the webthinking blog

This year I have the privilege of being one of the PodCamp Toronto 2010 co-organizers. Being a PodCamp junkie since 2007 I was more than happy to help! My role as a member of the web team? Making sure we have a brand new, shiny web site under the new domain name – podcamptoronto.com, that is.

Let me tell ya – working together with talented folks like Daniele Rossi, John Leschinski and Tommy Vallier has been an exciting, “open-source” experience!

Go check out the PodCamp Toronto 2010 site! Subscribe to our feed or grab the podcast.

I am looking forward to seeing you there on February 20 and 21. It will be fun! If you are new to PodCamp Toronto, here is the elevator pitch:

PodCamp Toronto 2010 is a FREE “unconference” bringing together professionals and hobbyists from Toronto and the surrounding area to explore the cutting edge of new and social media. If you are an online content creator – hobbist and professionals – who are building communities online in a variety of ways, then PodCamp Toronto 2010 is for you. Share ideas, discuss theories and learn lessons from an audience of experts. Network, network, network. All are welcome. Join us!

The official hash tag is #pcto2010

Great event this week-end – PodCamp  Toronto 2. Here are couple of snippets from day one:

* Same things don’t work over time – Chris Brogan
* Social media is a cultural revolution, not a commercial revolution – Collin Douma
* The “trust economy” emulates the human relationships on the web – Julien Smith

See some of the pictures I’ve taken and the whole podcamp flickr stream.

“Talking” Blackberry with PodCamp co-founder, Chris Brogan:

PodCamp Toronto 2008 is just two days away – I’m so excited to attend for the second year in a row.

In the mean time, this one – PodCampToronto.com, just slipped through the fingers of a domain name broker, so I’m more than happy to put it back to work for this vibrant community. See y’all there on February 23.

My Premium podcast feed is the very latest innovation brought to you by iSPINIT! Available as a personal RSS feed, it brings flexibility and convenience to a whole new level.

Once your PayPal payment is approved, simply subscribe to your feed in iTunes and automatically receive all Premium podcasts that you have chosen to purchase individually – no monthly fees.

If you like the music we play on the regular podcast, you can enjoy it in a premium version, free of commercials and other talk. Pay only for episodes that you like to build your collection on. It costs less than a Tall Caramel Macchiato, but it’s premium quality!

iSPINIT.com Premium is a chapterized AAC/M4A enhanced podcast – artist/song info being displayed for each tune. All previous episodes are available as premium content.

Give it a spin @ http://iSPINIT.com/premium/

If you are looking for a podcast hosting service, this might interest you… And you might be familiar with Libsyn.com just as well. BTW: if you are using it, you might pay more than you need to…

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in – S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket – e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!

A new Forrester report divides the U.S. online population into six groups according to their social participation on the Web:

• Creators – those who blog, publish web sites, upload videos, or participate in other content creation activities – 21 percent own Macs, while only 12 percent own Dell computers;
• Spectators – they read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts – 55 percent own Macs;
• The majority of Inactives – they don’t participate online – 55 percent own Dells.

Social Participation on the Web:

Source: Forrester. Via: Macworld.

Although I was able to attend the 2007 Podcasters Across Borders for just one day, it was a blast! So many things to learn, so many people to meet! Kudos again to the organizers – Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche!

I had the privilege of sharing the “cool table” with Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and Julien Smith:

Some quick facts worth mentioning:

• YouTube usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 616%! [Mitch Joel]
• FaceBook usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 2424%! [Mitch Joel]
• If MySpace were a country, it would have been the 6th largest country on the planet! Want to buy a banner on the homepage? Be prepared to pay $1.000.000 per day! [Chris Penn]
• Canadians spend 48% of their leisure time online! Is that the whole winter?! [Mitch Joel]
• “Google couldn’t care less about your podcast!” [Julien Smith]

More:

• PAB2007 on Flickr
• PAB2007 on Technorati

Ella and I just launched iSPINIT.com, our podcast! We love music! Indie and Podsafe music, for that matter. Music has and always will be part of our life, so, we created iSPINIT, for our indulgence and yours!

iSPINIT is a channeled music podcast that comes in several different flavours: (iSPINIT) Pop, (iSPINIT) Rock, (iSPINIT) Electronic and (iSPINIT) Jazz. You can subscribe to any one channel, depending on your taste, or get them all. Ella is hosting the rock and jazz shows, I get the pop and electronic/dance editions.
Since most of the music featured on the podcast comes from the Podsafe Music Network made sense for us to join the PodShow family.

Enjoy our hand picked “Naturally Famous Tunes”!