Different Purposes for Collections

[Pedro Palhoto]

Hi everyone,

I'm using/have used collections for 4 different purposes.

1) Moods: these are mapped to smart playlists on iTunes/iPod. For
instance, work mood, entertainment mood, informal tech mood, etc.. As
each mood ends up as an individual feed in iTunes with its own Album,
I'm able to use "Album contains <XYZ mood>". iTunes playlists are
limited to AND xor OR sequences of individual expressions. This is my
way of doing ((feed1 OR feed2 OR feed3 OR ...) AND (playcount == 0))
for each smart playlist.

2) Unavailable feeds: there are shows that don't have feeds available,
just the individual programs. To give other users a feed with all the
shows, I manually add in each program.

3) Suggestions: I send someone the RSS feed link to a customized
collection to suggest some content. Some people don't want to
subscribe to yet another service, so this has proven to be the easiest
way to introduce people to parallel content consumption.

4) Generic Collection of casts: for future reference or my backlog.
These don't necessarily have to have feeds attached to them.

There is more information on my current collections on SpokenWord.org:
http://www.spokenword.org/search?v=1&media=&style=0&table=td&member=276&src=c&ipp=25

[Doug Kaye]

On Jul 23, 2009, at 3:11 AM, Pedro Palhoto wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm using/have used collections for 4 different purposes.
>
> 1) Moods: these are mapped to smart playlists on iTunes/iPod. For
> instance, work mood, entertainment mood, informal tech mood, etc.. As
> each mood ends up as an individual feed in iTunes with its own Album,
> I'm able to use "Album contains <XYZ mood>". iTunes playlists are
> limited to AND xor OR sequences of individual expressions. This is my
> way of doing ((feed1 OR feed2 OR feed3 OR ...) AND (playcount == 0))
> for each smart playlist.

We should probably add an FAQ/HowTo to help iTunes users (about 50% of
our feed subscribers) do things like this.

> 2) Unavailable feeds: there are shows that don't have feeds available,
> just the individual programs. To give other users a feed with all the
> shows, I manually add in each program.
>
> 3) Suggestions: I send someone the RSS feed link to a customized
> collection to suggest some content. Some people don't want to
> subscribe to yet another service, so this has proven to be the easiest
> way to introduce people to parallel content consumption.
>
> 4) Generic Collection of casts: for future reference or my backlog.
> These don't necessarily have to have feeds attached to them.
>
> There is more information on my current collections on SpokenWord.org:
> http://www.spokenword.org/search?v=1&media=&style=0&table=td&member=276&src=c&ipp=25

Yup, I'd call you a Power User, Pedro! :-)

So given that you're probably doing as much more more than the rest of
us in terms of management of your collections, what would make it
easier and/or more powerful?

...doug

[brave1]

I use collections to manage the podcasts that I put on my MP3 player.
I have a 45 minute commute, so I listen to a lot of podcasts on the
way to and from work.

This is all probably going to sound kind of crazy, but here is how I
used to get podcasts onto my player.
1. Refresh the list of podcasts that I have in ITunes.
2. Download the podcasts that I am interested in into ITunes.
3. Move those podcasts to a playlist.
4. Open Windows Media Player.
5. Drag the podcasts from my ITunes playlist to my Windows Media
Player sync list.
6. Sync to my device.

This is how I do it now. The advantage of using SpokenWord.org is
that the lists of podcasts are available from anywhere, not just on my
PC running ITunes.
1. Create a new collection for the week. (For example: 20090720
Podcasts)
2. Scan through my main collection (the one where all new shows are
collected) for new podcasts I want to listen to.
3. Click collect on podcasts I want to move to my player and add them
to the new "20090720 Podcasts" collection.
4. Once I have collected all the podcasts I want, I go through the
list and right-click on the play button to download the MP3 files to a
folder on my PC.
5. Drag the podcasts from the folder to my Windows Media Player sync
list.
6. Sync to my device.

One of these days I'll figure out a way to automate all of this, but
this is how I do it today. I hope this helps!

[JulioTijuana]

I'm using Spoken Word for one purpose. Dealing with "No audio link,
iTunes feeds"

I use Google Reader for all my feeds , but there are a couple of them
that do not have
a way to download their MP3 unless you are using Itunes. For those I
created a collection
using their iTunes feeds, and then I subscribed to that collection
from Goggle Reader.

It works but It takes several hours for the collection's feed to
update on Google Reader
when you add a feed to the collection.

Julio

On Jul 23, 5:25 am, Doug Kaye <d...@rds.com> wrote:
> On Jul 23, 2009, at 3:11 AM, Pedro Palhoto wrote:
>
> > Hi everyone,
>
> > I'm using/have used collections for 4 different purposes.
>
> > 1) Moods: these are mapped to smart playlists on iTunes/iPod. For
> > instance, work mood, entertainment mood, informal tech mood, etc.. As
> > each mood ends up as an individual feed in iTunes with its own Album,
> > I'm able to use "Album contains <XYZ mood>". iTunes playlists are
> > limited to AND xor OR sequences of individual expressions. This is my
> > way of doing ((feed1 OR feed2 OR feed3 OR ...) AND (playcount == 0))
> > for each smart playlist.
>
> We should probably add an FAQ/HowTo to help iTunes users (about 50% of  
> our feed subscribers) do things like this.
>
> > 2) Unavailable feeds: there are shows that don't have feeds available,
> > just the individual programs. To give other users a feed with all the
> > shows, I manually add in each program.
>
> > 3) Suggestions: I send someone the RSS feed link to a customized
> > collection to suggest some content. Some people don't want to
> > subscribe to yet another service, so this has proven to be the easiest
> > way to introduce people to parallel content consumption.
>
> > 4) Generic Collection of casts: for future reference or my backlog.
> > These don't necessarily have to have feeds attached to them.
>
> > There is more information on my current collections on SpokenWord.org:

> >http://www.spokenword.org/search?v=1&media=&style=0&table=td&member=2...

[Doug Kaye]

Not at all crazy, but fascinating in that, again, there are so many
usage models.

Given what you're trying to do (get a week's worth of programs onto a
non-Apple player under Windows), what might make it simpler?

One other question (and this is for everyone): How do you find the
programs you want to hear? Homepage? Search?

...doug

[Ken Kennedy]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Doug Kaye <do...@rds.com> wrote:

One other question (and this is for everyone): How do you find the
programs you want to hear? Homepage? Search?

For the most part, I usually am adding feeds based on word-of-mouth; either directly IRL from someone, or a comment/recommendation on another podcast. But if I was finding a program via SpokenWord, it'd probably be via search.

--
Ken Kennedy
Contact info: http://kenzoid.com/me/contact

[brave1]

> Given what you're trying to do (get a week's worth of programs onto a
> non-Apple player under Windows), what might make it simpler?
>

I think that some way of marking podcasts as listened-to (and a way of
filtering out listened-to podcasts) would be helpful for my use case.

When I first started using SpokenWord.org, I felt a little bit guilty
about creating additional collections with copies of things that were
already in my collection. It seemed like the site wanted me to be a
"curator" of podcasts, and I didn't want to pollute your metadata by
collecting two copies of podcasts that I actually want to listen to.
I got over this guilt, of course 8^)

> One other question (and this is for everyone): How do you find the
> programs you want to hear? Homepage? Search?

I search for the feed. If I don't find it, then I try to add the
feed. I scan the homepage occasionally, but I usually just go
straight to the My Spoken Word tab.

[Pedro Palhoto]

On Jul 23, 1:25 pm, Doug Kaye <d...@rds.com> wrote:
>
> So given that you're probably doing as much more more than the rest of  
> us in terms of management of your collections, what would make it  
> easier and/or more powerful?

Doug, I'm constantly looking for applications, from the web to the
personal playback device, that approach a "Content Consumption
Optimization" paradigm. I'm not a huge fan of iTunes/iPod, but it is
what has proven best so far for CCO, therefore I'll start out with
that.

Setting up smart playlists in iTunes is time consuming at first, so
for new users, an iTunes helper plug-in could come in handy.

I don't subscribe to timely casts (i.e. daily news), so I usually have
only one content management session per week, loading up at least 45
hours of content to last another week. Each management session takes
some time as I have to convert the casts to AAC (I leave the
conversion overnight). M4B files can be listened to on an iPod one and
a half times faster using the Audiobook faster feature.

Process (on Windows iTunes):
- Sync iPod
- Download new content (parallel)
- Rate and comment on Spokenword.org
- Delete completely listened to content (smart playlist)
- Transcode/convert all new non-music podcasts to AAC ("Spoken
Podcast" setting in the import settings).
- Batch name change all converted M4As into M4Bs
- Add the M4Bs into the iTunes Library (manually with Windows Explorer
and a dummy iTunes regular playlist)
- Delete the M4As (smart playlist)
- Reorder some casts in the mood queues
- Sync iPod

Pros for transcoding:
- I can listen to content at 1.5x without pitch shift (45 hours of
content in 30 hours real time); unfortunately the iPod doesn't allow a
variable speed adjustment, 1.8x is my ideal comfortable listening
speed (at least with mplayer)
- much less storage space is required (mp3 is a bloated format)

Cons for transcoding:
- Transcoded podcast files will loose the episode information
available on the podcast feed (they become detatched from the feed in
the iTunes Library)
- Some spoken podcasts have music at the end: to listen to the
correct BPMs I have to manually put it at normal speed (and then back
up again when the music is over)

For the Mac you can use Applescript to automatize part of the
conversion.

What would really make my day would be to have selected feeds'
programs already transcoded to M4A at 1.8x speed (or some other
setting), before they are downloaded. Though I believe that there are
copyright issues involved if a copyright holder's files where
available on a third party server (even if transcoded and password
protected).

I'd gladly pay $15 each month for a service that would solve the
listening speed issue. I usually get 30 real time hours each week by
using parallel time. This means that at 1.8x I'd get an extra 24 hours
of content consumed every week. Which equals to 1296 hours of extra
content consumed every year. That's the equivalent of listening to an
*extra* 40+ online higher-ed courses every year. [30 hour courses]

Just to complete the math, the total amount of consumed content each
year would be 2808 hours, at 1.8x. Currently I only get 2340 hours of
content consumed per year, at 1.5x. That's 468 hours of extra content
I could consume every year. I.e., 15 extra online higher-ed courses I
could listen to every year. That is definitely worth $180 every year,
not counting the time I could save by avoiding the conversion routine
every week.

I'd like to have commented and questioned other posters but I'll only
get some more personal computer time on Saturday. I hope this is
enough to sparkle some debate until then.

[Pedro Palhoto]

On Jul 24, 1:24 am, Pedro Palhoto <palh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'd like to have commented and questioned other posters but I'll only
> get some more personal computer time on Saturday. I hope this is
> enough to sparkle some debate until then.

Just to add that collection-wise, once the collections are set up, I
don't do much with them.

What I would need that improves the collections concept is having two
extra classifications for each of the feeds and programs I wish to
listen to: moods and environments.

The issue is that for these concepts to work, it would require
software on the portable playback device that would be able to switch
mood and environment accordingly (manually, scheduled and location-
based). The program to be played would be chosen according to mood,
environment and other priority rules.

[Ken Kennedy]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:26 PM, brave1 <brave...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Given what you're trying to do (get a week's worth of programs onto a
> non-Apple player under Windows), what might make it simpler?
>

I think that some way of marking podcasts as listened-to (and a way of
filtering out listened-to podcasts) would be helpful for my use case.

 
Oh yes!! This is really one of the key things, IMO, for actually using SW for podcatcher management. You can work this out by having a "listened to" collection (and in fact it's the "correct" way, since the "listened to"-ness is an attribute of "your" copy of the program, not the program as a whole), but that's clunky, esp. with the interface as-is. An easy way to mark programs "read" that (behind the scenes) dumped them into a listened collection (that everyone had, at least optionally...similar to the "My Collection" in the sense that it was automatically available) would be great!

And if you could throw that into a search API call as an attribute, that would be fantastic.  (ie, have I listened to so-and-so?)

--

[Thilo Planz]

> An easy way to mark programs "read" that (behind the scenes)
> dumped them into a listened collection (that everyone had, at least
> optionally...similar to the "My Collection" in the sense that it was
> automatically available) would be great!
>
> And if you could throw that into a search API call as an attribute, that
> would be fantastic. (ie, have I listened to so-and-so?)

How about using the star rating attribute for that?

A programme that you have rated, you must have listened to.
And this would encourage people to rate more programmes (which not many
do now).

Thilo

[Ken Kennedy]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Thilo Planz <thilo...@googlemail.com> wrote:

How about using the star rating attribute for that?

A programme that you have rated, you must have listened to.
And this would encourage people to rate more programmes (which not many
do now).

I initially used that exact model with the homegrown system that holds my ratings now (until we get a ratings API), but I don't find it very satisfactory. While it's pretty much true that a program I've rated I must have listened to, it's not necessarily true that a program I've listened to I have a rating for. Some things I start, find not to my taste (or not what I thought), and skip. That doesn't necessary mean I consider them "bad" (ie, need a low star rating). I just don't want them in my "unlistened" feed anymore.

Also, feeds that I like may occasionally add a guest program that I am not interested in...again, I need to mark it read, but not "1 star". Or 3 stars, or 5 stars...any overloading of the ratings system by using an explicit rating (some number of stars) just to mark something read is going to distort the actual ratings from people who actually have an opinion about that program. It also whacks "if you like this, you might like this" -style recommendations. So I'm not a fan of this model.

If we had a ratings choice of "no opinion", or "not rated" / "NA"...that might work, at least for me. But I just checked, and the widget doesn't appear to allow that. It might under the covers somehow, though...I don't know the data model exactly.