US patent granted on podcasting

Photographer and podcaster @WildlifePhotog tweeted a link on Friday to a Softpedia article detailing a patent that's apparently been granted to US company VoloMedia.

Q) So what's their big new invention?

A) Podcasting.

That's right, VoloMedia are claiming that they invented podcasting. The patent was filed in 2008 but is a continuance to a previous one in 2003 and covers the concept of "episodic media content" which could include not just podcasts but potentially also things like RSS feeds in general. As Ars Technica points out it's hard to work out what's actually been invented here since they aren't claiming to have actually created the ability to download a media file or an RSS feed itself.

VoloMedia are currently claiming not to be interested in licensing deals however this is an obvious threat to anyone producing podcasts, in particular large companies who now face the prospect of a retrospective claim being made for licensing monies.

Personally I feel sure that podcasting was already around in 2003 and if someone can demonstrate prior art over this then the patent can be invalidated. Wikipedia has a statement that they emerged in 2004 and this has apparently been enough to overturn an application to trademark the term the following year.

EDIT - There is a suggestion that the first podcast may have been in July 2003 from Boston radio broadcaster Christopher Lydon following his attendance at BloggerCon in Harvard. At around the same time ex-MTV host Adam Curry apparently wrote some software to extend RSS feeds to include audio content and automatically download archived shows to his iPod.

It looks like it's going to come down to a matter of timing between the podcasts and the aggregation software at the time and the specific dates detailed in VoloMedia's patent claim.

Kudos to the regular blogger

I'm realising that this blogger malarkey needs a fair bit of time
devoted to it, you've got to have something interesting to say (whether
your readers agree or not is another question), do enough prep or
research to ensure that it's factually correct, spend some time writing
the damn thing and then revise/edit so that it makes sense.
So kudos to the bloggers out there who have other jobs or time pressures
and yet still manage to post frequent, interesting content. Of course,
you could always just throw some words together and hit send but I think
that the best amateur bloggers probably spend as much time getting the
post up scratch as professional bloggers and journalists do.

With that in mind and with a unusual lack of hubris on my part I've
realised that while I am still working for a living and wanting to spend
my spare time doing things like scuba diving, mountain biking,
photography, growing veg on the allotment, DIY around the flat.... oh,
and spending some time with my long-suffering wife as well, I'm not
going to be able to update this blog with anything like the regularity I
had originally intended.

It's probably not going to affect many people in the scheme of things
since there's still not that many of you reading this on a regular basis
(the Google Analytics show that most of you are one-off or sporadic
readers). I'm not going to compete with people like Mashable or The
Register for speed and volume but I'll still post about major things
that catch my eye.

Podcasts

I've been listening to podcasts on-and-off since I first got a 4th gen iPod (the black&white screen and click wheel) and now regularly put one on in the car on my drive home from work.

I use a Kensington LiquidAUX to charge and connect the iPhone to my stereo's line-in socket. The main draw for me on this product is that the charger's also got a handy wireless remote control that fixes to the steering wheel allowing me to skip tracks safely without fumbling with the iPhone's touchscreen which doesn't have the tactile feedback of previous iPods.

Most of the podcasts I listen to fall into three categories - comedy, photography or technology and there's a special fourth category reserved for anything by Stephen Fry who's recently released a new book, The Dongle of Donald Trefusis, only by podcast.

Some of the other podcasts that I've been listening to are:

Tips from the Top Floor - photography tips from Chris Marquardt.

Stephen Fry's Podgrams - a series of audio essays (sadly not updated for a while now).

Guardian Tech Weekly - audio updates from the tech writers at the Guardian newspaper.

I'm also very keen on one podcast in particular - it's a new one called PhotoLegal which is a great listen for anyone interested in the legalities and rights surrounding photography. You'll see in a future blog post why this one is close to my heart...

Strobist Boot Camp II

One of the blogs I read religiously is Strobist, the photography and
lighting site from David Hobby (@strobist on Twitter). David's a
photographer and photojournalist from America who for a long time has
been running a very popular website dedicated to sharing his techniques
for off-camera flash photography.

In case you're wondering, the American call their flashes a strobe so"Strobist" just refers to flash photography - I guess the English equivalent site might be called "Flasher" but that might get a different audience!
Where David really excels is in explaining through simple steps how to achieve some pretty amazing lighting in your photos - specifically, the power and flexibility that comes when you a) stop using the little popup flash on your camera, and b) take that flashgun and move it away from the hotshoe.

Over the years the Strobist blog has covered a huge range of basic and more complicated flash techniques through his Lighting 101 and Lighting 102 series. They're definitely worth a look if you're even slightly interested in improving your flash photography.

This summer sees the start of Strobist Boot Camp II, a repeat of last year's series of practical challenges since there's only so many technique lessons you can post to a blog. David will be setting a number of assignments that the readers of his site will each attempt in their own way - the winner at the end wins a prize.
If you're reading this at some point after the Boot Camp has finished then there's nothing to stop you completing the assignments however the real interest for me is going to be comparing my entries to all the others as we submit them via the Strobist Flickr pool.

I'm going to be following the assignments and hope to post on here and my Flickr stream about my equipment, techniques and results. If you're entering too or just want to have your say then I'd love to hear from you via the comments on this site or my Twitter feed.

UPDATE: The first assignment is here!

PhotoCalc iPhone app

Recently I've been listening to the photo podcast Tips From The Top Floor from German photographer Chris Marquardt.


One of their recommendations was a handy little app called PhotoCalc which won't appeal to the non-photogs out there but for the technical togger it's a nice reference tool to calculate the Depth of Field of a particular focal length/aperture combination.
It'll also guide you on Flash Exposure settings, reciprocal exposures and plenty of other useful, but not all vital, camera related information.

You can find it on the iTunes App Store.


The other reason for this post was to test out the ShoZu app which allows you to update a number of different blogging, photo sharing and social media sites from within a single interface.
So far so good if you're reading this... there's also a rumour on Twitter at the moment that the app might move to being paid-for so I wanted to download it while it's still free.

Seems good so far but you can't post text and images as one post - hence the screenshot in the previous post.

PhotoCalc on the iPhone

iPhone remote trigger for Canon DSLRs

Canon already gives users of it's DSLRs the EOS Utility which allows them to shoot tethered, controlling everything except zoom from a computer. This is useful for timelapse photography or in a studio environment where you're not needing too much camera movement but want to take advantage of the ability to review shots on a larger high-res screen and save them straight onto a hard drive, especially useful if you're lucky enough to use one of the new 21megapixel Canon 5D mk2.

Photoshop and Lightroom plugin experts onOne have now extended this functionality with a new iPhone and iPod Touch app called DSLR Remote which lets you wirelessly control the computer/camera combination from the phone itself. You do still need the camera to be tethered to the PC, it's not a standalone remote but I'd be surprised if we didn't start to see wifi enabled DSLRs in the future that cut out the need to use USB cables for control or file transfer and this in turn would allow something like the onOne software to communicate directly to the camera. Of course you can always use the £600 wireless transmitter and grip but for most of us this isn't a feasible option.
An added bonus is that for LiveView enabled cameras the app allows live streaming, allowing you to see whatever the camera sees and almost turning it into a remote security camera while future versions of the app will also allow remote control of the video functions of the newer DSLRs.

It'll be interesting to see how useful the app actually is - there's already been comments suggesting that it's a case of "hey, this is cool" rather than fulfilling a particularly pressing need but I can see a number of uses where the app will come into it's own - plus there's no denying that it's rather cool functionality that I'm determined to make work somewhere!
For studio shooters who are already tethered then this probably will be useful, I can imagine the tog walking around with more freedom and being able to show the images to their model for more easily. It'll certainly be handy for self-portraits since you could recompose the shot and adjust aperture etc without walking back to the camera and the intervalometer will make it popular for timelapse photography.

It's not on the AppStore yet but when it comes out I'll be getting a copy to review on here. The Professional version is expected to cost $19.99 (UK pricing not confirmed yet) for full functionality but will be offered at a discount $9.99 initially, while a cut-down Lite version will give you remote shutter triggering only for $1.99.

onOne will be notifying us when the app is approved via their RSS feed and on twitter from @therealmikewong.

Nikon, Sony, Pentax and the others aren't supported yet but plans are to extend the app to include these brands in the future - see the onOne Q&A for a full list of supported models. Users of these brands shouldn't take this as a snub that they've gone for Canon first, I'd imagine that's due to the availability of the Canon SDK for developers.