It seems like in the last month or so, I had to explain to several people, several times in a couple of venues why Dan and I do not immediately release a version of the show once we are finished recording. I thought I should repeat the explanation here for everyone’s benefit.

Linux Outlaws was never meant to be a news show. When I came up with the concept, I was modeling it very much after MacBreak Weekly and to some extend This Week in Tech itself. That is to say LO is designed to be discussion of and reflection on the Linux and open source / free software news of the week in a friendly, often lighthearted atmosphere. It should not be your primary source of these news. As such, LO was never designed to present a comprehensive, authorative or even reliable selection of what has happened in the last week and because of that I had never thought it to be a big issue that we have a pretty long lead time with the show (usually at least three days from recording to release). You could say that Linux Outlaws isn’t optimised to bring you information quickly, instead we concentrate pretty hard to maximise the quality of the show. This extends to content (both serious and humorous) and also audio quality and general listenability (cutting out the uhms, ahhs and pauses) which is especially important to both Dan and I. This takes time and we know that. The whole concept of the show is build around it. We realised pretty early into it that some people rather prefer the show very raw and quickly delivered. That is why we started experimenting with streaming it live and have kept that arrangement up since then. We now provide you with exactly the recording of it all as it happens live, both in video and pretty high quality audio formats. I even save the video to the Ustream site when I don’t forget to record it. This is our compromise for those of you who want the show immediately and/or in its raw state. We are, however, not willing to sacrifice the quality of the actual podcast because of this. There will be no raw, TLLTS-style, fresh-off-the-tape release of Linux Outlaws. The editing and releasing of the podcast will always take time and I am acutely aware of the fact that it has been taking longer lately. I will take steps against this (more on that in a minute) but I will not compromise the core values of our show for it. As long as this is still a hobby for both Dan and me, there will be no way that I can release the podcast much faster than we have done in the past couple of years. If you want it faster, either pay me to do the editing or watch the live show.

As the show has been getting longer and longer, and with the original mission in mind, I have come up with a plan to re-focus Linux Outlaws a bit to adjust for this. Starting with the next show (#136), we will stop listing all distro and software releases that we pick up on. We will only talk about the ones we find noteworthy for some reason or another. You are of course still free to send us feedback (which we always appreciate a lot) and tell us if you think we missed something important, but please respect our decision if we do not mention stuff you send us. By now, we are getting a lot of email and everybody has something else that he or she finds important. In the same vein, I will take it upon myself to more radically cut down the actual news items we talk about. I always do this in some kind of fashion or another, but I will try to be more ruthless with it now since I think we really need to focus on the important things and make the show a little less complicated again. If I do this correctly, chances are you won’t even notice but if you do, please remember: we are human too and humans make mistakes. With any luck, this will speed up the release of the show again and keep it fresh for many, many more episodes to come. Our purpose always has been and always will be to produce the most relevant while still entertaining Linux podcast in the highest quality possible out there.

Again, by all means send us feedback on all of this, we are always interested in what you think and how we can make the show better for all of you. Just one more thing: Before you send us email, think about what you are doing. Maybe read it over again before you push that “send” button. As I said, we are starting to get a lot of email and we take a chunk out of our personal free time to read it all (and we do read all the mail we get) — so please make it worth our while. If you do that, I am happy to read all of your feedback, a lot of it warms my heart every week and totally makes it worth it to do this show. We are grateful for all the intelligent rants, funny insults, well-worded criticism, witty jokes and random “I really like your show” comments we get. Please keep that up!

Hey folks, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on the blog and I figured it was time I stopped slacking – not in a Slackware sense, thankfully Also I was pretty surprised earlier this evening when Fab found an interesting article concerning us on Podcast Alley. It seems we were listed in their top 5 tech podcasts for May, and we didn’t even know until now. Have a look at the screen shot below…

Podcast Alley Listing

(click to enlarge)

You might notice a little podcast down there below us at number 8… what’s it called again? Oh yes, that’s it. Security Now! Hang on, that’s pretty amazing news. I don’t listen to it myself but I couldn’t deny that it’s one of the best known technology podcasts around. Part of Leo Laporte’s TWiT stable no less. I know it’s only one website and one month’s review so we shouldn’t get carried away, but it’s nice to see. I’m pretty chuffed by this and so is Fab, I wanted to share the picture. Thanks to everyone who’s helped and supported us in almost 2 years of doing this now. It’s a lot of work but we both have fun making the show, that’s thanks to our great listeners. We recently passed 100 episodes, a landmark I never imagined we could reach. Here’s to another hundred. We’re not done waffling yet.

Take care,

Dan

As a first effort in cleaning up the visual design of the podcast, I’ve created  some comic-style portraits of Dan and myself (in part inspired by the ones the TWiT Network uses) and used them in conjunction with the logo I developed some time back to create a new iteration of our cover art — which will be used from the first episode of 2009 onwards. You will notice that the font is much clearer and more readable on small screens (I had some feedback requesting this) and that there’s again some Linux command line goodness in there. It’s also a bit of an homage to Security Now, which was the podcast that got me into podcasting in the first place (the first one I listened to, so in a sense Leo and Steve started all of this). I hope you like the new artwork, please share your thoughts on it in this forum thread. This is the first of a bunch of visual changes coming to Linux Outlaws in 2009…