Awaiting a flood of audio from JavaOne

In 2005, we started using the java.net booth as a place to hold mini-talks: 20-minute presentations by members of the java.net community about their projects, their communities, or other things relevant to them. Last year, we hooked up a laptop to the sound system and started recording the mini-talks, sending them out as podcasts. We hoped to bring a little bit of the java.net booth to everyone who couldn't make it to JavaOne.

Last year's podcasting required a lot of manual effort -- I hand-edited the XML feed file from my laptop and wrote all the program descriptions -- so we knew we'd want to do a better job of getting our house in order for this year. Fortunately, O'Reilly was already adapting its publishing system to support podcasting, so we brought that code over to the java.net system, where we can use it for multiple podcast feeds, including the mini-talks, and the Mobile & Embedded podcast that started last week.

For the mini-talks, last year we made a decision to get the talks up as quickly as possible, to convey a sense of the immediacy of the JavaOne event. However, the practical upshot was that we clobbered listeners with over 40 episodes in the course of four days, and anyone who subscribed to the feed probably got shows overwritten before they could be listened to. So this year, we're going to send out the mini-talks at a less frantic pace, figuring that more of them will actually get heard this way. Still, we intend to get a few of them out before the end of JavaOne, so those of you attending the conference will have something to listen to on the way home -- after all, Josh Marinacci told me that he loaded up all of last year's talks on his iPod and listened to them on the drive from San Francisco to Oregon.

The feed for the mini-talks has changed, and we're trying to make it as easy as possible for listeners to keep up with this. If you're subscribed to last year's feed via iTunes, you'll be redirected to the new feed the next time you update. We've also updated our entry in the iTunes Store. Users of other podcatchers who don't pick up the changed feed may want to just manually update to the new feed. You can also check for shows manually on the Community Corner Podcast page.