I had a pretty interesting day yesterday.
After being up till close to 2am I woke up at 5:30am, showered and drove to the airport to do my 10am talk at WordCamp 2007.
My flight landed at 8:30am and I was picked up by my old buddy Joe Engo. After a couple wrong turns we finally got to the event location at 9:30 in time to get setup.

I finally had a chance to meet Matt Mullenweg, and was thoroughly impressed, this is one young man to watch. To think that at 23, hes at the head of a project thats impacted so many people, and has gained so much interest and respect, and has managed to build a business model around an open sourced app… no easy feat.

So then it sets in. I’m the opening presenter to this conference… I’ve really been too busy to have thought much about my talk at WordCamp the preceding couple of weeks because work has been crazy busy. But standing there getting setup to open the conference I got a bit nervous. Its also been a couple years since doing one of these types of things, so I really started feeling completely unprepared.

Matt introduces me and I ask the audience a few questions about whos familiar with podcasting (everyone) and how many podcasters are out there (a few). Well, this kind of took some thunder out of my slides intended to be used to help explain podcasting basics. I had to think quick to adjust my talk and explain my views of how I feel podcasting to be a little more personal and blah blah. Was a bit of a slow start.

So I figured I could launch into the stuff about podPress and show of the features and talk some praise of WordPress, which I started… and then the Internet connection went dead. Just as I was starting to feel a little comfortable…
With some quick action by the Automattic team I got back online and was quickly followed by the audience and was able to start cracking some lame jokes and getting into a groove about podPress, podcasting and WordPress.

Even with the slow start, I felt like I was finally able to connect and coherently discuss some of the things I am passionate about, and hopefully show how easy it is to get into podcasting, the cool features of podPress and the amazing platform WordPress provided that enabled me to create the feature set. The talk was video taped, so as soon as I get a copy of the video I will be adding the media to this post so it will end up in my feed as a video podcast.

As soon as my talk was over, I chatted with a few people in the lobby for about half and hour, and then headed to the airport to get back home. Next year, as a speaker or not, I’m going to make sure to plan better so I can stay for the entire weekend.

Update: The video is now available.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Podango the MightySeek/podPress forums are back online!

As a long time podcasting fan and supporter of the community I have been a fan of many shows, and impressed by a bunch of them. Some of my favorites (and I know I’ll end up forgetting some) have been Slice of Sci/Fi, Escape Pod, Filmspotting, The Signal, The Bitterest Pill, Verge of the Fringe, zeFrank, TikiBarTV and numerous Podiobooks (Sigler, Selznick, JC Hutchins, etc), along with many many more.

So when I say I was blown away by the efforts of Stranger Things (http://www.strangerthings.tv), its not from a lack of experience with the brillance and creativity in this community. Its because its quite an impressive accomplishment. Audio is one thing, and it takes skill and hard work to do it well. Short video clips like those from zeFrank andTikiBarTV are also quite a bit of work and take great talent. But to produce a 30 minute long episode with decent acting, a cool story (from self-pimping Sigler) and very nice special effects… and to make it a free podcast. Wow.

I have a hell of a time just trying to get my show out once a month, and even that is wayyy behind on getting some episodes out (one is coming soon btw).

Anyways, my props to the Stranger Things team, and I hope you are able to continue gaining an audience and some sponsorship/donations to help keep your show going.

While at the PPME I met up with the legendary Evo Terra and got to sit in on a recording of the great Slice of SciFi podcast, which was quite alot of fun. It was recorded in Evo’s hotel room with a bunch of us hanging out in there. Amoung the live audience Mattew Wayne Selznick (author of Brave Men Run), podcasting “good guy” Paul Puri (founder of the Podcasters Guild), podcasting “mean guy” Steve Eley (Escape Pod), and fellow security podcasters Michael Santarcangelo (Security Catalyst) and Martin McKeay (Network Security Podcast).

I was pretty silent thru most of it, but toward the end Evo went around the room introducing each of us and asking a few questions. I hassled them a little (all in good fun) and got quite a laugh/boo out of it. It was a great time and it alone was worth getting to the PPME for me.

I sat in with the LA Podcasters gang at the PPME and was in on a recording of Friends of the Fringe, which was pretty fun.

Im the guy on the right with the green shirt and this hat

I had the great pleasure of being interviewed about podPress by the one and only Michael Geoghegan. I got in a small plug for my podcast as well, so Im pretty happy.

The Podcast Academy: Dan Kuykendall

 

 Standard Podcast [29:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2680)

In the latest episode of Upon Further Review the podPress plugin (and me) was reviewed. Im happy to say we got a 4.5 out of 5 rating and in general alot of glowing praise.

The podcast itself is very well done for an episode #3, and theres lots of other good stuff in the episode so have fun listening.

The MightySeek podcast got a cool mention in the lastest issue of (IN)SECURE Magazine.

The Security Roundtable » Blog Archive » SRT in the iTunes Music Store

The podcasting group Im a part of now has its own Artist Group in iTunes and is featured on the podcasting home page. Im pretty excited about this and look forward to any new listeners that join in due to the exposure.

Today I learned about iTunes support for password protected podcasts, and am thinking about the security issues, planning out how I can support this in PodPress as well as what this means for podcasting in general.

Overall I think this is very cool for podcasting, because it can open the doors for various content providers to jump in and start offering content. It may also allow existing podcasters to start offering special pay-only content. I know many want everything for free, but Im not opposed to paying people for the time and talent they pour into creating great content.

That aside, I was most curious about the technical issues involved. So I dug in…

Last week I heard that radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh announced that his show would be available from within iTunes. For several months his show was available as a “podcast” which meant his subscribers could download MP3’s a few hours after each show aired. At the time this happened, I dug into the custom downloader, sniffed out the traffic and figured out how it all worked. It wasnt complicated, but it wasnt a real podcast, there was no RSS feed with enclosures, and no way standard podcatchers could ever support it.

Now the landscape has changed, and this is a new solution that works with iTunes. I still didnt know how it was going to work, but my guess was that it had to do with HTTP BasicAuth. This morning the website had the link, and I had my Paros Proxy. I configured my computer to run thru the local proxy, and I went about getting the show into my iTunes, recording all the network traffic along the way.

It turned out to be much easier than I expected. It did use HTTP BasicAuth, and it only does so for the rss feed.
So what we have is a link to the RSS feed, but with the protocol defined as itpc, which I assume to mean ITunesPodCast and is something that iTunes is registered to handle.

So the link looks something like this:

itpc://rss.premiereradio.net/podcast/rushlimb.xml

Note: Just because the protocol is itpc instead of http, does not mean you couldnt go to this URL with your browser

http://rss.premiereradio.net/podcast/rushlimb.xml

If you try, you will get a password prompt. This is using standard HTTP BasicAuth, and once you give your credentials you would get the RSS Feed.
The feed itself is a standard iTunes compliant RSS2 document like we are all used to. As far as the MP3 files themselves, there is only security by obscurity. I will not give an actual URL to one of the MP3 files, but its something along the lines of

http://rss.premiereradio.net/download/rushlimb /username/48123789787qe98/rushlimb/2006/03/ Rush%20Limbaugh%20-%20Mar%2010%202006%20-%20Hour%201.mp3

If you had the actual URL, you could download the MP3 without any sort of authentication. Of course, security by obscrurity is not an ideal solution, but in the case of this type of content it serves the need. It should also be easy use the same HTTP BasicAuth to protect the MP3 files is so desired.

I have also found out that the popular podcatcher Juice supports HTTP BasicAuth as well, so using this solution really seems the way to go.

I believe I can add support into PodPress for all this at some point, and the bottom line is that this is an interesting and exciting development in the Podcasting world.

- Additional Resources -

* Just found out about another blogger who did a write up here

* http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net