Friday, March 14 marked the first online broadcast of Coin Chat Radio. Broadcasting from the Iola, Wisconsin, home of Krause Publications, Coin Chat Radio is a one hour weekly report on the numismatic industry. Shows are hosted by Bob Van Ryzin, editor of Coins magazine, and rebroadcast every hour from the site.

According to the article at Numismaster.com, another Krause property, the one hour show “plans to offer a wide variety of programming to appeal to a divergent collecting community.” The first show featured an interview with Larry Shepherd, the newly appointed Executive Director of the ANA. It would be something that I would be interested in hearing—which is a problem since I have not heard the broadcast.

As this is written, there is no way of listening to the show except online when it is repeated on the Internet every hour. While this presents a lot of opportunities to listen, you have to be able to be at the computer at the top of the hour and have the time to sit with the computer. Although there are buttons at the bottom of the page to subscribe to an RSS feed and subscribe via iTunes, neither link provides any information and the iTunes link creates an error in the iTunes player.

One of the beauties of the Internet is the ability to time shift information. This way, a listener can download the content and listen when convenient. If it was available as a podcast, I could download the show to my iPod and listen while out and about or driving with the iPod connected to a car adapter. I have come to depend on podcast packages of information for keeping up with information.

As an information security professional, I am very reluctant to allow my browser to freely access the Internet. So another concern is that the Coin Chat Radio site uses a embedded player from a website in Germany. When I first visited www.coinchatradio.com, the Firefox plugin called NoScript prevented the site from being properly displayed. NoSript blocks the use of Javascript on a webpage, allowing me to investigate before allowing the script to run. After allowing the site to use Javascript, the player would not load. After a little investigation, I found that the player is being downloaded from sodah.de.

Although it does not appear that the code for the player does not contain malicious software, known as malware, it is a bit disconcerting when using a player from an off-shore source given the current state of Internet security where most of the attacks come from outside of the United States. While a site based United States could be a source of malware, if something where to happen, the violating site could be punished under US law whereas a foreign site is out of law enforcement’s jurisdiciton. I would feel more comfortable if the software used was from a source that was reviewed by a third-party, such as an industry publication, regardless of where it is from.

Coin Chat Radio has the potential to being a good resource should Krause Publications resolve these issues.

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