I'm pretty confident that most of you reading this at the moment are not refreshing your browsers every five minutes trying to test out our new functionality, but just in case, a word of caution. We're making changes on the fly, and some of them are breaking changes. This means that until the official announcement is posted here, any accounts or data you create may be (and likely will be) lost!

In the meantime, we've updated our registration/login/logout system. In addition to being more secure, we've tried to make it clear that when you register for a Paramagnus Account, you get access to all of our podcasting services - you don't need to register for each one! We figured we might as well make life simpler for you. We've also gotten rid of some of the registration fields, so that registering is even quicker than before.

I'm anticipating we'll make the "data created from now on will not be lost" announcement sometime at the beginning of February.

If you're poking around the sites and want to make a suggestion, please do! You can leave a comment here, or you can contact us.

Dickson and I registered for Northern Voice 2006 tonight. We figured it was about time, since the conference is less than a month away (February 10th and 11th). We'll be in Vancouver from the 9th until the 12th, hopefully learning a lot and sharing the stuff we've been working on! We'll post an update when we've decided what exactly we'll have ready for the conference.

There's still time to register if you want to join us. See you there!

If you're a podcaster in Canada you might be interested in Tod Maffin's "A Dummies Guide to Podcasting Music in Canada":

Why can’t I play commercial music in my podcast in Canada?

Good question. It’s the question most most podcasters have been asking me at these meetups I’ve been doing across the country. Let me try to provide some answers. (First the disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. If you want real legal advice you should actually talk to someone who studies this stuff for a living. And then buy them a drink because God knows, they probably need it.)

Tod does an excellent job of debunking some common myths, and telling you exactly what you'd need to do to play music on your podcast.

I haven't paid too much attention to playing commercial music on podcasts, for two reasons. One, we have things like the Podsafe Music Network that contain a very large collection of audio you can use. Second, too much commercial music could turn podcasting back into radio! I figure if you want commercial music, there's satellite radio or iTunes or something. That's just my personal opinion though, and I know there are lots of people who want to play music.

Having said all that, things are still in the very early stages. A year from now there might be really simple licenses for podcasters to purchase, who knows!

Welcome to 2006! We're completely back to work now (funny how the holidays tend to be so busy with other stuff) and trying hard to meet our release schedule. Speaking of release schedules, we had some discussion lately about whether or not to release a beta version of Podcast Spot. Our previous releases haven't really been betas, they have been "previews" or "prototypes", but it's easier to call them betas. We haven't completely decided yet, but we're leaning towards going straight for primetime, for a number of reasons. Timely then, that I came across some discussion about the word "beta". From Michael Arrington:

Every company does things a little differently. Some rush the product out, features-be-damned. Others wait, and wait, and wait, until its “perfect”. Some companies are secretive. Others open. And so on.

I’ve seen hundreds of new products launch over the last six months, and I think I have some pretty good advice for companies that want to improve their beta release.

Michael goes on to list advice in a number of different categories, like "first impressions" and "landing pages". His advice is pretty good - I'm glad I found his post.

Stephen Bryant also talked about betas recently:

The vicissitudes of the public beta have been thoroughly discussed on the Web this year by Webloggers, columnists and reporters alike. I think 37Signals' Jason Fried put it best in when he e-mailed me to say: "Release your damn product, take responsibility for it and constantly improve it. The 'Public Beta' flag is a cover-your-ass mechanism that needs to go."

I couldn't agree more. So before we ring in the new year, I'd just like to say: In 2006, first thing we do, let's kill all the betas.

All of a sudden, the decision is becoming easier :) That said, I think a beta is still useful for a software application for Windows (or any other operating system), because they are much more difficult to properly test than web based applications.

Combined with the fact that we plan to have a free account for Podcast Spot that you can use to evaluate the service, I think we'll probably go straight to release. Applications like Podcast Wizard will likely still have a beta period however.

More soon!