This year, IBM decided to offer (almost) all sessions from Lotusphere as an MP3 recording. Great idea, but the execution lacked quite a lot.

After several days, running wget sessions inside several screen windows, I was able to obtain all 10 ZIP-files, each about 1.3 GIGABYTE. I don’t know, what line the server is sitting on, but it was definitely too slow for all 6.000+ attendees downloading the stuff. Get a decent torrent, IBM!

As the official Lotusphere 2008 site is already „closed” I panicked as I noticed, that one of the ZIP-files was corrupt. Fortunately, the download of all 10 files is still – although the site is officially closed – possible, if you have the direct URLs and your Lotusphere credentials. Download today was also quite fast, as there were no other users blocking the line. ;)
IBM: If you, at last, use Domino for the Lotusphere website, please use Dominos security features to „secure” the site.

According to my experience and a comment to vowes podcast-post posting, IBM is using services provided by on24.com. This company says about itself: ON24 Inc. is the leading provider of webcasting and rich media marketing solutions. ON24’s solutions provides companies a full range live streaming audio and video applications and services to meet corporate and marketing initiatives …

Yeah, right. Apparently, they let some marketing and media monkeys work on the recordings. There can’t be any other explanation. No person in his or her right mind would provide the recordings in a tree-structure like this:

+---01_21 Monday
|   +---AD
|   +---ID
|   +---INV
|   \---Other
+---01_24 Thurs
|   +---AD
|   +---ID
|   +---INV
|   \---Other
+---AD
+---ID
+---INV
+---m-bird_1
+---m-bird_2
+---Other
|   \---PressInterviews
|       +---AMR
|       \---AMR PM
+---pelican_1
+---s4_5am
+---s4_5pm
+---swan-7-10_pm
+---Swan1-4am
+---swan5-6am
+---swan5-6pm
+---swan7-10_am
+---swanosprey-am
+---swanosprey-pm
+---swan_1-4pm
\---swan_pelican_pm

Jup, all 285 MP3 files are neither sorted by date, nor by track or any other meaningful order. It is just one big heap of files. You even get name conflicts, if you choose to unzip all files into one directory (preserving the stupid directory names).

There is also no structure in the naming of the files – eg. how to mark repeat session, if they are in the same folder, …

But what really pisses me off:

THERE ARE NO ID3 TAGS IN THE MP3 FILES !!! NONE !!!

It took on24.com almost a month to provide the MP3s and they can’t even be bothered to add some stupid ID3 Tags! Not even IDv1. Why this bothers me? Well, if you put the files on an Ipod or any other MP3 player, it looks like this:

This makes it really easy to select the session I want to here. Ok, the probably omitted the tags because they think that we Lotusheads know the sessions by their numbers and not their names.

The notes inside the directories also make for some fun reading:

It appears that the recording software failed during this session. I attempted to restart which was succesful and became JMP301.2 If this file should prove faulty, the audio does exsist on Video Tape.
 
Flash Drive Disk Error on 2 sessions in S3 on Monday
 
I completely missed the record on this session.
 
WHERE IS 1D107?
 
Session 3 lost, thumb drive pulled out too early
 
I missed the first half of this session. Wrong Button!

„ON24 has a best-in-class service offering: Professional Services consulting comprised of a team of seasoned event managers, Full production capabilities, Signal acquisition, Hosting, encoding, and distribution”. Yeah, right!

I am off to make some sense out of this mess.

Tagged as: download, ibm, lotusphere, mp3, on24.com, podcast, rant, rich media | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Sonntag, 20080224, 00:16 | permanent link | 1 Kommentar(e)