Happy New Year

2006 New Year's Resolution: Deliver Washington Post to a cell phone.
You heard it here first.

Just in Time for Xmas

A first cut at a rebotcast of a Creative Commons economics textbook:
Internet Archive: Details: Introduction to Economic Analysis

For that someone special on your list.

Note to self: Come up with strategy for robot reading complex mathematical formulas.

Test of Blogging with Performancing

Ben Metcalfe has a new podcast, called Talking Shop , and I'm subscribed.

Ray Booysen to Adam: Why You Never Write?

Ray Booysen is not a totally happy camper. He is working endless hours maintaining his node on ipodder.org.

That's funny, things are pretty manageable over there, for me. The obscurity of botcasting has its advantages I guess.

Ok, this is a test. I'm going to wave my magic wand and help get Dave to play the role of the Good Fairy.

But, this just in: He's already flapping his wings.

Move Over, War and Peace

I just got a bead on an open source Economics textbook, with a CC license. The world has been waiting for a rebotcast of something like this. Sure, we gave you we gave you We the Media, we gave you the 9/11 Commission Report, but are you satiated? Of course not.

That's ok, we get it. The download numbers at archive.org are sending us a message, and the message is. "Please, Robot Books, or Botcast Network, or whatever you call yourself, please, please keep producing these books. We love them. We listen to them on long trips, in snowstorms, and while waiting for our children to drift off to sleep, before we slink out of the bedroom, careful not to get tangled up in our earphone cables".

Keep it down out there, ok? We're talking as fast as we can.

And watch this space.

Rebotcasting the Future

Over on the Backstage mailing list there's been some discussion of web-based calendars, that have RSS feeds. One that was mentioned was Upcoming, a small startup that was recently acquired by Yahoo.

It's social software, so lots of people contribute to the variou "metros", putting in upcoming events. I thought it might be cool to put in a bunch of events for Portsmouth, and turn it into a botcast.

But I'm wary. You're allowed to syndicate calendar feeds to your own website, but I don't think this permission necessarily gives the green light to rebotcasts. I sent a note to the folks at upcoming, but they're in the throes of moving to Silicon valley, to their new cubicles at Yahoo.

It seems to me that a calendar announcement is copyrighted material, unless otherwise stated. Now, I could put in my own calendar announcenments, but unless I craft these myself, I'm lifting them from elsewhere. But I have a funny feeling if I troll the web for CC-licensed Portsmouth anouncenments, I might have a long troll. Is this what they mean by the long troll?

The Lay of the Land

Here's a quick rundown of some sites I am aware of:

The Botcast Network is the home page for all my offerings. It is an amalgation of various botcasts and rebotcasts, ranging from newspaper feeds, to news magazines, to full books, to blogs to comedy.

Talkr is a service offered by Chris Brooks, who used to live not far away from me in Southern New Hampshire. We both marvelled at this coincidence over lunch, before he left the country.

@LL Robot Radio is an ambitious project offerred by a hip sounding dude in what I imagine to be San Francisco, but probably is not. We have corresponded, and have loose plans to get our robots together sometime, for some kind of meetup mashup mashup.

RSS DJ is another ambitious project, that is attempting to be a "mix your own" site for putting together rebotcasts (although he does not use that term). It's got an air of youth and hipness about it, although so far, I find the site a bit confusing.

So, we have two main categories,

• pre-digested, pre-constructed content and (Botcast Netowork, @All Robot Radio)
  
• online services for setting up your own content (Talkr, RSS DJ)

There are other ways we can classify these systems. For intance, some, like Botcast Network, and RSS DJ, use performance art techniques, while the others prefer not to venture into silly territory.

Out of the whole group, I'd say that the Botcast Network is the most eclectic. I've got performance, I've got magazines, I've got bloggers, and I've got books (War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, etc). However, I must say that @All Robot Radio is pretty darn eclectic, in his own oddball way.

Anyway, that's the lay of the land, for now.

Definition of Terms

Ok, let's get down to business.

What is a botcast?

It is a podcast, read by a robot. It can either be orginal work, authored by the robot, or a close proxy.

What is a rebotcast?

This is a particular type of botcast, where the podcast is created by converting a text-based feed into speech. It is a one-to-one mapping of a blog into a podcast.

Why do we love the Creative Commons license ?

We love it because we consider any blog or feed published using this license fair game for a rebotcast.

Are there rebotcasts that don't make use of Creative Commons?

I'm glad you asked that question. Yes, but these are the results of obtaining explicit permission, or by capitalizing on invitations to mashup.

How do you perform the transformation from RSS feed to botcast, or more properly, rebotcast?

That's ok. We don't want to be sticklers about the terminology. Well, I use the duct tape of the Internet, and an Open Source speech synthesizer, and Linux, cron, etc.

Is it highly technical? Are the barriers to entry very high? Are you like, a real guru?

Well, no, not really. I hack Perl for my day job, so my chops are reasonable. But 3 geeks on Jolt Cola could catch up to me, pronto.

So, how are you planning on leveraging these ideas?

Hey, it's not always about money, you know. Besides, I have lots of ideas... Anyway, yeah, I'm working that part out.

Ok ok, you don't have to get touchy about it.

Breaking Radio Silence

Here's my first tentative post of Ted 2.0. The guy behind the robots has decided that it is only fair that he lend his voice to the Internet cacaphony.

It's official. The long winter after Internet 1.0 is beginning to thaw. I felt slightly ripped off during Internet 1.0, because much of the true excitement passed me by, while I labored within the corporate monolith. I guess what I learned from that is that, seeing the train coming, many miles down the track, and even seeing it early, does not especially guarrantee that you will get good seating.

So here I am, Web 2.0, I'm at the station, suitcase in hand. I don't know where you're going, but I'm glad you're coming.

Looking back, years from now, I think we'll see that pre-2.0 time as overly pessimistic. All that talk about our doomed economy, outsourcing, and the rest.

My name is Ted Gilchrist, and my game is botcasting. Excuse me, but I've got to catch a train.