Who am I? - part 2

Let's continue explaining my reception of the complicated radio/podcast perception. I find radio entertaining as long as it fits my time schedule. When I was younger, it was an option for me to listen to specific shows at the specific airing time. Nowadays however I got spoiled.

If there is an audio content on radio that I am interested in, then I will not adjust my time to it. If there is no possibility to listen to the show at my convenience, then I skip it. I try to use the podcasting + autoplaylists options on my mediamonkey media software and to actually manage and prioritize certain shows over the others.

Listening to podcast content is a sort of going back to roots of radio. Sure, large media and news production companies do produce podcasts and adjust to the growing demand of the market. But the real podcasting radio jewels are the private show produced by ordinary web users like you and me. The ability to produce a media content directly at the keyboard, the ability to be your own editor, censor, publisher and marketer surely attracts those individuals striving towards the free media. In most cases I feel those "small-time" shows as being more genuine and user oriented than the official radio-broadcasted commercial.

Just like people who blog and read blogs as a substitution for the written media. I personally prefer reading news online. By that I mean reading blog-comments about the official news. By reading, watching and listening to private net content I can feel the public opinion better then when reading the editors' approved content. 1000 bloggers give richer angle on any subject than a single newspaper. My usual newsreading starts with blog portals as technorati or knuff.

When it comes to reading, well, new new media have arrived to my written content world too. Audio books have spoiled me so much, that I find it more enjoyable listening to someone else's voice than reading the same content in a written form. I mean, children do enjoy listening to others reading to them, right? There has to be something in it. Needless to say, listening to a book instead of reading it gives me more degrees of freedom sort to say. Maybe I am more an aural type, who knows? Well, this allows me at least to have great book listening sessions while I am on my long jogging tours.

Don't get me wrong, I really like reading too. I do read local newspapers at daily basis, as long as I get them deliver every morning free of charge as a test reader. It's just that I find the new new media too convenient and user-friendly not to use their full potential.

Part of my media profile is also love to the digital photography, TV-radio commercials production, my mobile phone flashing and who knows what else... I will leave it to some other post. As I read in one of A-B-C's of the blogging, I must keep posts short and clear. The last two posts are everything but this...

To conclude the story, my media self would be best describe by words like free, portable, gadgets, tweaking, open. I can use these words as tags as well. Yup.

What is your media profile like? Anything I missed? Talk to you soon.

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Who I am? or Who am I? - is the question for ages

Well, how can I not remember that scene with Billy Crystal from the famous comedy Analyse This. I thought this short video may serve as an innuendo to a post about my media-self. This one is an assignment for the new new media university course. And, a handy way to introduce my media profile.

TV - not really for me, except for the tv screen itself. I do not tend to watch TV-program but I enjoy movies of my choice and an Internet video streaming material. I hooked up my tv-set to the Xbox game console, which has been "fixed" so it can play various media formats, plus more. A community driven Xbox application xbox media centre is THE actual media center of our home. This free program provides reproduction of just about every thinkable media format directly to our living room home cinema.

Xbox is connected to my home router and is a part of a home LAN. Router has it's own story too. Originally I bought it as a triple-media ADSL2+ modem. I am a curious and a gadget-driven man, so I found out the way to re-program my modem into a router. The best thing is that the router's capabilities have been locked by isp provider in order to limit the usage of the device.

Flashing modem into router and fixing xbox can start giving you my idea of media. Releasing the full potential of the devices through free network-available knowledge is my thing. As long as I know where and how to look.

Networking. I hooked my laptop to the home network too, so I stream music, videos and pictures from one device to another at my home. The good old television as I have known it for a few decades is forgotten where I live now.

My love to music in general has lasted quite long. I remember my late father taking me to a high-fidelity store speaker rooms, where he made me turn my back to the wall full of speakers and describe the difference in reproduction of various systems tested. Needless to say, I love music. It's a love with a capital L that transcends into a very personal perception of the music pieces. If neither you can compare both joy and pain of Anton Corbijn¨s "Control" movie about the band Joy Division and an obscurity of Eurovision Song Contest country-qualification concerts, than you know what I mean.

As I speak I listen to an instrumental piece Magic Spells by the new electronic band Crystal Cases. You will find this information in the right part of this page, where Last.fm displays the music I play on my pc, xbox or my zen. Social networking take another important part of my media-self. Being able to interact with others means a wider base, more alternatives, fresher ideas, and ultimately better choice. A logical concequence is a better music from my players. It helps me searching and finding music I enjoy, rather that what major music companies offer as mainstream music.

Music formats have evolved through my music voyage. I remember having a rather huge collection of long-play analog music albums. Yes, i was proud of my 350 records. In fact, they are still intact in my old room back at parents' place. Then I switched to digital cd format and collected even more albums. In late nineties minidisc format gave me portability and quality I prefered. Being addicted to my old Sony minidisc's fit and sharp sound I missed by far the first wave of mp3 players. I got my first mp3 player in 2004. That was a 15gb harddisk driven Philips hdd100. It still looks fantastic, a sort of an iPod antipod. Piano-black and shiny, though somewhat poor in functions for today's standard, but it still delivers superiour sound, when compared ty my present portable media player of choice: Creative Zen Vision:M.

Media organizing. The advantages of processor power in media organizing are thrilling. Having a several thousand large music collection, storing the songs in folders and managing them in that fashion is rather old and unpractical. Tagging is the winning word here. Mediamonkey is a free software that I use to manage my music. Once that this brilliant program unleashes it's whole powers, you actually learn to love your music collection. Automatic playlists generated by user-given criteria keep my music perception exciting after every synchronisation of the music library with my player.

One more thing worth mentioning is radio. The thing with radio is that I don't listen to it very much. I mean, I do love radio, I have even workhed a number years in front of a microphone on several radio stations, but I simply find radio quite obsolete nowadays. Podcast is the reason.

This post will be continued as soon as I get some sleep. It is 1:47 AM. Blogging carries me away too easy...

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