A grand time was had by all as we read A Christmas Carol and sent it out, live, over both Talkshoe.com and uStream.tv. Below is the audio version for your listening pleasure. If you would like to see a partial video if the reading, you can watch it on my uStream.tv page.
Last night I spoke at the regular monthly meeting of the Orange County Podcasters on “What’s Next and What Needs to be Next in Podcasting.”
As is typical with podcasters, they were a great group of people and I had a great time, both during the meeting and later at some after-meeting time at the local WingNuts. Below is a link to the audio from my presentation and the following Q & A session. Video should be available by tomorrow.
Frank Castaneda had me on his show, The Struggling Entrepreneur, this week. We talk about working as an independent in high-tech, writing and new media.
In this episode of The Struggling Entrepreneur, we have an interview with Douglas Welch. I had the opportuntity to meet him in person at the Podcamp Arizona unconference in November, 2007. Doug is a high-tech consultant and recent New Media Entrepreneur. Coming from a corporate IT environment and also being a writer, Doug shares with us his road to becoming a successful entrepreneur. As a family man, he does this in concert with his wife and her career, as well. What is interesting are 2 areas that are mentioned in this 40-minute interview:
1. The need for the entrepreneur to be aware of the obstacles with affordable health care; and
2. How being a successful entrepreneur can enrich your personal and family life by “buying yourself time” for a quality life.
How many videos and short movies are ruined every day from bad audio? People will forgive mediocre video. If it is slightly out of focus, handheld, dim lit or whatever. But they will hit the stop button, change the channel, or grit through their teeth with bad audio. How important is it?
During PodCampAZ on November 3, 2007, I had an opportunity to sit down with Evo Terra and discuss Podiobooks.com, an online, self-publishing, audio book service.
Douglas, writer and host of Career Opportunities — a weekly print column for ComputorEdge magazine in San Diego, and pioneer podcast — presents this session on developing content to keep your show humming from week to week.
Topics covered will include:
* Knowing what your gettng into
* Collecting ideas, no matter where you are or what you’re doing
* Using your own life experiences to drive your show
* Using series to provide on-going material
* Using co-hosts to share the load
* “The Beast Must Be Fed!” and other truisms from journalism
* It’s like writing a novel….every year!
Douglas is now in his 12th year of publication with the print edition of Career Opportunities and recently celebrated the 3rd Anniversary (Est. September 24, 2004) of the Career Opportunities podcast.
[audio:http://welchwrite.com/cip/audio/2007/podcamp-socal-qa.mp3] Listen to this session
This is the audio from the question and answer session at the beginning of PodCamp SoCal on September 27, 2007 in Ontario, California. When some speakers were delayed, I offered to kick things off by getting the conversation started.
Note: The audio is a bit rough during the first part of the session buts gets better as the session continues.
When faced with the outsourcing of his traditional IT position, Kevin was able to use his podcasting skills to create a new position for himself in the company.
[audio:http://welchwrite.com/cip/audio/2007/cip-on-tv-20071009.mp3] Listen to this show
The most critical factor in building the success of podcasts and other new media shows is to get them “On TV.” Now, let me be clear, I am not talking about trying to sell your shows to a big television or radio network, get them on cable TV or sell them as DVDs. Instead, when I say “On TV” I mean getting them on the physical device that nearly every American has sitting in their living room — or kitchen, or bedroom –right now. We need to do everything we can to divorce new media from its computer origins and place it on the technology that everyone already knows how to operate…the television set.
The television is one of the most ubiquitous electronic devices in a home, whether in the U.S. or in places usually described as “developing” counaa
tries. To be without a television or a radio is seen as the height of disconnecting from today’s modern society. Just watch people’s reactions the next time that someone announces that they don’t own a television. The expression of surprise is almost universal. Every new media producer should be using this common device to spread their message, but how?
I was quite excited when Apple announced and released its Apple TV product. Finally, I thought, here is a device that makes listening and watching podcasts as easy as watching TV. Well, it might not be perfect – it still requires a computer, iTunes and some computer knowledge – it is definitely a step in the right direction. Here is a box you control with a small white remote, and the entertainment flows right into the television, which everyone in the household – from the toddler to the teen to the octogenarian knows how to operate.
Of course, Apple has failed the new media world by treating the Apple TV as the ugly and unloved stepchild of their product line. Sure, you might find one on display in your local Apple store, but you see no advertising, no push to sell the devices. I don’t really expect the box to remain on the product line much longer unless someone steps up to champion it among the hype and excitement of the iPhone and new Macs.
Still, the Apple TV has pointed the way to new media success. We only have to find someone who can deliver the device to bring this new media to the old world. When I am in a more reflective mood, I can see televisions all over the world that can view online content as easily as they view NBC, CBS and ABC. They can automatically download online shows the way that TiVOs turned us into a nation of high-tech time shifters. Even more, these same devices could use flash drives as the VCR of the 2010s. Imagine a friend being able to give you a show on a memory stick and you only have to insert into your television to watch it. Imagine no more “format wars” over some physical object. No more Beta vs. VHS – BlueRay vs. HD-DVD.
Of course, while we are waiting for television technology to catch up with us, there are other ways to get our shows “on TV”. Several traditional networks are collecting shorts and shows and packaging them as traditional half-hour fodder we all grew up with. The YouTube Show can’t be far off. Instead of relying on these traditional media providers to “deem us worthy” though, we need free, unfettered access to our audiences.
One overlooked opportunity is the local public access channels provided, by law, by every cable operator in the country, over a certain size. When I have mentioned this opportunity to new media producers in the past, I have met with almost universal disdain. They look at the current, quirky, offerings of their local public access channel and don’t want to be associated with them. Of course, most podcasts are dramatically higher quality than anything you see on the typical public access channel. Simply getting a few podcasts placed on public access would change the reputation of those channels overnight and give us exactly what we need – television exposure with the freedom to say and do what we want.
Take heart, new media producers, you don’t have to sell your show to a television, radio or podcast network for pennies of what they are truly worth. With a bit of the technological ingenuity and initiative that got us here, we could all go on to be television stars.
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/fit/fit-pnme-2007.mp3] Click to Listen
Hear and see what my fellow Friends in Tech members had to say about podcasting at this year’s Podcast and New Media Expo. What is there take on my recent article, “I am not a podcaster. I am a producer.”
I sat in on the SoHo Tech Podcast’s Monday Night Tech again, talking about the Podcast and New Media Expo and about podcasting in general. Check it out using the links below — Douglas
Click to Listen
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/sohotechpodcast/MondayNightTech006-10-01-2007.mp3]
For a discount on web hosting plans use the code pod64
For 10% off any order use the code: blu64
Live Recording from Talkshoe
On this edition of Monday Night Tech, I talked with Douglas Welch from http://www.welchwrite.com,
Michael King, Jeff and others that joined me in the Talkshoe chatroom.
We talked about the Podcast and New Media Expo, the future of
podcasting and how to get into podcasting.
Last Sunday, I was part of an event that provides an almost perfect case study on how organizations can capture content and then use it to promote their organization throughout the year.
The UCLA Extension Writers’ Program held their annual Writers’ Faire that gives potential students a sneak peak into the classes the program offers. This year’s event included 24 individual panel discussions in 6 rooms over 4 hours. Each panel discussion lasted about 40 minutes.
Imagine, now, that you were able to capture all of these sessions on audio or video. In my own personal case, I recorded to both my iRiver MP3 player and my iPod 5.5G using a Belkin TuneTalk Microphone attachment. It took nothing more than setting it on the table in front of us and pressing the record button. There are many other, easy choices for recording though, including DAT tape, memory card recorders or even a laptop with a microphone and free recording software.
Once you gathered these sessions, you can quickly edit them into finished podcasts, ready for distribution from your web site or through your blog’s RSS feed. This doesn’t require any special skills that can’t be gathered in about an hour’s worth of training. You trim the head and tail of the audio you recorded, removing any extraneous information. Then you add a nice intro explaining where these recordings came from and giving the link to your web site. Then you export them as MP3 files.
Now, after only about 3 hours of work, you have 24 individual podcasts – enough for a regularly scheduled, twice-monthly podcast for an entire year! Remember, this is from content you would have created anyway. The only difference is this time, you captured it. Add a few interviews or speakers recorded during the rest of the year and you could easily have a weekly show – all designed to educate your students, customers or donors and convince them to use your services – using content you have already created.
The influence of these shows grows and grows, too. Not only can you release them on your own site, but those involved can also link from their own personal web sites, spreading your message further and further. If you captured video, you can also place your shows on the various video sharing sites, like YouTube and on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
I hope that this small case study has given you the impetus to insure that you capture every bit of content you are creating today. Most companies simply throw content away, letting it disappear into the past, despite the face that hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of people would love to see or hear it.
Do you want to learn more about how your company or organization can capture content and put it to use promoting your services or products? Write me at cip@welchwrite.com, comment on this blog post, or call the listener line at 818-804-5049
Rosanne and I were part of this panel discussion today on the UCLA Campus for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. We are teaching Podcasting for Writers, an online course, this session.
How do you get your film, your story, out to audiences around the world? Learn how today’s screenwriters, directors, and producers are exploring alternative venues for distributing their work, from the world of independent film to public television to YouTube. Discover how you can turn the words in your script into a reality on the screen.
Jonathan Tydor, Douglas E. Welch, Rosanne Welch (chair)
(Updated 8/31/07 530pm : A review of the H2, along with audio examples, can be found at Michael W. Dean’s site, StinkFight.com)
My fellow Friend in Tech member, Victor Cajiao, from the Typical Mac User podcast, mentioned he is picking up one of these units, so I started to check out the specs.
If I have the opportunity to “lay hands” on this unit at the Podcast and New Media Expo in September, I will give you a review and more information.
I review the history of podcasting, its uses and a bit of the technology involved.
During this talk, I also showed 2 video interviews with some fellow podcasters from LA. These have been removed from this talk, but I plan on releasing them here, as well. Subscribe today to receive them automatically.
Today was a work day at home, splitting the one large recording from last Wednesday’s LIVE event into individual parts, in preparation for building individual podcasts.
Working with my wife, we selected some appropriate music, chose and interesting reader to use as a test and prepared a First Draft podcast to deliver for notes. It is my intention to create a standard intro and outro for these podcasts and then assemble that with the audio from each individual reader.
Imagine my happy dance when the customer came back with NO NOTES on the initial podcast. This doesn’t happen on many projects, regardless of the work being done, so I am feeling very good. I have already completed another of the sessions and will process the remaining 16 this week. We are heading out to a project in Missouri on July 7, so I want to have the project completed and invoice sent before we go.
I will post here as soon as the audio goes live on the client’s site, so you can finally hear what I have been writing about these last few weeks.
As far the future, there is another event by this customer which could use the same treatment we used for this project…recording, editing and podcast production…so I am going to pitch that project to them a little later this summer.
Another short project update…
My other project, Mortgages Made Simple with Rick Gundzik, just released its 3rd episode and a 4th is almost completed. We have settled into a nice rhythm and I am producing the show remotely — recording via Skype or Gizmo as a “double-ender” and assembling in my office here. It seems to be working well and we will probably be scheduling a live show, via Talkshoe.com, sometime in June July