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Podcasting Blog
Audacity Updated
5/09/2008
The very popular among podcasters audio recording application, Audacity has received an update. Podcasting News has a full rundown of the changes, including many bug fixes. It is nice to see some interface fixes, too, as I’ve felt Audacity has always suffered on the UI side.
Got a Podcaster Birthday Coming Up?
2/14/2008
Don’t forget that I’ve put together the finest collection of gifts for your favorite podcasting friend, family member, neighbor, or stranger! This isn’t just a list for holiday gifts, but great to find something to buy for a birthday gift or something for yourself, too. Filled with books, hardware and more, the store is broken out into … Continue reading »
Greg Cangialosi on B2B Podcasting
2/13/2008
While on business and conference-going on the west coast, my co-author of The Business Podcasting Book Greg Cangialosi was interviewed today for the City Biz List about B2B podcasting. After a short introduction Greg gets right to the point about why podcasting matters to business:
Simply put, podcasting presents yet another opportunity for an … Continue reading »
Hardware Recommendations
- Kustom KM4 Mic with Cable
- Behringer XM8500 Microphone
- Shure SM58 Mic
- MXL MXL V63MBP Computer Desktop Recording Kit
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Contact
Ryan Irelan, Editor - listen@podcastfreeamerica.com
Podcasting Manifesto: Creating Avenues of Access
Matt Foster of CitizenSpin has the best round-up of the Podcast Expo in Ontario, CA this past Friday and Saturday. Earlier I asked if the the expo would touch on any of the issues regarding making podcasting more accessible by the non-geeks and those with less technical savvy. I saw very little reporting of that, but Matt wrote on a talk by Don Katz, CEO if Audible, Inc. The common thread in Katz’ keynote was that podcasting needs to be simple and we need to be cognizant of that.
1) Don’t underestimate how easy podcasting needs to become. It has to be easy to fit into the non-early adopters’ lifestyle – people are intolerant of technological complexity. Future optimisation will come forward and make it simpler – the experience and content needs to become more important than the technology.
Of everything I read, this is probably the most important statement and how surprising that it came from the CEO of Audible! Hopefully, this wasn’t lost on the attendees of the conference. Geeks (like me) prefer to live in our world, on our terms, wondering why everyone else isn’t “up-to-speed.” We have little patience or desire to really think hard about the processes we’re creating and the messages we’re sending about what podcasting is, how to create one or even how to find one and listen to it. There’s so much work to be done in this area.
I subscribe to several customized RSS feeds that deliver to me the latest writing on all things “podcasting.” Time and time again I see podcast tutorials come through that are just plain complicated and completely unhelpful to anyone except those that already know how to podcast.
This is very frustrating because it all boils down to ineffective communication (willingly or unwillingly) and laziness (not thinking through the process you’re trying to explain). Teaching people something they know nothing about is difficult, exhausting and challenging. All of the tutorials out there are only making it that much harder.
In foreign language education there is a method called “Total Immersion.” This is a way to teach a foreign language by communicating in that language from Day One. Yes, at first no one will understand what the instructor is saying. But the students learn quicker and become less dependent on their dictionaries and learning translations. Without detailed planning of everything the instructor says and does this method is a complete failure. It isn’t a whimsical approach to teaching. It’s very structured and takes many hours to prepare each lesson.
Imagine that the foreign language instructor came into the class each day just started talking aimlessly, without any plan or goal. Maybe the instructor feels like he or she is being helpful to the students by keeping the class immersed in the language, but in reality the students just tune out the instructor because they get no points of access and have no realizations at the end of the class that they’re learned something. This makes Total Immersion a complete failure, but it’s only because the instructor didn’t think through the process of teaching the students and didn’t think about what it would be like to sit there and hear someone talk at you in a foreign language.
My point is this: If we want to spread information about how to podcast and how to listen to podcasts, we need to really think about what we’re doing. We can’t continue to slap together tutorials in a haphazard fashion. We can’t call a document “How to Podcast” and then spend the next four paragraphs talking about what bitrate to use when compressing your audio file to mp3. We can’t sell people “Podcasting in a Box,” promote it as simple and then require they download an open source audio recording tool that has a nightmarish interface. That’s insane. We need to think about what we’re doing.
I’m glad that Katz made this a point of his keynote and I hope that the mad rush to make money from podcasting (The Next Big Thing) and to build yet another tool that is unusable to anyone without technical expertise won’t obscure the really important issue of creating avenues of access to podcasting and making them as wide as possible.
This is my motto here and I take it seriously: Promoting Podcasting for Everyone.
Thanks again to Matt Foster for his excellent updates from the expo.
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