Funny how media is these days. We’ve come full circle, and then we’ve gone around again a couple more times in the past few years.

Used to be we just had radio to listen to. Then the movies came. Then TV. Recorded material came and went: wax cylinders, vinyl, cassettes, film, Beta, VHS, Laserdiscs, CDs, VCDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray - we could listen to music and watch shows on tape and discs. Cable came and opened up the world to us - we could watch anything and everything, on demand. We can now pause live TV, and record many shows simultaneously, preprogrammed weeks ahead if we couln’t be there to push the buttons.

Then internet mixed it all up together even more: you can watch live streaming TV, download music and movies and enjoy them on players and computers. All permutations existed, and there wasn’t enough hours in the day to listen to and watch everything we wanted.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’d know I’m a voracious podcast listener. While the name is new, podcasts are just old-fashioned radio shows at heart. Having worked in radio for two decades and doing three-hour talkathons twice a week for years, there’s a special place in my head and heart for the format. It’s nice to sit back and listen to folk talk about things and discuss them. In the course of listening you get to know them and they feel like they’re your friends.

One of my favorite podcasts is Buzz Out Loud, which is a daily (well, Monday to Friday) tech-news-and-views talk show of indeterminate length (usually about 30 minutes) from CNET. It’s over 700 episodes now, which is a considerable run, and I started listening to it in the upper 300s or so. Hosted by Tom Merritt and Molly Wood, with producer Jason Howell piping in now and then, it’s an interesting and fun show for geeks like me who need to get updated and hear different takes on what’s new. (Give it a try, why don’t you? It’s available free from the CNET site and through the iTunes Store. Links at the end of the post.)

BOL and CNET have lately taken to streaming their podcasts live on cam via UStream as they are recorded, which seems to be an increasingly popular trend with previously audio-only podcasts. (Leo Laporte’s TWIT is also doing the live video streaming thing, along with other shows.)

I’ve been watching, and it strikes me as odd to watch people do a radio show on TV - or in this case, live video streaming via the net. Radio is meant to be heard, and the missing dimension of sight is actually a major factor in the makeup of the show. Watching people talk in front of a mike gets seriously boring after a while - I mean, what are you watching for, facial expressions and wild gesticulation? Radio shows are best heard than seen (no offense, Tom and Molly).

In my talk shows in radio back in the day, I’ve had visitors come and sit in on a live show to watch, and they invariably go glassy-eyed after the novelty of being in the radio booth wears out. After a while they just stare at the soundproofing on the wall and listen, they way they’ve been accustomed to at home or in the car. (It’s a phenomenon similar to when I catch myself at a front row seat at a live concert watching the video monitor coverage instead of the stage - but that’s a topic for another post.)

I’ve been watching BOL vidstream live for a few days now, and I’m the same way. After a few minutes I stop watching Tom and Molly and just listen to them talk, staring absently out into space the way I normally do when I’m plugged in and listening on my morning commute to work everyday on my iPhone. The vidstream is in that odd limbo between TV and radio that sometimes exists when new technologies get mashed up, and it can’t seem to yet find its level and place in the world. Those visually-oriented will sit and watch, and those audally-inclined will just listen. (Said another way, the young ‘uns will watch, and the old farts will listen. I’m an old fart.)

Also, watching them takes out a bit of the mystery of the show. Through my months of listening I’ve created my own CNET studio in my head, and have invented places where Tom and Molly and Jason would sit while they talk, how they would act, how they were dressed - and watching the reality somehow takes the magic out of it. And lately, I find no joy in listening to the audio version of the episode I’ve already watched, and I miss my BOL in the morning.

It may work for some people, but I guess not for me. I’d rather listen to them on my iPhone on the road than watch them on my Mac at 1AM - which is the ungodly hour  they come on in my country. (I had to sneak in the Mac reference, lest some readers berate me again for posting something not Mac-related; this is after all a Mac blog.)

But it’ll find its level eventually, I’m sure. Until then I’ll just listen. After all, Buzz Out Loud is still an audio podcast, and not a TV show; the live video stream is just a bonus for hardcore fans, so I don’t really have any right to complain.

Only BOL completists and obsessives will watch it, I figure; most folk, like me, will stick to the old audio version on their iPods. So why does BOL do it? I guess because, like that adage about why dogs do what they do when they have nothing better to do, they can.

Catch Buzz Out Loud here, and the video stream here (which starts at 5PM GMT) or here, or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

Looks like I can finally retire resource-hungry Firefox soon, if developer news about the new version of Safari is accurate.

People currently testing Webkit, or the new iteration of Apple’s own browser, are finding that the developer build currently being seeded and tested is already 2.5 times faster than the current Safari release - and that is still in it’s unoptimized state!

If this is any indication, the speed boost of the forthcoming Safari will be considerable. Computerworld has more details on the speed boost and the new features here.

Don’t take my word for it, but it also seems that Webkit is safe enough to test on your own system. If you want to, download the 15.8mb dmg file (it bloats to 62mb when expanded) of the unoptimized WebKit Build r30090 here; later you can get whatever nightly build is available through the Webkit opening page.

Been trying it out myself, and dang, it’s fast.

One of the Holy Grails of home computing is achieving a natural sounding, conversant computer voice, like the LCARS voice of the Starship Enterprise, or HAL in 2001. Ok, maybe not HAL so much.

The built-in voices of OS X are better than most, to be sure, but it’s not quite Majel Barrett-Roddenberry level yet; the choices we currently have are still a bit wooden and mechanical. Certain third-party apps can do better, as we’ve previously posted, but we’re still a long way.

With Leopard, we’ve come much closer though.

Welcome Alex, the new voice of Mac OS X.

Apple’s new synthetic voice is more lifelike and natural, based on patented technologies they’ve developed themselves. There are new techniques for pausing and fine breath control that makes Alex sound much better than Bruce or Vicki.

Listen to a sampling of Alex here.

Tag Mobile Service, that unique barcode system being used to expand once-static print media into dynamic, updatable wide-ranging content accessible through mobile phones, has gotten on the iPhone express.

All you need do is take a phonecam shot of a TMS tag, and you immediately get content associated with the tag onto your phone - audio, video, animation, text, wap sites - all for free (or just the measly cost of the bandwidth; the content is free.) The software that lets you do all this on your phone is likewise free, downloadable directly to your phone, or through the net from the TMS site. In the unlikely event your phone has no cam, there are short codes that you can just enter through the TMS Reader app that does the same thing.

My magazines, for example, have tags on the covers that lead you to a mobile version of the table of content, or a preview of what’s inside. Some of the article coverage is expanded onto the mobile platform with the simple expedient of a tag on the page and preproduced content. The possibilities are endless.

And recently the TMS phenomenon met up with the iPhone phenomenon with the launching of the iPhone version of the TMS portal. Check it out here. (A quick shout-out to my Frenchman friend, Frederick Saurat, TMS Co-founder, who sent me the info.)

One of the bigger issues in the release of the iPod Touch is the inability to manually add entries to the Calendar app on the iPod itself. Current users are forced to just do everything on the Mac’s iCal application and just sync up with their iPods.

We wonder why this PDA function has been removed (probably because the iPod is not meant to be a PDA - new multi-touch Newtons, anyone?) but why’d they let people tweak Contacts directly on it anyway? For that matter, why even add wifi to the iPod? Just so people can surf to the iTunes Wifi Store and buy songs and make more money for Apple? In that case, why add Safari to the mix? An exclusive direct connection to the IWS would’ve made more sense.

Well, at least there’s hope for iPod Touch owners who want their Calendar apps full-featured.

Steve Jobs has a habit of sometimes answering users’ email directly (or has his elves do it), and hoping for a Jobsian reply MacRumors member David J. Early from Scotland wrote to Steve-O recently to ask (among other things) why Apple has emasculated Calendar. Steve wrote back and said, “The inability to edit or add Calendar events is a bug that will be fixed in a future release.”

Hmm.

Jobs also said in his terse reply that iTunes Games - as they are now - will never show up on the Touch, and totally ignored Early’s other questions.

Full text of the email exchange here.