I’ve been there only the past two, but what an amazing ten years CMS has had. For the past few months, I’ve been putting together a history of the program, which is available at cms.mit.edu and on Scribd:
On Friday we held an all-day symposium, featuring about 40 alums, this year’s ten graduate students, and dozens of guests from around MIT. But the highlight by far was on Thursday, when we welcomed back former CMS director Henry Jenkins for a Communications Forum, where he spoke of a career at MIT. I happened to be sitting directly behind the Dean, who briefly shrank to almost nothing when Henry’s first words were, “I hate this fucking place!”, not realizing he was citing the old MIT student slogan (since adopted by other institutions, including the military service academies).
For months—months—I’d had trouble submitting the Comparative Media Studies Colloquium podcast feed to iTunes.
Today I finally had a free morning to really sort through these issues.
When I tried to submit Feedburner’s podcast feed, I would get the message “It appears the feed has already been submitted.”
That was a problem because the podcast was not listed in the iTunes podcast directory
iTunes is notorious for not responding to requests for help, though I can’t blame them
(There were also problems with converting our podcast feed to XML and discovering that Feedburner now requires a Google account, but that’s not for now.)
After rooting around a dozen different help forums, one thing was clear: the only way to resubmit a podcast feed so that iTunes doesn’t think it’s a duplicate is to change certain key XML data. Though no one in these forums knew so, it turns out that you can change this data within Feedburner itself:
Log in to your feed
Click the Optimize tab
In the sidebar under Services, click Title/Description Burner
And within that, tweak the description of your podcast
I went an extra step and changed more, since all of that “Optimization data” is actually what shows up in your podcast feed’s XML. So I added geotag info, a new image, and selected the SmartCast and SmartFeed options….all the more to make it appear different from the previous version already submitted to iTunes.
The podcast should be on iTunes sometime next week. And though I hate to wait for it, this email I just got was so very sweet:
Dear Podcast Owner
Your podcast feed, [ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MITCMSColloquium ] was successfully added and is now under review.
Creative writing began, well, as creative speaking. The first thing you learn in 9th grade World History is that the first fancypantsers did their fancypantsing through speech.
So let’s move back to that, now that we can. The intimacy of audio distribution has returned.
At the beginning, it was voice —> air —> ear. Very intimate, but very limited.
Then it was voice —> tape —> production —> tractor trailer —> stores —> many ears. Not so intimate and still pretty limited.
But now it’s voice —> computer —> many, many ears. Intimate in everything except physical presence, and limited only by folks’ unwillingness to use it.
Some literary journals are moving ahead, finally following news sites’ lead, making good use of audio in podcasty and non-podcasty ways. And to their credit, it’s a mix of audio readings of stories and poems already in print but also of extra goodies, recordings that complement a litmag and extend its mission.
