Female: Yeah hi! Dr. Brown asked me to ask you to check out all of these classes on extreme.
We’ll share all of this latest Photoshop CS3 experiments with you plus we’d like to mix in just a bit of fun too.
What? Go Learn!
Male: Now, let’s go through some popular Podcasts that are out there today and talk a little bit about the experiences that these Podcasters have had on the web.
The first one I want to bring up is a religious Podcast. It’s called the Catholic Insider. Father Roderick is a Priest in The Netherlands and he had enough foresight a couple of years ago to realize that this was a medium that would allow him not only to reach out to his own flock and his congregation locally but it would allow him to go out and reach out to the entire world and spread the message of what the world’s issues are. What religious such are for Catholics to anybody who has an internet connection?
On the entertainment side, one of my children’s favorite Podcasts is the Podercast which can be found at the leakycollegian.org and the actual URL would be on the notes here for the class. Essentially, the Podercast is a Podcast to fans of the Harry Potter books and the movies. They talk about news, they talk about current events. They actually do interviews with the cast from other shows. They even had J.K Rowling on there, the author of the books. It’s a free willing. It has lots of banter back and forth between the focus that are the interviewees and the interviewers on the show. Listening to it, you can tell these people are very passionate about the subject matter. They go to events and in general, they have a great time. One thing you will notice about the show also though is that they do have an outline. There are specific items that they do cover during the show but it is very free form and it’s very entertaining to listen too.
The next one I want to talk about is a technology show. Leo Laporte if there is anybody who is one of the grand daddys of Podcasting, its Leo Laporte. He has several Podcasts that he is either to host of or the co-host of. He has a great background. I believe going back about 20 years in radio specifically in technology shows.
Now, This Week In Tech which can be found at thisweekintech.com is the show that is syndicated from a radio show that he has in California where he spends three hours each week talking about, as he describes it, everything in technology and basically his subject matter extends to anything that has a process or chip in it so he’ll talk about big screen TVs, he’ll talk about iPods and other mp3 players, he’ll talk about cellphones, computers, Macs, gaming, home security systems if it has a computer or a chip in it, he talks about it.
Now, we will talk about some specifics about Podcasting about how you want to stay fairly focused within the room of technology. This Week In Tech is got a very broad reach as far as the subject matter goes and personally for me, sometimes I find that the content on the show doesn’t really touch base with my interest are but he’s a great entertainer, he’s a great interviewer, and I always get something out of the very show that are listened to so I continue to come back.
One of the other things we’ll talk about during this series is about the length of the show and obviously having a show or a Podcast that you know when you pull all the commercials out this is close to 2 hours and 15 minutes long is really on the outer edge of what we find is effective and popular in Podcasting but again, it works for him so as we go through the series and we talk about the rules and talk about best practices, let’s not forget about the fact that this is going to be your show. It’s your Podcast and you get to make the rules and you get to throw the rules out that you don’t like and what’s important for you is to find what works for your audience and stick to it.
One of the next shows we’re going to talk about is a show called Diggnation.
Now, there’s a website called digg.com. And essentially, this web site is a news content aggregation site where the community or the members of the site decide what shows up on it.
So for example, a user maybe looking at Fox News or CNN, or a CNET website, and find a news article that seems interesting to them and they will go and summit that news article to the Digg website. When other user see the title of the news article that they’ve posted and read the content, they may or may not decide that that’s an interesting news article to them then they will vote on it.
Basically, Diggnation is a Podcast, it’s a video Podcast where one of the owners and one of the employees of Digg will speak each week to their audience and talk about what the most popular news articles for the week were. Typically, it’s a very humorous show. You’ll learn a lot about beer on Diggnation but you’ll also learn about popular culture. Typically they do that shows in the apartment of one of the Podcasters. It’s not a terribly high-tech show but again, it’s entertaining and will get—will come back and forth between production quality whenever you’re doing amateur media and what’s most important in this realm, which is going to be the content. You can have very high quality production quality within these shows but if the content is not good, if you’re not entertaining, if you’re not hitting a nerve with the audience, it doesn’t matter how did it sounds or how did it looks. Your audiences aren’t going to come back.
Now, that’s not to say that production quality is unimportant, it is very important but you have to prioritize the different areas that you focus on within Podcasting because typically Podcasting is a one-person show or two-person show when it comes to putting the stuff together. So, you have limited number of resources, limited number of money, and limited amount of time. You’ve got to make sure that you put all your eggs in the basket that’s going to get you the most return for your efforts.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services