Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Jason Kottke blows an opportunity to call bullshit on The New York Times Magazine section called Funny Pages. First of all, though, the idea of a section serialized comic and a novella, each from a illustrator-writer (Chris Ware) and writer (Elmore Leonard) who will spend a few months at a time and a column or story from a different author each week (see the editor's introduction for more information on the format) is a really great, prompting me to resubscribe to the magazine's RSS feed. I also have the "podcasts" queued up for a slow day, which weekends always are.

I put the word "podcasts" in quotes not because I don't like the term—I think it's really good—but because they're not podcasts. They're links to MP3 files. The difference is this: with those links, it takes me 3 or more steps to get them from the Internet to my personal digital music player of choice (which happens to be an iPod). The number of steps doesn't matter: it's whether or not the process or automatic that makes it podcasting or not. For the podcasts I'm subscribed to—actually MP3blogs that I made RSS feeds with enclosures for—I got NetNewsWire and iTunes to team up and have the MP3s download automatically at a set time and then go directly to a playlist that automatically get updated on my iPod when I plug it in to my computer. The New York Times Magazine is audioblogging, which is what we used to call 'posting MP3s'.

I'm looking forward to listening to the interviews, which I understand are done in the style of old-time radio drama format. Until those interviews go to my iPod with no manual intervention from users, though, podcasting it ain't.