Net & technology

BBC Newsnight video podcast

Newsnight has launched a weekly 25-minute video podcast. It’s a round-up of the best stories from the nightly show.

This seems to be one of the first downloadable files that the BBC has offered in MP4 format, so it’s iPod-compatible. Indeed, the podcast is already number one in the iTunes UK news chart and in the top ten on the worldwide news chart.

Despite the sceptics, I definitely think people are going to watch video on the move. On the train coming here I caught up with some TV I had recorded. It makes the four-hour journey much more bearable.

But the price of portable players needs to come down and the most successful ones in future will be those that play all the popular formats: Windows Media, XVid, DiVX, Flash and MPEG as well as Quicktime and they will be based around removable Flash memory cards.

The new high-capacity cards that are coming along, which can deliver the data as fast as a hard drive, will revolutionise the portable player market. Hard-drives are too fragile, cables (for transferring) are annoying and no one wants to be limited by a fixed-capacity internal memory.

Great RSS feed reader

For quite a while I’ve been looking around for a good feed reader. I was using the one that is built into Opera, but the slow-down while it updated the feeds every so often bugged me when I was busy looking at web pages at the same time. Sadly this is just one of the Great RSS feed reader

Correct audio recording level is a basic…

Dear Rocketboom… Horribly distorted sound (again). Note the flattened-out peaks where the level has exceeded 0dB. Correct sound recording level… Why bother producing a ‘high-definition’ version of the show when the audio is painful to listen to?

Cool screen grab software

FastStone Capture This is great. It can grab a full length web page, scrolling if necessary. Free for personal use. I like to keep copies of the pages I design. Also today I discovered that Opera 9 can save a web page as a self contained web archive file (.wht extension).

The BBC, public participation and ‘user generated’ content

How serious is the BBC about public participation and user-generated content? Not very serious, I would say…

The BBC has always looked on the public as material to be used in its programmes and now looks on photographs and videos that come from that public as material to be used in it programmes. Not much change…