My First Podcast, and it was ROTSS
I heard the hype about podcasts, but I finally decided to see what it was about. And I picked a good first podcast, too: Revenge of The Screen Savers.
For those like me who have been living in their own little world, a podcast is essentially a recording that is fed into the world through an RSS feed, which in essence provides a summary of new items on a website. Instead of being an RSS feed about web pages (e.g. blogs, news), it’s an RSS feed of audio files (e.g. MP3s). Podcast clients use these RSS feeds to download the files and transfer them into a portable media player, such as an Apple iPod. Instead of reading web pages, you’re listening to them. Or something like that. If this wasn’t clear, go see What is podcasting.
Anyway, for those of who were weren’t lucky enough to get to see TechTV before G4 acquired it and expunged just about everything that made TechTV cool, The Screen Savers was a show about various kinds of technology. They showcased semi-geeky stuff, they had pleasant banter about it, these people know what they are talking about, and they didn’t suck doing it. When G4 revamped The Screen Savers, they basically got rid of almost everyone who had any sort of clue about anything, replaced them with a bunch of no-nothing pretty-boys (and girls), and changed the show so it is basically shell of its former self. They even recently renamed the show to “Attack of the Show.” Who in the hell came up with this name?
Anyway, the hosts of pre-G4 The Screen Savers, Patrick Norton and Leo Laporte, and a couple of other people involved in TSS got together and decided to do a weekly podcast, which they aptly named. They’re a bit concerned that the folks at G4 might sue them, which is why they officially aren’t calling it “Revenge of The Screen Savers” but using the acronym, ROTSS. Actually, in the first podcast, they metioned the acronym TROTTS, which did lead to a brief digression into toilet humor.
What I find interesting about this podcast, aside from the pleasant technology banter, was that the four people making the podcast were joined together via Skype, that VoIP application that many of us VoIP bloggers don’t like for one reason or another. The sound quality was decent. Leo sounded best because he recorded the podcast with a radio-quality mic. Patrick and the others sounded like callers to a normal talk radio program.
Off to download episode #2 of ROTSS, oh wait, they’re now calling it The Revenge of These Green Saviors.
