance scene and even Britney Spears. Though it's a leading edge marketing concept, the podcast is refreshingly low-fi. The podcast is a straight ahead interview, and free of intrusive advertising.

I'm a new contributor for Blog Magazine. That snippet of the Tennessee Titans Cheerleader? That's a Blog Magazine deal. Get the whole story.

I was spending time entering random search terms to find various types of folks on Spaces, and I came across The Psychedelic Ciruit. Now, granted, he's not a podcaster that I know of, but certainly links to plenty of them. My question is how come he doesn't show up when I search for "podcast", yet he shows up on the first page of results when I search for "photo". [scratches head] Well, check 'em out, he's got XML nerdiness in his tagline and a link to what Feedster's doing with Spaces.

I bought this song and can't stop listening to it on repeat, over and over and over. Jay-Z. Lyrics for Dirt Off Your Shoulder. And seriously, turn the music up in the headphones like he says. It makes the work day go by quicker.

You'll want to download a sneak peek of things coming soon. Watch my blog on ericrice.com for an announcement. :-) Want to listen this as a podcast? Copy this feed into a program like Doppler for Windows or iPodder X for Mac.

I think it worked! I'm doing some more tests.

Here's how I podcast from my MSN Space
1. First, I link to an audio or video file that I've created (and possibly hosted anywhere online) and add the html tag rel=enclosures. A link would look like this (angle brackets removed):

[a href="http://somewebsite.com/file.mp3" rel=enclosure]

2. Second, I create an account at Feedburner and create a new feed there with the SmartCast option turned ON. FeedBurner wants to know the feed address for my site. In this example for MSN Spaces, it is the link that is returned when you click on "Syndicate this site" up at the top of MSN Spaces blogs. That URL is http://spaces.msn.com/members/ericrice/feed.rss (Note: your MSN Space URL is the same, except instead of 'ericrice', you would type your MSN Space name.

After I give that address to FeedBurner, they will give me a new feed address to share with everyone. In the case of THIS blog at MSN Spaces, the address I have to tell everyone about is the following: http://feeds.feedburner.com/spacespodcast

Now, anyone who uses any of the great podcast software out there can subscribe to your podcast feed!

Download the MP3

Stop by EricRice.com and say hi, or call the KSSX message line, 1-206-350-KSSX and leave your comments.

So, I'm done posting for a little bit over here on my test MSN Spaces blog. In the meantime, if you have comments on blogging, the new MSN Spaces, or anything else, call the KSSX message line at 206-350-KSSX (that's a Seattle number, even though we're worldwide, yo). Your comments might make it a future show.

In the meantime, Come on over to my place and chill.

In my previous post about Music Lists and the MSN Music Store, I forgot to mention something:

I don't know about the music variety in MSN's Music Store, btw, but apparently, if you're looking for drum-n-bass, you might not have good luck.

Yeah, so I don't have one, since I'm a Playstation guy, but it would be neat to see a Favorites module for Xbox (your music module sends links to the MSN Music Store, which conceptually makes sense but you didn't tell me that you were going to do it). Let people on the Xbox site add a game to their Xbox Favorites list on their MSN Space.

By the way, the music module assumes I support the MSN Music store. I don't. I support iTunes, which happens to come on all Macs and all HP and Compaq computers. Don't be arrogant, Microsoft. Let people have a choice to make that link show up, and give them a choice which store they want to link to. iTunes has an affiliate program. Your customers can make money. This is good. You know this.

Do you see the video below?

Nope. I tried to embedd a movie object, noth Quicktime and Windows Media (I was posting the MSN Spaces Demo Video (watch here)

Denied.

Update: So, it worked, but MSN Spaces strips out the code that makes something open in a new window. Argh.

If I don't immediately jump into the conversations in the comments for each of these blog entries, it's because I'm not being notified about them via e-mail like every other blog software and service.

Keep in mind that I'm not trying to tear down the MSN Spaces concept. For who this product is designed for, it will probably suffice. Advanced folks and those already entrenched in the blog universe will probably view it as overly censored, watered-down and restrictive. Well, you're correct.

All I'm doing here is point out some obvious issues I'm encountering, as it's my job to pay attention to as many publishing tools as possible.

Of course, I'm using Firefox, which is probably the biggest display of blasphemy to Microsoft, but sorry, you're losing the browser war.

I must admit, I do like some of the Internet Explorer-added functionality, but it is by no means worth it to switch.

That said, there are more problems with MSN Spaces (MSNSp) reformatting HTML. First, I noticed that line breaks between paragraphs were reformatted from BR / to just BR.

Stop that, please?

Hi folks. Well, just having the word 'podcasting' anywhere near this test Space I've created on MSN, leads me to believe that I should probably pony up the science and test out podcasting.

If you want to see my actual site, visit EricRice.com.

Now in the meantime, here is the test to my MSN Podcast.

MP3 parody about me.

I'm going to run the feed here through FeedBurner to take advantage of SmartCast. Then, you should be able to get the podcast.

Until later,

Eric

UPDATE: MSN Spaces reformats my HTML. I can't add rel=enclosure and put it in quotes. MSN Spaces (MSNSp from now on) strips the quotes out. When I try and remove the quotes around the URL for my MP3, MSNSp puts them back in. Looking at my MSN Spaces Test FeedBurner Smartcast-enabled feed shows it not formatted.

Of course, I have this nice reminder that "Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons."

Puh-lease. If I promise to podcast in WMA format can this be fixed. (yeah, sure, Eric)

Maybe it's the shiny buttons or the microphone, regardless, Evan and Aidan kick it new-school. Heh.