Like all other things web, it’s deceptively hard to come up with realistic numbers for “readership” or “listenership.” Web requests can come from too many places, in too many guises, to each be dependably tied to a real person.

That said, we can get a vague idea of the “listenership” of Live From the Formosa Tea House by looking at the number of times the MP3 audio files have been downloaded. This doesn’t mean they’ve been listened to, of course, but it’s better than nothing.

So here are the episode statistics, covering downloads from September 27, 2004 to the present:

• Episode One - 3,705 downloads
• Episode Two - 3,456 downloads
• Episode Three - 2,153 downloads
• Episode Four - 392 downloads

We held an impromptu “Podcasting 101” tutorial at the Queen Street Commons this afternoon. Brother Johnny, Rob Paterson, and Cynthia Dunsford were there, along with Peter West and Mark Sandiford.

We covered the same same ground I covered in this blog post, but in person: how to record audio into an iBook, the basics of editing in Sound Studio, converting to an MP3 file using iTunes.

The missing link, left uncovered, was how to take your MP3 and “turn it into a podcast.” In other words, get the MP3 on the web with a URL, and set up an RSS 2.0 feed to point at it. Unfortunately, the “free weblogging platform” marketplace — Blogger, TypePad, et al — haven’t quite caught up to podcasting yet, and so this final step isn’t easy as, say, maintaining a text-only blog.

Help is on the way, however. A good place to start is this Feedburner page that describes how you can use Feedburner to “podcastify” your TypePad or Blogger blog. This is probably exactly what Rob (TypePad user) and Cynthia (Blogger user) need.

We’re going to get together again sometime soon to cover “how to record Skype calls and turn them into a podcast.” I’ll try and give some advance notice about this so others can attend.

If you’re trying to debug problems with Java applets in Safari, you may have wondered, like me, how to see a “Java console” of the sort that’s available in Mozilla-based browsers. One way that I found, by mistake, is to Control + click on the red “X” that is displayed when a Java applet won’t run:

This afternoon’s background music.

Today’s background music.

The Flickr page for tag ‘pei’ has an interesting mix of Prince Edward Island vacation and I M Pei architecture photos.

A few weeks back, I added a little Flash “play this audio file” widget to the bottom of posts that have audio attached to them:

Since then I’ve heard from three people who’ve wondered why they’re being prompted to install Flash when they visit the weblog.

I’m wondering about Macromedia’s claims of Flash penetration, and whether they exaggerate the real situation “on the ground.”

As a sort of unofficial test, can you please add a comment to this post if you’re being prompted to install Flash when you visit (I’m attaching a tiny audio file just to make sure the Flash widget shows up). If it appears that it’s a widespread problem, then I’ll either remove the widget or get more sophisticated about Flash detection.

Okay, I’m looking for a word that describes the portion of the day when it’s “regular business hours” in both Copenhagen and Charlottetown.

Copenhagen is GMT+1. Charlottetown is GMT-4. So when it’s 9:00 a.m. in Charlottetown, it’s 2:00 p.m. in Copenhagen. And when it’s 5:00 p.m. in Copenhagen it’s 12:00 Noon in Charlottetown.

In other words, there’s a 3 hour portion of each day — 9:00 a.m. to Noon in Charlottetown, 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Copenhagen — when we’re both “at work.”

What is that overlapping part of the big “time Venn diagram” called?

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 4 this afternoon over lunch. At the Formosa Tea House. Live.

We recorded in the coveted back room of the Formosa, with a very simple technical setup. We all sat around Dan James’ APEX435 microphone, which ran into Steven Garrity’s Behringer Eurotrack UB802 mixer. We took the output of the mixer and plugged it into my iMic, which was plugged into a USB port on my laptop. I did the recording in Sound Studio, saved as an AIFF file, then imported the file into iTunes and converted to an MP3 (24 kbps mono, VBR medium quality).

This episode runs one and a half hours. It didn’t feel “too long” when we were recording it, so we’ve decided to release it completely unedited to maintain the “three guys having lunch” feel. It may feel too long to listen to. Things we discuss:

• Our technical setup.
• Recent travels by Dan to Peru and Peter to France and upcoming travel by Steven to London and Paris (for his honeymoon). [starts 2:42]
• London bombings, “terrorists are people too.” [starts 28:30]
• Steven’s Canon PowerShot S330 digital camera motor goes bad [starts 36:00]
• Queen Street Commons update (and QSC vs. ATC). [starts 37:15]
• An extended riff on the differences between employees, entrepreneurs and freelancers, the responsibility to be “open” about what we do, charging for “mind share” vs. “billing by the hour,” refusing to write proposals for new projects, “adults don’t really know what’s going on,” how we price our services, how we select our clients. [starts 43:50]
• Steven is getting married. [starts 1:13:00]
• Wikis, Wikipedia coverage of London bombings, the Rukapedia, the silverorange wiki. [starts 1:14:48]
• A brief mention of Plazes. [starts 1:28:45]

You can subscribe to the Live from the Formosa Tea House RSS feed if you want to become a regular listener. We’re also in the iTunes 4.9 podcast directory — just search for Formosa.

I’ve started a new entry in the Rukapedia: Things That Are Not What They Used To Be.