Internet Activity #4

2 Podcasts

I listen to the pandora one quite often, it is available as a podcast and as a vidcast. It is interesting to learn about the different ways that music is made, for example in building a song:
http://blog.pandora.com/archives/podcast/2008/04/building_a_song.html
They detail how a song is built (well, that was pretty obvious based on the title of the podcast).

I have also listened to the Onion radio podcasts (http://www.theonion.com/content/radionews). I find them pretty funny.

I enjoyed both of these podcasts and I am sure that I will listen to them when they arrive on the internet. They are both of high interest to me, I love music, and I love stuff that is funny. I am sure that I would listen to other podcasts if I looked around for them.

I would probably enjoy them more if they were provided as text as well as the podcast, it would let me go through them easier on my own time, though, it is nice to be able to hit play and go somewhere else to go do some work.

For audio books, I went to http://librivox.org/. There, people provide their services reading chapters of Public Domain books, and then they upload them. Apparently their goal is to provide every book that is in the public domain.

The book I chose to listen to was The Short Science Fiction Collection vol 005

http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-vol-005/

It was interesting to listen to as I really enjoy sci-fi. It is also good because this preserves the works as many of them are not in print any more.

I did look at the purchasing plans of Audio books on some sites like Amazon.com and Chapters.ca, and the prices seemed extremely high, you could buy the books for less than the recordings in some instances. If you could buy the books for one price, or the recordings for another, but they should be comparable. There is no way that it costs that much to transmit the audio over the Internet, there is no printing cost involved with it. Perhaps a bit of money added to the price so that the voice actor can be reimbursed for their work. Even if you get physical discs of the audio book, there is no way that it should cost as much as it does.

The vidcasts that I watched were from Pandora again, which was nice because it adds a visual element to the information that they are presenting.

http://blog.pandora.com/archives/show/2008/04/music_101_singi.html

I enjoyed it, and I will listen/watch them again as they come out.

Another one that I have listened to is Cute With Chris (http://www.cutewithchris.com/).

It is a very ammusing one that is available on youtube as well as from his site. Here is an episode:



Youtubes sucess comes from the ease of its use. It became popular as one of the first video sites, and is therefore one of the biggest and most widely used. It is also popular because anyone can upload any content to it, so even shows that should not show up because of legal issues will show up there for a little while for people to watch, then they are taken down when they are found by the owners. Youtube attempts to respect copyright laws, but this is made easier by people marking things as infringements or innapropriate. The Google cannot be everywhere at once, so they rely on the users to help them out, which many do.


High Definition defined:

A television system that has twice the standard number of scanning lines per frame and therefore produces pictures with greater detail. (dictionary.com) Generally I think this is in 1080i(interlaced) or 720p (progressive interlaced). There are other formats too that were created in different countries.

I watched some previews of trailers on Apple.com in both resolutions. On my laptop it made very little difference because the screen is not very big. On my desktop computer however, it made a huge difference because the monitor has a resolution of 1680x1050, so the difference is definately noticable.

I watched the exclusive Speed Racer trailer in both hd and normal definition. I do not believe that the difference in resolutions made me want to see the movie any more or less. The exclusive trailer however did make me want to see it. Another trailer that I watched was for Hellboy 2... I didn't even know that there was a Hellboy 2. I am definately going to go see it. The HD version once again did not sway me either way. It is nice to be able to just go to the site and watch the trailers though, the availability is nice (On a side note, I hate that I have to install Quicktime to look at the trailers).