The most recent example of this occurred on episode Alpha 61 of The Dragon’s Landing Inn. I sent Chuck and Lonnie an e-mail with a small bit of role-playing advice, and they were nice enough to read it on the show. They even played our promo without us asking for it, so I don’t want anyone to say I called them dummies. They’re two very smart guys who have plenty of interesting things to say. If I didn’t think so, I probably wouldn’t listen to their podcast or send them e-mails. But at the same time, I guess that’s what makes this more disappointing. Even smart people with awesome podcasts have trouble reading my e-mails aloud.

I would normally immediately blame this problem on my writing, but I am not alone in this predicament. My co-host and house-mate Rym also has this problem. He has also expressed dismay in that whenever others read his writings aloud, they stumble over every other sentence. Here’s the trick. I can read his writings aloud perfectly, and he can also read mine. You could blame it on writing style, but our writings are very dissimilar.

So what am I trying to say here? I’m not quite sure. All I know is that many people have trouble taking text from a page and reading it aloud with perfect fluidity. This makes me sad. Let’s do a test. Take this blog posting and try to read it aloud. You must speak using conversational pace and tone. See how many times you hit a speed bump. See how many times you have to re-read sentences before you can recite them fluidly. Try doing this with articles from the newspaper or other websites as well. Now do it cold. Read an article aloud that you have never seen before. I get the feeling that reading aloud is a skill which is not emphasized enough in our society. Maybe if more people realize they lack this essential and basic skill, they will build upon it and exercise it more often.

You see, not all feeds are created equally. There are so many different formats and optional tags with true or false meta information that it quickly becomes very difficult to write software to manage every feed 100% perfectly. But with sufficient hacking we can get close enough. The problem here is that every feed is at its core a list of links, hopefully in chronological order. No matter what aggregator or feed reader you use it treats all lists of links the same way. It doesn’t know any better, and it can’t.

This poses a problem because as a person I don’t treat all RSS feeds in the same manner and my software does. This mismatch causes me a lot of wasted clicking. Some of the feeds I read are things like slashdot or digg. They update so frequently that I don’t need to be notified of new updates. I just visit them at my leisure, and I know there will be new content. So what I want is to get all of that new content in an efficient manner. A reader like rawdog is well suited to this task. It creates a single web page with all the items from subscribed feeds in a compact and easy to read manner with newest items on top. Everything is color coded to let you know which site it came from.

But there are other sites which only update a few times a week. For these sites I need an effortless way to determine if there is new content available or not. Looking inside a Firefox bookmarks folder once or twice every day is not so good. Perhaps if Firefox simply monitored the feeds and knew which items I had read. Then it could automatically open and blink a new tab with the appropriate content already in it when it becomes available. That would be a pretty slick extension.

There is yet another kind of feed, feeds like del.icio.us/popular and google news. These are feeds with a large variety of rapidly changing links in no particular order. For these feeds there needs to be some sort of filter and ranking algorithm. Items I am more interested in would be filtered to the top and others not even displayed. These aren’t feeds I constantly monitor for news, but ones I visit during downtime just to get an overview of what’s happening. So an aggregator that generates a custom page putting hot headlines in a more prominent position while still displaying others in less detail would be best. Then I could click on headlines that looked interesting and the aggregator could learn more about what I wanted to see.

The worst problem is when it comes to something other than articles. Webcomics are a particular problem. Some comics have news articles, and others do not. I think what would be best would be a single page, like the comics page in the newspaper. This page could arrange the comics in a custom layout determined by me. That way, like the newspaper, I could always locate comics in familiar positions. If a comic had a related news article I could click the related comic to have the news open in a new tab. Also, the ability to browse the archives of each comic with first, back, forward and latest buttons would be very useful. At best they would change the comic on the page in an AJAX fashion without reloading.

For podcasts I have an even worse problem since I need to manage not only the checking and looking at feeds, but also the downloading and deleting of audio files. So far, no feed reader lets you set different options for different podcast feeds. The whole thing really bites. Most pocasts come out with an episode every day or week, so I configure my podcatcher for those. But it means there are other podcasts I completely ignore because it is too much trouble to read them. For normal podcasts I set iTunes to get every episode and delete them after I have listened to them.

There are two types of podcasts that give me trouble. The first is news podcasts. NPR 10am news in particular is the trouble. I don’t care about yesterday’s news. So if I didn’t listen to it yesterday I want it deleted when a new news report comes out. Only the newest podcast should be kept and all others deleted. Music podcasts like the hype machine pose an even worse problem. For a podcast like that I want every mp3 in the list to be downloaded and to remain downloaded. But songs that fall of the bottom of the feed should be automatically deleted unless I specify otherwise. There is currently no podcatcher that gives this sort of option.

So what to do? I can resort to using a plethora of different aggregators to manage all the different feeds of information coming in. But that becomes tedious to have to have so many tabs open for web based aggregators. It’s even worse for applications because they are much harder to switch than tabs. What I need is a Firefox/Flock extension that takes care of all of these things in a graceful way with an intuitive interface. I can try to do it on my own, but it will be quite shitty. Here’s hoping someone like Google or Apple can do it right. Because that is what we will need to upgrade from web 2.0 to web 2.1.

I got into podcasting recently when I purchased the iPod nano. Come to think of it, I should probably keep an OPML online of all the podcasts I listen to. I’ll do that sometime this week. Anyway, this sudden realization that podcasts are actually awesome and people listen got me to rethink about my audioblog idea. Before you knew it, my roommate and I had started a podcast.

You see, when I get home from work, we talk about all kinds of things. And our friends often remark about how entertaining our conversations are. I don’t understand what they’re talking about, but apparently standard conversational fare for us has been called “pure sex” by others. Who are we to deny the world its need for pure sex?

The problem we had with the podcast was coming up with a name. We came up with some good names like “renaissance geeks” and such, but that didn’t pan out. Rym thought “teh show” was a good name, but I felt it implied some sort of connection to l33t kiddies. But then, I rememberd a previous Idea of mine. You know those late night TV shows hosted by guys who have last names beginning with the letter “L”? I always felt there should be a show like that just for geeks. So we settled on “GeekNights with Rym + Scott”.

The website for the podcast is www.frontrowcrew.com. In college our group of friends was known as the front row crew because we sat in the front row of anime club ever week. That site is shaping up to be sort of a community blog that ties us all together on the Internet. The podcast is just the first, and primary, thing that will be hosted there. However, because of iTunes and such, we had to seperate and reformat our podcast feed using feedburner. So the GeekNights podcast feed is at a different URL.

I hope you enjoy the podcast, but if you don’t I wont force you to listen to it. And I doubt that the podcast will diminish the content posted to this blog. If anything it will be quite the opposite.

To listen to the audioblog click here.