Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Bike Summer LA Part 1

Bikescape takes the Calshuttle to LA for a few days of Bike Summer, a month of activities designed to promote biking and bike culture. We meet with the folks at the Bicycle Kitchen and the volunteers of Times Up! We also met with Tomatoes who led a single speed cruiser race.

Listen to the podcast

Send an email to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to demand a pedestrian oasis in Golden Gate Park!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for your work on bikescape! i recently bought an mp3 player, and
have been enjoying the shows. i'm not (yet) a biker, but a devoted
pedestrian. i decided to try getting along without my car last
november, and taking public transit has given me exercise, time to read
and listen, and a lot of pleasant time outdoors.
i recently posted my thoughts on my six-month anniversary.

i've been surprised at how interesting bikescape has been for me. there
are occasional stretches of technical bike geekdom that elude me, but
they're outnumbered by all of the insights into car culture and its
alternatives. when people hear i'm taking the bus, the usual reaction
is pity, concern, and an offer of help; it's good to hear the voices of
other people who find cars not as indispensable as we're commonly told
they are.

thanks for playing the great "desperate bicyclists" song again this
week. is it available for downloading anywhere? would you consider
using it as the opening theme for bikescape? i think it would make the
show instantly recognizable and give a great kick to the start of each
episode.

thanks again, and all the best to you and your family.

sincerely,
jeff

jon said...

Wow!

If this podcast gets just one person to try biking, i'll be very happy! (I left a comment on your blog!)

The Despaerate Bicycles were a '70's London punk band. You can find some of their pod safe music at

http://www.derekerdman.com/ilovemilkshakes/october2004/Desperate_Bicycles_Anthology/desperatebicycles.htm

I would have liked to have used that song as a theme for BS but unfortunately its already being used that way on another excellent bike show out of London called, appropriately, The Bike Show.

http://www.unstablesound.net/bike.html

I love the song though, and will continue to use when I can.

-jon

Anonymous said...

thanks! the "cars" mp3 is now sitting
happily next to bikescape on my player. :)

sincerely,
jeff

Anonymous said...

jon, has the new podcasting iTunes increased the listenership? I think that have you listed under "Sports" in their Podcast Store thing.

apple released some info they say will help podcasters get listed properly in their directory:

right here

i enjoy hearing about bike culture. i live in a smaller georgia city and there isn't must pedestrian traffic much less utility cycling traffic. there is a recreational cycling club with some nice folks, though.

jon said...

I really never had a good idea of how many people actually download the podcast. There is a statistics page at the feedburner website where the atom feed from Blogger is converted into an RSS 2.0 feed. It tells how many people are subscribed using RSS readers including newsfire, ipodder and now Itunes. That number has tripled since itunes started to support podcasting.

Then again, you can stream podcasts using Itunes without ever actually subscribing. I do this a lot at work and I don't think it gets counted at feedburner.

I could check at a-infos where the files are stored but they only seem to count clicks on the link to download the file, rather than requests for the file itself...

As for being in the sports category at itunes, I suppose that does suck, but then what category do you think would be right? Certainly not sports but culture? Politics? Urban Planning? All of the above and more???

Feedburner promises to upgrade their feed service to accomodate Apple's weird tags and when it does I'll try to deal with it. It'll just be a matter of checking the right boxes. And the feed will also include a link to the album art so you won't see a broken link image when you click on the podcast. I'm just not geeky enough to write my own feed...

Thanks for listening! I'm thinking of throwing a party here in San Francisco for all of my listeners. Can you imagine how weird that would be? I think we'd all be clones of each other!

-jw