Canadian Podcast Buffet » Search Results » pab2007 podcasts http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca Canadian Podcasting gets a shot in the arm. Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:05:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 156: PAB2010 – Barry Lock has registered. Have you? http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=386 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=386#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:18:43 +0000 Administrator http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=386 PAB Picture MosaicIt’s PAB-heavy this week as we officially open registration, tease you by announcing some of the speakers, and explaining a bit more about PAB and what the PAB-experience is.

EVENTS

PAB2010 EVENT INFO

PAB2010 SPEAKERS

Once again this year, the submissions for sessions have been just incredible – THANK YOU!

We’ll tease you by revealing 3 speakers today, and we have more announcements coming very soon

  • Adam Gratrix – (Winner of the long session title award): Cult of Listener: Podcaster as shaman in the post-literate Global Theatre; or, How to Recruit Disciples and Brainwash your Audience for Fun and Profit
  • Whitney Hoffman – Disruption of Social Contracts
  • Susan Murphy – Making Meaning: How to Create Content that Speaks to People

PAB2010

  • We talk about what makes PAB a unique and valuable event, and explain the importance of the registration fee for everyone who participates in the conference (listen to Chris Brogan’s JOLT in which he announces PAB should be charging $400 per person).
  • Stay tuned for information about a fantastic group rate at a nearby hotel.

INTERVIEW

CANADAPODCASTS.CA

CONTACT US

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=386 3 107: Sylvain Grand’Maison, Jay Moonah and the Backchannel http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=199 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=199#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:09:03 +0000 Administrator http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=199 PAB2006

According to my flickr search, this is the only picture that features Sylvain, Jay, Bob and Mark. It’s from PAB2006, and it’s the now traditional group shot we take on saturday afternoon. Will you be in this picture this year?

In other words, have you registered for PAB yet?

NEWS / BANTER

  • Thoughts to Dave Brodbeck & family
  • Ross is on the mend
  • Bob’s radio interview on Live 88.5 (audio here)
  • Social Media Orphan PSA

EVENTS AND MEETUPS

PODCASTERS ACROSS BORDERS

CANADAPODCASTS.CA

INTERVIEW

TALK OF THE WEEK

CONTACT US

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=199 10 99: It’s all about the conversation http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=189 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=189#comments Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:32:46 +0000 Administrator http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=189 Hi all! Bob doing shows notes here …. I could scour the net or my archives to put a great picture here, but I’m going to cop-out and re-use the picture from last week so I can get my stuff done and go watch the Habs. Did we mention Todd Tyrtle caught a video of us dancing at PAB2007?. Nah.

EVENTS AND MEETUPS

CANADAPODCASTS.CA

AUDIO COMMENTS

INTERVIEW

  • John Bignell from EMS live
    A ONE-YEAR sabbatical to be a dad
    Unique segment ideas
    Things to consider as a podcaster

AUDIO DESSERT

  • Toronto Meetup audio

Edit : I forgot to include the show I mentioned :

EXTRO AND CONTACT INFO

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=189 3 98: New media overexposure, older Dude, fire bridgade communications http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=188 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=188#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:24:13 +0000 Administrator http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=188 Join us as we tango through another Buffet. Todd Tyrtle caught a video of us dancing at PAB2007. Thanks Todd, we didn’t think anyone had noticed.

EVENTS AND MEETUPS

  • Toronto Podcaster Meetup (Night of Mayhem)
    Saturday, April 5 at 6:30pm
    Imperial Public Library (54 Dundas Street E)
    Facebook group

CANADAPODCASTS.CA

INTERVIEWS

TALK OF THE WEEK: Overexposure

EXTRO AND CONTACT INFO

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=188 3 78: More ear talk, PodCamp and paying it forward http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=160 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=160#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:48:28 +0000 Administrator http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=160 Podcamp Boston here we come!Podcamp Boston here we come!

NEWS & COMMENTARY

EVENTS

  • PodCamp Boston 2 this weekend
  • London meetup, November 7 at 7:30pm
    Molly Blooms (700 Richmond Street)
  • Toronto Meetup, November 16 at 6:00pm
    The Yellow Griffin Pub (2202 Bloor Street W) Facebook event
  • David Newland LIVE, Oct. 26th 8pm at the Yellow Door, Montreal
    3625 AYLMER (Between Prince Arthur and des Pins)

TALK OF THE WEEK

  • How much memory or batteries for your recorder?

CANADAPODCASTS.CA

AUDIO DESSERT

EXTRO AND CONTACT INFO

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=160 0 PAB2007 – The Power of Podcasting panel http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=147 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=147#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:00:42 +0000 Mark http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=147 Photo of The Power of Podcasting panel taken by Bob GoyetcheThe Power of Podcasting: Taking Your Initiatives To The Next Level panel at PAB2007 by Terry Fallis, Ian Hull and Kate Morgan

Leveraging personal and professional ventures with a podcast is no longer risky business but a well-tested strategy to spread the word about your initiatives. With the potential to amplify your web presence, build community, and get people excited about what you do, podcasting is a powerful way to stand out in any niche.

This panel will share personal podcasting experiences, discuss how podcasting became a reality in their organizations, and provide various strategies to get you up and podcasting.

Photo by Bob Goyetche.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW…

Mark Blevis:  I am now and have always been Mark Blevis.

Bob Goyetche:  And I aspire to be Bob Goyetche.  Welcome to this special edition of the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring yet more audio from Podcasters Across Borders 2007.

Mark Blevis:  This edition of Canadian Podcast Buffet is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Bob Goyetche:  You might not know this because you’ve been listening to every session religiously and we never quite mention it.  But there is a PAB in 2008 in Kingston in June.  Keep your eyes on Podcasters Across Borders.com and keep listening to the Canadian Podcast Buffet for more information.

Mark Blevis:  What you’re about to hear is the last of the formal sessions from Podcasters Across Borders 2007.  And you thought you couldn’t make it through?  This is a panel called “The Power of Podcasting – Taking Your Initiatives To the Next Level” and your panellists are Kate Morgan of Podwise, Terry Fallis of Inside PR, and Ian Hull of Hull and Hull.  And this will bring to a close the formal speaking session audio of Podcasters Across Borders 2007.  Keep listening for some other little jewels that may come out in the feed in the month of August 2007.

Bob Goyetche:  We’re going to be back with more regular Canadian Podcast Buffet episodes in the fall, that is after Labour Day, for Season 3 of CPB.  So if you’ve got a podcast that you want to get promoted, you get in touch with us www.canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.

Terry Fallis:  Happy to be here.  Ian and I are actually veterans of Podcasters Across Borders.  We have been coming here since the very first time it happened.  So we feel like we’re kinda part of it.  Ian, in case you don’t know, is…and he would not permit me to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway.  He is recognized as one of Canada’s leading estate lawyers.  So he may not fit into this crowd quite as well but he is well recognized in his field.  And we’re gonna hear from him about how he has helped to let podcasting build his business.  Kate Morgan was not here last year but is a podcast producer of some note and has actually started her own company to do podcasting.  So I’m also very happy to be here.  I’m a podcaster on the professional side and on the personal side.  I have two podcasts, one on public relations which I’ll tell you about in a few minutes.  And the other about really supporting my novel as Charles has done as well.  And so we are happy to be here.  We had many months to prepare for this.  We’ve known about this panel for quite some time and we had several meetings to plan.  At that first meeting at breakfast this morning, we decided that we would talk about our own podcasting stories, how we got started, why we got started, what it’s doing for our organization and things that we learned from it.  So that’s what we are going to do.  So I’m going to start ‘cause I have two to talk about briefly, and then we’ll go to Ian and Kate and then back to me and then we’ll open the floor for questions.

I work for Thornley Fallis Communications.  We are a mainstream public relations agency.  About 2 ½ years ago, my partner Joe Thornley who was here yesterday for much of the day, talked to me about the power of social media.  He was just starting to learn about it.  I give him all the credit for opening my eyes to it.   And we decided collectively after a couple of months of kicking it around that social media in general and podcasting and blogging in particular were gonna change the way we deal with our clients.  It’s gonna change the way organizations engage their audiences, sustain those relationships, sell their products, move minds, whatever it might be.  And we got into it.  Joe started blogging right away and since he was blogging and a number of other people in our organization were blogging, I thought I would take on the podcasting thing.  So April, 2006, a year and a bit ago, we started podcasting.  My colleague at the time, David Jones, and I started a podcast called “Inside PR”.  It’s not a podcast about our organization.  It’s a podcast about public relations. Something we do as a service to the community but also to, I hope, showcase our leadership in this space. 

In those early episodes, both of our listeners were very complimentary.  It went very well, but we decided we wanted to try and build our audience.  So we actually recorded customized audio promos and we sent them to some of the leading podcasters in our space at the time, including Canadian Podcast Buffet.  And given the generosity in this community which has been on full display all weekend, they played them and we saw and immediate bump in our stats at the time.  So if anyone’s starting a podcast and haven’t thought about tapping into what a wonderful spirit of cooperation and generosity that exists in the podcasting world, do a couple of audio promos and send them around.  Customize them to the show you’re sending it to and that will certainly help build your numbers.  We did build our numbers, I think over time for a I think a couple of good reasons.  First of all, I like to think it’s good solid content and we’re in this space with some other great podcasts like “Trafcom News”.  Donna Papacosta is with us and was a great inspiration to us.  Mitch Joel’s podcast came shortly after ours.  In fact I think Mitch was saying he thought we were way ahead of him.  I think we were in show 8 when Mitch started his podcast.  And it doesn’t take long to get established in the space when there are only a handful of podcasts there. 

But we had good content and good conversation.  We went with the two co-host  scenario.  We don’t script really heavily or at all.  We actually decide what we’re going to talk about shortly before hitting the record button but because they’re issues that we’ve been talking about in our own business for 15 or 20 years, it hasn’t been that challenging to come up with good shows.  Good shows.  I think the other thing that we did that has helped is we’ve never missed a week.  We started a weekly show.  It comes out exactly the same time every week and building up that kind of sense of expectation on the audience’s part, I think, has really helped us.  We also have a familiar format.  We do change it up as Neil said, which is a good idea to do once in awhile.  But in general there’s a predictable format.  People have come to expect it and they’re comfortable with it and so are we. 

So what have we learned?  We’ve learned that we have listeners all around the world now.  We’ve built up the audience.  It’s quite a solid and loyal listenership now.  It has built profile for us as individuals.  What complicated it was after about show 12, Dave Jones, my co-host, left our company and went to work for a dreaded competitor of ours.  But again, given the spirit of social media and podcasting, we decided oh, the show must go on.  It’s not about our firm, it’s not a competitive thing.  So we continue to do the show to this day while he works at his big international agency and we work at our humble medium sized home grown Canadian agency.  We have done other things to try and build the audience and sustain it.  We have a Facebook Group now, which has about 300 members I think, something like that, or maybe 200.  And Mitch Joel is now at 600 members I think, so he is doing very well on Facebook.  And we have done an awful lot of interesting things.  Met a lot of great people like Donna Papacosta, Mitch and others in this room.  And what I think we learned is that if you build it, they won’t necessarily come.  So, you need to promote it and get out there.  And try and give it some legs along the way.  I think I’ve had probably 25 or 30 speaking engagements in the last year on social media and podcasting, which is a measure of how new podcasting is when someone who’s been doing it for only a year and a bit is seen as someone who can get up and talk about it.  That’s how new it is, but we’ll continue to do that.  So that’s a little bit about “Inside PR”.  If you’re interested in communications and how corporate image and reputation and how we  communicate affects organizations, can make them and break them, I encourage you to check out the show.  Let me turn it over to Ian, who is gonna talk about his organization and podcast.

Ian Hull:  Well, thanks very much Terry.  Yes I am indeed the dead guy, and I know a lot about dead and that’s about it.  So I was talking with Terry with our podcast before we started and I immediately bought into it.  There’s no sales pitch in terms of why we did it.  I thought today, if I could, what I would like to do is just highlight what we, how we took what has been talked about a lot today and sort of executed it and what our steps to execution were to help, I don’t know, either encourage or give some ideas.  We bought into Terry’s model in every respect, we’re consistent.  We do two podcasts; one is for our core group of lawyers who we like to think send it…well who we know send us work and who would like to have little snippets of information.  We give them a 10-minute podcast on topics that we know that affects their day.  And it isn’t…we get the work to us because we do contentious litigation work and they don’t.  They do the happy, someone comes in and dies. So, not so happy, but get probate and get the Will administered and so on.  So our podcast is one group of that and I co-host that with a partner in my firm.  And we have it done it actually the same number, we’re trying to keep up with “Inside PR”.  We haven’t missed a week since last March. 

But the other podcast we do is also a little more general public and we try to identify issues like why would you do a Power of Attorney or why would you do a Will.  And we talk about those issues.  So we think that hopefully we’re hitting a broader audience.  Our numbers show that in fact that’s true.  Our lawyer, sort of, focus podcast tends to get less, about half of the numbers we get.  But that being said, the context of this…the whole concept was, in our world is that before podcasting came into our world and everyone else’s world, is being a good colleague and giving back, giving things for free.  I mean, the whole internet is based on that, as Julien said yesterday and others have said.  You know, there’s no magic here.  It’s…the internet is you give something free and you get something back tenfold.  On a business side or on a personal side, in almost every respect.  

So we sat down and started this.  We started the podcast and then we realized that as we we’re told by smart people like Terry that we have to supplement this with a blog.  Again, we’re busy enough people that we didn’t really want to add a new thing to our day but we sat down and we blogged.  And so we were daily blogging and we were podcasting two podcasts a week.  My partner and I were getting a little overwhelmed by it so we…and we have fifteen lawyers in the firm.  So we sat down and said okay, let’s break this down.  And so then I had to turn into a sales person about the content set.  Because not everyone buys into it because you’re going to eat away at their time and their efforts and so on.   Like, I’m happy to say everyone in our firm now is podcasting and blogging.  We’ve mixed it up.  We keep our own separate podcast, one that we don’t let anyone else get into.  But the others we share. 

And so, you know, I mean I’ve had to sit down with fifteen, really some of them nice, not some of them not so nice, as nice as lawyers can be people.  And I had to say, you know, look, how do you teach them this?  And I said it’s like being the fat smoker.  You already know what you should do.  You should eat less and not smoke as much.  Or nothing on the smoking and eat even less.  And you have to stop what you feel, what feels good today and start working on long term.  And those are concepts that don’t sit well with anybody and who’s sitting there really as…we’re just gerbils on a treadmill for a living.  And all we want to do is keep the treadmill going and we say well, think ahead, look out.  Well, look out a year, look out two years.  Well, our numbers, when I was here last year, our numbers were about fourteen and I think it was a little high because I’m pretty sure my mother was going to two different machines and downloading.  But, you know, now we’re up into the 100, 120 range.  We’re getting tremendous feedback from our sources and it was all about executing. 

So I just now…I’ll just take a minute now and just talk to you about the steps that we’ve taken over that year.  We sat down and said our webpage was a joke before.  And so we really liked the podcasting.  That was our focus, that’s what we loved.  It was a passion for us and so we wanted to build our presence around that because we don’t wanna stop that, we don’t wanna lose.  You know, we don’t want a pod phase, we want to maintain our enthusiasm.  So our webpage…purposely we just started off and said, what’s our mission statement?  That’s…smart guys wrote that for us.  We have an interesting sort of trust experience that’s our sort of position in the marketplace.  That’s marketing guys telling us what to do.  But then we…I said look, I don’t wanna…that stuff all works but I wanna start.  So the first thing we put on our page to the left is hitting podcasts and blogs, lets people go to it.  And I’ve told you what we’re doing on that…

Terry Fallis:  Do you want me to click it?

Ian Hull:   Sure, oh sure.  And that takes us to our…wow, this is high-tech…takes us right to the webpage.  And our blogs, we try to do two funny or not funny.  Two interesting blogs and three substantive legal blogs.  So that people are coming to it, aren’t sure what they’re going to get. Are they going to get like this one “The Effect of Intestacy on Adopted Children”.  Not a big topic for a lot of people.  But an important topic to those few who click.  And we’re getting about 1,200 hits a week on our blogs.  So some days are better than others.  Some days we talk about Anna Nicole Smith and we get tons of hits right.  So we started with that.  We worked it…we dovetailed that…we started blogging because we had to.  And we have, and we’ve split it now.  Each lawyer takes it for a week and does it.  So that it’s not so onerous.  And it also keeps it fresh.  Bu, you know, it was the only way we could sustain it. 

Then we came back and we said okay, we want to make sure, again with our focus being the podcasting, that’s the thing we love to do.  And then we sat down and we said okay, let’s add to that some bells and whistles.  And so we have our next column, is we call Hull and Hull TV.  We’ve got video streaming, we’ve got…we’ve taken the video casting into a new realm and we have some…it’s pretty informal, some of the video casts and stuff.  But they’re things that, for lawyers who are interested in this, on how to do a Will Challenge Trial. 

Other things below that are our Breakfast Series.  We have a breakfast series three times a year.  and now we webcast.  And we say okay, now, if you’re going to webcast,  we’ll want to put it up on the web reasonably quickly after.  We picked that up.  And then our third choice on the Hull and Hull TV is a total friendly…this is…it’s about a concept called The Family Meeting.   It’s got nothing to do with being a lawyer.  It is sort of the public friendly area of our marketing.  But what we keep coming back to is our two podcasts.  We have a public friendly podcast and we have a lawyer friendly podcast.

And our…so we’re just keeping taking our initial model and keep building on it.  Then, of course, as all of us who can do it if we’re lucky enough to have done it is, is that we’ve got to flog a product.  And so we flog our books there.  Again, you know, as has been said, this is not a money-making endeavour.  I mean, my book is published by a publisher who takes 99.9 cents on the dollar of anything that’s sold.  I’m not making a living on it, but we have it there. Again it’s another feed.  We talk about that on our podcasts.  We’ve got twenty series, a twenty podcast series just on that book.  So we help that.  And then finally is our newsletter, which is something we send out four times a year.  Often we’ll be talking about it on our podcast.  We’ll say in our next newsletter we’re going to do this.  So you can see how Terry taught us to sort of stream line these through.  And we use Kate’s firm on the Podwise side to execute it over the year. 

So that just,  I thought might be at least interesting to some people to see where we took 10 listeners to 110.  And I think 110 listeners who’ve listened to ours anyway are core.  I know anytime I see somebody who sends me work and does listen to this stuff, they’re gushing about it.  They can’t get over it.  I mean, a newsletter is the old-fashioned way, we keep it up.  We don’t forget the idea.  The ideas, an the last comment I’ll say is, we looked at this.  And I stole this idea from a podcast from the Harvard Business Review does a cool podcast on business stuff.  And they said podcasting shouldn’t be looked at, in their view and I agree with this, as virile.  It’s not one to one.  I’m not sure that that’s the way…and so I took that you look at it as a seed.  You plant a seed.  And our seeds are things like the Hull and Hull TV, the books and “The Probator” .  And what we do is we try to enhance that.  So I try to hit 10,000…not 10,000…let’s say I hit a 100 people with one of my seeds.  And I think eventually I’m gonna get 2 or 3 new people listening to my podcast.  I don’t rely on the one on one 100% because I know, certainly in our practice, in our world, people aren’t nearly as friendly, people don’t share, people don’t like each other as much.  It’s just…that’s just the reality of the business environment I’m in.  And so I’m not going to expect  one of my competitors to say, you gotta listen to Hull’s podcast, it’s amazing ‘cause it’s not gonna happen.  So anyway. 

Terry Fallis:  Ian, just before we go to Kate, do you wanna mention the interesting promotional idea you pursued to get some of your clients to listen to your podcast?

Ian Hull:  Yeah, I heard it earlier mentioned that it didn’t go well.  We actually sent out iPods to 150 people.  And we bought the cheapest one we could get.  Of course, Apple doesn’t give you a deal even when you buy on mass.  Because unless you’re buying 400,000 of them.  But we sent them out to all of our core listeners.  We’ve got a, you know, we’ve built up and people who are not listeners but people who are referred.  And it went over the top.  And the two things that came out of it; one is, is that people either walked down the hall and handed it to a friend or gave it to their teenage daughter.  And that’s good enough.  I don’t care if they don’t use it.  And the other thing is, is that a lot of them are linked in and they linked it in.  And what it developed is there’s two iPods now.  I have an iPod for business and I have an iPod for music.  And a lot of these people who are getting into that said the same things to me.  They said look, I either gave it away or I got this.  I’ve got one identified just for your podcasts.  And we also sent them out pre-loaded ‘cause lawyers are monkeys.  They can’t even turn on iTunes.  So you give them a pre-loaded iPod and you say to them, if you wanna get it updated, send it back to us and we’ll update it.  And it’s amazing.

Terry Fallis:  It’s a full service firm they have.

Ian Hull:  But it…but you can imagine the loyalty that creates.  Like these guys just go, oh, this is unbelievable.  Because they drive from, you know, Burlington to Toronto everyday in traffic and they fill it with some time with our…and we put on stuff that they ask for.  Like, well can you add a couple of things about this or that.  we don’t put any competitors on because there are no competitors.  We’re doing estate law blogs and podcasts.

Terry Fallis:  Thanks Ian.  Kate, give us a sense of what you’re story is with Podwise and how you got started.

Kate Morgan:  I started working with Ian a little bit at Hull and Hull just doing some marketing on the legal side, which isn’t…doesn’t happen that much.  A lot of lawyers just work within sort of referral systems and they don’t do that much marketing.  Ian’s really like ahead of the game in every aspect.  So we started looking at different things that we could do.  and Ian, through Terry, had got the idea of blogging and podcasting and had already started.  So that’s really, to be honest, that’s the first time I had actually heard of podcasting was last summer.  So I think when you’re in spaces like this, I was just at a MESH conference a little while ago.  And when you’re in these spaces, it almost seems sort of like, what’s next?  Like podcasting and blogging and that kind of stuff, is things people have been doing for years, but in reality, especially within the legal field, it’s not…I mean, I start most of my consultations with a basic description of what a podcast is and how it works.  I mean, even going into RSS is just, you know, way over the top. 

So, I think that within certain spaces, these are still new ideas and new concepts.  So that’s sort of…and then especially within the legal world dealing with releasing information for free and, you know, collaborating and working with others, are not things that are easy to integrate.  So I guess sort of my stance on it is that, as you see with all these different types of podcasts, different subject matter, you know, that’s being transmitted through podcasts, is that these tools can be really adapted.  So depending on the client or depending on, you know, your need, you can adapt a podcast to basically just use it as a distribution channel to get whatever information you need out. 

So, yeah, and I think that always the focus should be on what your knowledge base is and what your passion is and you should be talking about, you know, as has been re-inforced over this…these days, that you need to be talking about something that’s important to you.  So, you know, with a lot of lawyers, law is their passion and is, you know, something that they work on everyday and, you know, means a lot to them.  So for them to be able to have this channel to, you know, initially share legal knowledge and not legal advice, but just legal information, to a general public or to other lawyers, is a great opportunity.  And it starts to really convey a lot of credibility.  And they start to build, you know, separates them from other lawyers who aren’t sharing information like this.  And they really become thought leaders in this space where people aren’t working with social media at all.  And, you know, really sets them apart from the masses. 

And  then you can see this leveraging into potentially more business, more speaking engagements, things like that.  And, you know, even from just hearing speakers today, the off-line world is tied really heavily to the on-line world.  So when you meet somebody in an off-line context and hear them speak and meet them and have a great discussion with them, I think you’re a lot more likely to listen to their podcast.  And I think it works, you know, the other way as well.  When you listen to a really great podcast on-line, you’re obviously, as we said, you’re more likely to buy someone’s book, you’re more likely to go out of your way to hear them speak in on off-line context.  Maybe if you’re looking for legal advice or something like that, you’re more likely to make a consultation with that person. 

So I think that they really play off one another and we can’t really, you know, separate them.  The…like I think sometimes we’re just on-line so much but the off-line context is still, you know, really valid and it’s where a lot of, you know, business and relationships are, you know, happening or built, so.  We’re really looking at podcasting as just a way of sort of highlighting your skills, your services, becoming really credible.  And you’re doing that through distributing information and knowledge.  So those who are sharing the most information are in turn getting the most back, which is a concept that Ian brought up as well.  So I don’t know, just at breakfast we were talking about on Hull on Estates, when we’re managing their blog page, all the comments that we get are people who are getting, you know, these really, really personal long comments, sort of like, you know, “my brother took this, you know, my brother took…got power of attorney and he’s doing all this stuff, you know, and our mother’s in a nursing home and I don’t feel like she, you know, really knows what’s going on.  Like, what can I do?”  People are getting, you know, really personal, people are really desperate for this information and this advice and they’re willing to put themselves out there.  And obviously those comments don’t go on the page, but then it’s a direct sort of path to going to Hull and Hull and looking for, you know, real legal advice that, you know, people are obviously willing to pay for.  So I think that that’s, you know, kind of the relationship as we’re seeing.  You know, there are a lot of people that may just listen to it.  It’s just an idea, it’s just a concept, they don’t go any further with it.  But there’s definitely people out there hungry for knowledge and, you know, hungry for real advice.  So that’s how we’re using blogging and podcasting. 

Terry Fallis:  Okay, thanks.  We are going to open the floor for questions.  There’s one more to talk about.  We really touched on or concentrated on business podcasting.  But Mark and Bob wanted us to do something on the personal side too.  So I actually wrote a novel a couple of years ago and spent about a year flogging it to agents and to publishers.  And it’s a novel about Canadian politics which doesn’t exactly cry out for broad distribution, I understand.  But anyway, I tried that and banged my head against that locked door for a long time and I was getting rather discouraged about it.  Then I went to Podcast Expo in Ontario, California last September and I saw a guy named Scott Sigler speak.  And Scott, if you have any idea who he is, he’s probably…well he’s probably the leading podcast author, book author on podcasting out there.  He sort of started it, the genre.  I saw a session he did and I thought, hmm, that’s kind of interesting.  And I came home and I thought, why am I going to bang my head against the wall for another couple of years trying to get it through.  The first-time author, in this country at least, has a really big mountain to climb to interest even an agent in looking at the manuscript, let alone getting the whole manuscript published as a novel.  Kudos to Charles for managing to break through.  That’s  terrific, but anyway, I decided I’d come back and in the true spirit of social media, I would self-publish the novel, definitely consumer generated content, and podcast the novel one chapter at a time.

So I started doing that in January and I podcast one chapter.  Takes about half an hour to listen to.  Took me a lot longer to podcast it but about a half an hour to listen to.  There are nineteen chapters plus the prologue, so twenty episodes.  And started coming out in January.  I finished it up in May.  I did what I did with “Inside PR”.  I sent promotions to all my podcast friends and once again they were very generous in their time and played those podcast promotions on their shows including CPB.  And Bob actually interviewed me for an episode of Canadian Podcast Buffet.  And lo and behold, it started to take off.  I don’t really know what the iTunes rankings mean.  I don’t know if anyone can explain that to me or what it actually represents, but I was in the new and notable section once.  I’ve been as high as 24 in the Arts and Literature category. 

Shortly after the third chapter was published, I think, or posted, Podiobooks.com called me and asked if they could put it on their feed.  And now I get half my listeners from Podiobooks.com, the rest through the regular Libsyn iTunes posting.  And I’ve been surprised by a couple of things ‘cause for me it was really just a social media experiment.  I had no expectations on what it might yield.  But I have a larger audience than I ever expected.  I kinda thought they’d only be Canadians who are interested in Canadian politics.  Turns out I have authors in many different countries, particularly in countries that have a parliamentary system of government.  I know Brian Person at the back has been kind enough to listen to the whole thing and he’s in the US.  And I’m happy to know that the Canadian political stuff didn’t slow it down too much for him. 

But lot’s more listeners than I thought.  It’s actually created a demand for a sequel which I hadn’t really contemplated.  But , so…yeah, Dwight’s been pushing the sequel idea.  But…so I’m starting to map that out, not wishing to disappoint the listeners.  And the book’s going to be coming out in print form in probably the next 6 to 8 weeks.  And I hope that I’ve built up some demand perhaps for some sales based on the podcast.  And many people have said, you know you want to sell the book.  You’re giving it away for free in an audio format over the internet.  And I don’t really look at it that way.  I just look at it as building a bigger audience for the novel itself.  And it’s been a very positive experience for me.  I’ve started a Facebook group.  Please feel free to join.  There aren’t that many there now but I’m using that to sort of communicate to those who have been listening.  So a really fun experience for me.  So on the personal side and on the business side, it’s worked for us in both areas.  So here endeth the sermon.  Any comments or questions for us? We’re happy to answer them.  Yes?

Bob Goyetche:  Okay, I’m going to start here back with Chris.

Chris Penn:  Hi, I’m Chris from Financial Aid Podcast.  No, I’m not Mitch Joel.  I have too much hair.  Oh, oh now I’m Mitch Joel.  For podcasters, promos tend to stay within the fishbowl.  I mean that through advertising to people who are already inside podcasting. For some of us who don’t have large budgets, what, as PR professionals, would you say is a good low cost way of getting outside the fishbowl and getting a lot of attendance audience?

Terry Fallis:  Well, one of the things you can do, if you know people in the media, we spent a lot of our time in the PR world trying to interest journalists in what we’re doing and what our clients are doing.  So I, in a way, did that for myself, for the book.  I actually did an interview with Steve Paikin who has the show on TVO called The Agenda.  And we did a fifteen-minute interview.  But I’m not sure it aired.  It was really an on-line interview.  But I saw an immediate boost in my subscriptions after that aired.  So doing some straight old-style PR, trying to do some media relations.  Issuing a news release is probably not gonna work, but doing some pitching, doing some email pitches to some journalists and getting out there.  If it’s a book you’re doing, and it’s out, independent book stores don’t get a lot of authors coming through their stores.  So setting up time to actually do a book signing or promoting the podcast while you’re there is not a bad thing to do either…I don’t want to hog all the floor…

Ian Hull:  No, no you’re the PR guy.

Audience Member:  Tommy, the Local with Talkshoe.com.  Question for Ian or Kate, because I know you work on the Hull and Hull blog together.  I noticed on the posting that you posted from Hull and Hull LLP, and yet you mention that the author of each post changes week to week.  Is there a reason you chose to represent it as the company rather than the person writing it?  If I see a blog and I wanna feedback to him, I’d rather write my email to Ian or write my email to Terry, rather than write my email to the company.  Is there a reason you went that route?

Kate Morgan:  They actually, if you scroll down, they finish with the name of whoever wrote the post.

Tommy:  Okay.

Kate Morgan:  So that’s how they wrote it, so you know, we could put a link from Natalia to her profile, which has her email address.  But if you just go to the Hull and Hull site every lawyer has a profile with their email address so…it’s hard to see…but, yeah, it does fall sort of under the firm.

Ian Hull:  Yeah, no, that’s exactly.  But I find it comes back.  The problem with having your name on the door is that everybody wants to talk to the person with the name on the door and it’s the same in the social media world.  And it’s great but it’s also time-consuming.  So anything that I can do to deflect some of that in a day just because we all have too many emails coming in and so we put that at the bottom.  But the truth is, that they usually, a lot of the time, they’ll email direct to me or something like that will come around that way.  But I just wanted to make one comment was this idea that, because I think we really are, like we’re a tiny sliver in this whole world of law and the world of podcasting and everything.  But everything really is mainstream.  I mean, I was looking at the “Economist” this week and I was reading an article on, you know, some rich…her name was described as Queen Brooke, and she grew up poor, married a rich guy at age 51 and died.  The guy died 6 years later in the fifties.  And she spent the next 50 years giving away his money and she’s very well known in New York City and she just died at 104.  Her son let her decay and really basically rot in an apartment that was unclean.  She died of Alzheimer’s.  The son, the grandson had a big piece of litigation over it trying to get her separated from her son.  And the whole story was, it just amazed me, was that that’s what we see every day in our little sliver.  It was interesting enough to have a page in “The Economist” which is a fairly mainstream gig.  And there’s no question that if you tell a story about whatever topic you’re talking about, tell it well.  It goes a long way.  And the other final technology thing, in terms of future that I didn’t mention was, they’re talking and there’s…if we get to the point where we have wireless iPods which is not an impossible scenario, I think it’s going to change the whole model of the monkeys that I have to feed to.  Because once they get set up once, they don’t have to think again.  And so that’s positive too.  I think technology is really gonna…it feeds everything, but it’s really gonna help our little sliver as well.

Terry Fallis:  Couple of hands in the air.

Audience Member:  Thanks, I don’t have to stand, that’s awesome.  I’m…we’re just sort of checking it out right now. but you’re taking all your feedback through emails and comments right now I take it, right?  Are you doing any like audio or like live Skype or Talkshoe call-in sort of show?

Terry Fallis: Well I can sort of answer from our side.  On the Inside PR blog we have a PodPress player right there.  We also have mobiTalk so we accept audio comments.  And one of the things we did early on is, instead of waiting to play the audio comments in the next show, we actually started posting audio comments we received right on the blog.  We would still talk about them in the show and probably play them again, but just to keep the conversation a bit more immediate, we would actually post just the audio comment on the blog, as well, with a little right up and a link. So that’s how we’re doing it.  You’re doing email mainly?

Ian Hull:  Yeah, we’re not good at that.  We’re trying to build that.  It’s really hard.  We’re finding it very hard because everybody just wants free legal advice, and it’s, you know, I try to…I’m happy to give as much as I can.  But not as…you know, at some point I have to actually earn a living and…so our model is not working that great on the feedback side.

Audience Member:  Hi, Robin Brown, I’m a federal government guy trying to get social media going in with the fed’s.

Terry Fallis:  Good for you.

Robin Brown:  This Inside PR, you say, is a business tool.  Is there any way to measure whether it’s…I see where you’re trying to use it to increase your business.  Is there any way to measure that?

Terry Fallis:  Well, only in that, I guess, in the last year, our firm has produced, or I have produced on the personal side, about 150 podcast episodes, most of them are Inside PR, my book.  But the last probably 50 or so have been for clients.  So we have a number of clients who are podcasting.  And our approach to social media was we don’t think we should be counselling clients on it unless we’re actually doing it.  So if PR agencies are appearing before your organizations advising on social media, you should be asking them “well, what’s the…where’s your blog and what’s your podcast?” so I want to listen to them.  So we took that seriously and are actually trying to walk the talk as it were.  So it’s been really helpful to be doing it and it has given us a lot of insight.  So we’ve made the mistakes on our own shows and have been able to apply that to our clients.  So, yeah, it’s paying off.  I don’t know for mainstream PR agencies whether or not it’s gonna be a really lucrative part of the business to turn ourselves into a podcast production house.  That’s not really what we’re hoping to do.  We want to be seen as advisors who can help organizations integrate social media into their broader communications efforts.  Our belief is that social media is a tactic, not a strategy.  Blogging is a tactic, podcasting is a tactic.  The strategy is in the acceptance that conversations are moving markets.  That conversations is the real strategic insight but …so we’re trying to integrate it in our broader PR work as well.

Bob Goyetche:  Great, and I think that calls time Mark?  Thank you Terry, Ian and Kate.  Very informative.

Bob Goyetche:  This episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Mark Blevis:  Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.

Bob Goyetche:   For more info on Canadian Podcast Buffet you can go to our website www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca.

Mark Blevis:  For more information on Podcasters Across Borders visit that website www.podcastersacrossborders.com.

Bob Goyetche:  To contact us you can leave us a voice mail area code 267-220-3701 or our email at: canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.

Mark Blevis:  Of course you’re welcome to join any and all of the Rogic forums including the Canadian Podcast Buffet forum, and Podcasters Across Borders forum, and there’s a link to that at www.rogic.com/forum on the Canadian Podcast Buffet website.

Bob Goyetche:  Canadian Podcast Buffet and Podcasters Across Borders are proud members of the Rogic Podcast Conglomerate.

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=147 0 PAB2007 – Charles Hodgson http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=146 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=146#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2007 01:18:29 +0000 Mark http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=146 Photo of Charles Hodgson taken by Mark BlevisBuilding Your Podcast Inside And Outside Of iTunes presented at PAB2007 by Charles Hodgson

What inspires one to podcast more than 500 episodes? Will this ever make money? Charles will talk about his experiences in building audience, his good luck and frustrations, and the opportunities he sees. Charles uses the opportunity to market his book.

This session deals with a mature subject matter.

Photo by Mark Blevis.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW…

Bob Goyetche:  I’m Bob Goyetche.

Mark Blevis:  I’m Mark Blevis.  This is special edition coverage of Podcasters Across Borders 2007 on the Canadian Podcast Buffet.

Bob Goyetche:  We hope you’re enjoying our journey through Podcasters Across Borders.  What a great weekend it was.  And what a great weekend it will be June 20th to 22nd, 2008.  Keep an eye on Podcasters Across Borders.com for all the information.

Mark Blevis:  Wow, that was nicely done.

Bob Goyetche:  Thank you.

Mark Blevis:  This episode of Canadian Podcast Buffet is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Bob Goyetche:  Our next speaker from Sunday morning, Charles Hodgson from Podictionary “Building a Podcast Inside and Outside of iTunes”.

Charles Hodgson:  I think that next year I’d like you to limit the registration to 10 people because I really haven’t had time to get to know the people that I’d like to get to know.  Or maybe extend the length of this thing to a month, something like that.

So I do a podcast called Podictionary, the podcast for word lovers.  And I want to talk about three things today. What got me started, why I began podcasting.  And that’s important because it tells you why I keep podcasting or so I thought anyway.  What my experiences have been so far, I’m sure you’ll see something familiar there.  But I hope there’s some new reflections as well.  And where it’s going for me.  And I hope that it’ll give you something to chew on a little bit that might be good for you. 

So if you want to become rich quick the thing to do is become a podcaster or you can become an author.  An author in Canada makes on average $12,000 a year from their writing.  So you can see you can retire on that very quickly.  In my own personal case, I had a book deal with a big publisher for a manuscript that I’d already written and it’s been 29 months to bring it to the market.  So you got to hold your breath for a long time.  So for both being a podcaster and being an author, you’d better love it or else it’s not going to last. 

I love doing my podcast.  I love doing my book.  Mark and Bob do not want me to take this time to turn it into a presentation about my book.  But my publisher does want me to take the time to turn this into a presentation about my book.  So I’m going to take just a few minutes to talk about my book and it does actually relate to the podcast, so please bear with me.  It’s a book…as you can see here it’s about the words we use for our bodies.  And some of the words you know and some of them you don’t.  So the little bump in your ear that keeps your ear buds in is called the tragus.  And the reason it’s called the tragus is because there was an ancient Greek word, tragus that already existed and had a different meaning.  But I’m sure many of you even have had teachers in school and stuff that have fuzz growing out of their ears…anybody have that?  Okay, so the tragus in your ear is called the tragus because of people like that, because the ancient Greek word tragus meant Billy Goat.  And the fuzz growing out of your ears is the Billy Goat’s beard. 

Here’s another word that you don’t know.  This is from old English this time.  This is…just means hole.  The word thorough means hole.  Once you know that thorough  means hole, you know why these things you know they’re called nostrils, nose thoroughs.  So this is a book about the words we use for our bodies.  So necessarily I need to talk about our private parts and some of those words are rude.  I’m pretty happy with the way I’ve treated them.  So I’m going to take just a moment to read one very short passage about a rude word and the rude word is “twat”.

“The twat is the female genitalia, it means nothing else.  Strange then that in 1841 the poet Robert Browning used twat in his poem “Pippa Passes”.  He wrote this work during the reign of Victorian propriety when things sexual were never discussed.  Pippa Passes also includes the memorable line “God’s in his heaven – all’s right with the world”.  It was Robert’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning who wrote “How do I love thee, let me count the ways”.  It seems that Mr. Browning was under the impression that a twat was something that nuns wore on their heads.  And so he used the word quite innocently and he went to his grave in 1889 still unaware of his error.  And here’s the offending passage “then owls and bats, cowls and twats, monks and nuns in cloister’s moods adjourn to the oak stump pantry”.  Now I don’t know about you, but that makes me wonder about counting the ways.  While we’re in the neighbourhood, you should know that the word “ass” has been in the English language for more than a thousand years.  So has the word “arse”.  You can see how people might have started to get them mixed up.  And as a matter of fact, when people started using the word “ass” with the attributes of “arse”, other people started to be embarrassed to use the work “ass” and so they needed to invent a new word to mean “ass”.  And so donkey came into English about 300 hundred years ago just because of that.

You use emoticons on your email.  Here’s the emoticon for “ass”.  Here’s one the Jack Layton would like, a big ass, a tight ass, a dumb ass and a smart ass.  So now you know why I think it’s a good book.  So my job was to make other people think it was a good book.  So if you don’t…last year in 2006 there were 260,000 books published, titles.  So if you don’t publicize your book, it sinks like a stone.  So on the second of June, 2005 I figured out what a podcast was.  And I thought if I do a podcast, people are going to hear my voice and they’re going to fall in love with me like I fall in love with the broadcasters on CBC and NPR.  And if they fall in love with me, they’re going to go out and buy my book.  So I went to bed that night, thinking I wonder if that’s a good idea? And at 3:00 in the morning I woke up and I thought, I know that’s a good idea.  So I got out of bed, I went down stairs and I started trying to figure out what I had to do to become a podcaster.  And by the time I went to dinner that night, I had put up my first episode on the word “chauffeur” and I’ve been doing one a day, five days a week ever since.

When you do one a day, five days a week for more than 2 years, you often wonder why am I doing this?  I knew it was ‘cause it was a vehicle that I wanted to sell my book with.  It’s not a podcast of the book.  It’s to compliment the book.  It’s a word everyday with a history of the word and a little story tied around it.  It’s not new words that you don’t know.  It’s supposed to be very accessible, everyone…it’s not supposed to give you a better vocabulary, it’s not supposed to make you smarter, it’s supposed to be entertaining.  So the word “chauffeur” came about because when people started driving cars, they weren’t gas-powered cars, they were steam engine-powered cars.  And to have a steam engine, you need steam.  And to have steam, you have to have a fire and the fire has to be hot.  In French the word hot is “chaud”.  So the chauffeur was the guy who heated the fire, made sure the fire was hot.  So that’s the connection between the podcast and the book.  It’s something you already know but something about it you don’t know.

So when I started I wondered, you know, maybe by the time my book comes out, I can have a 100,000 people listening to me.  Nowhere near.  But I haven’t done too badly, says 2.5 million downloads here.  I’m at 2.7 million downloads.  That sounds like an impressive number so I use it as much as I can.  But in fact what it means is I’ve got somewhere more than 5,000 listens per episode and I don’t have any idea how many people that means I’ve touched but I’ll take a wild guess. Maybe I’ve talked to 10,000 or 20,000 people.  And so for a book that hasn’t even come out yet, I’m happy with that. 

So not to exaggerate the degree of success I’ve had, but to the degree that something’s worked, what is it?  Being there every day I think has been important because if someone liked it they came back the next day and there’s something fresh there for them.  Content is king, everybody knows that so I’ve tried to make it entertaining and interesting when I did it.  I was very early on, there was another podcast the “Word Nerds” and I was lucky enough that they caught my existence and they mentioned me a few times.  And so I think that my first 400 listeners probably came because they were up there mentioning me.  I managed to get exposure on national public radio.  There’s a radio show which is also a podcast called “A Way With Words” and I was on there.  And it says negligible here because I was expecting a big boost when I appeared there in my listenership and I didn’t really see it.  Then in February of 2006, I was featured on that top part of the iTunes store and my listenership went up 50% it was very dramatic.  Right after that I was also on the Yahoo Page.  I was featured and although I know that lots of people are using it.  There’s hundreds of people supposedly subscribed to my podcast through there.  I didn’t really see any peak or anything there. 

I’ve been…appeared in lots of magazines and newspapers and blogs.  And I thinks it’s all good, you know.  But they say that publicity is a cumulative thing ‘cause I didn’t see any of them standing up as single points that raised my profile or raised my listenership.  I tried to take matters into my own hands.  I came up with this elaborate plan to build listeners through a Nano giveaway.  So my advice there is, don’t waste your time or money.  It costs a lot of money, it takes a lot of time and maybe a few people new came on, but not appreciable.  I already had the system down so I did again with a book.  Much cheaper.  The book was on words so it was a narrower focus but again I didn’t really see any results. 

Then this past Christmas enough people got iPods in their stockings that when they plugged them in the internet looking for something to listen, I had 200 new listeners just from Christmas presents.  In March I was lucky enough I had front page coverage on the Living Section of USA Today.  USA Today has a circulation of 1.2 – 1.4 million copies so I don’t know how many pairs of eyes saw that.  Let’s guess, 2 million people saw that.  It was front page.  It was very impressive.  But I only saw 200 people come as listeners that stuck to me.  Maybe 1,000 people came to the website.  So it’s really hard to convert from one medium to another.

Then again late March I was sitting at home and I noticed that my download numbers were going through the ceiling.  What’s going on? How come so many people are downloading my stuff?  So I went out looking to try to find the reason and it turned out that “Grammar Girl” had been on Oprah.  And “Grammar Girl” lower down in the same article on USA Today, she was in there.  So I thought maybe people saw her on Oprah, they Googled her and they saw my stuff in the USA Today article which is also online.  And that’s why I’m getting these downloads.  That’s great.  But the more I examined that, the more I realized that can’t be true because the download numbers were up, up, up but the website numbers were static, so that couldn’t be true.  So I looked a little deeper and I found that I was being featured a second time on iTunes.  But this time it was really obscure.  It was like 3 or 4 pages deep in this long list of other podcasts that they were featuring.  And so what that meant to me was in just over a year, I went from the top level banner exposure on iTunes bringing me about 500 hundred people, 400 people to something really obscure out of the way bringing me 2,000 listeners.  So it meant to me that iTunes is big and getting bigger fast for podcasts.  So iTunes is king in terms of bringing you podcast listeners and that’s great.  But it’s also terrible because they’re the facto internet portal for podcasts, that means that there are no…there is no uTube for podcasts.  There’s no web-based central place for people to go to find out about podcasts.  And that means that there’s millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people who might like your podcast but you are out there in the crowd of billions of web pages instead of being in the thousands of tens of thousands of podcasts within a portal.  And its incumbent on you to try to standout in that crowd. You’re on your own. 

So what that meant for me was I’ve always used Libsyn as my service provider for my podcast.  They have a very simple blog engine and I thought one of the things I needed to do was, I needed to get a per episode player so that if people came to the website they would be able to hear right away without the complicated need to subscribe or anything what I was about.  And I tried and tried to get something like that to work within the Libsyn blogging engine but I couldn’t make it work.  So I was forced to go to WordPress and PodPress.  And thank you Nico.  I think that it really works well, it looks beautiful but I can tell you it was a pain in the ass.  It took me a long time to figure out what the paradigm is, to decide what look I wanted, to get everything working.  I went to a big publisher for my book because they’re going to contact all the bookstores, they’re going to put the books in the boxes, they’re going to do all that stuff for me.  Here I gotta download the software, I gotta keep it updated, I gotta make sure that the plugins don’t conflict and, and debug it.  I think that’s a real hole in the service models of these guys.

So people talked about this before.  Now I’m getting outside of iTunes and I’ve got a website.  Google is the place that I want to be…I’ve got lots…I’ve got hours and hours of audio…I got no text…so for a long time I thought that was a good thing.  My book has about 60,000 – 70,000 words in it.  For my podcast I’ve written over 200,000 words, that’s money in the bank for me.  If  I publish that on the internet will the publisher think it’s as worthwhile?  My fancy New York agent thinks not.  So I’ve got this conflict.  Do I put it up as a transcript or I don’t.  So I tried to, I’ve been doing that for the last couple of months.  I think it’s working in terms of bringing me new people but it’s too early to say.  I’m at the beginning of this SEO Search Engine Optimization journey.  I think though as well as bringing potentially the search engines, someone said before it’s good for people who are deaf who can still access your stuff.  It’s more than that, certainly in the book world.  There’s lots of people who don’t even have sound cards.  So I don’t care if they fall in love with me because they listen to me or they read me.  As long as they buy my book, that’s what I want.

So my podcast is different in that it’s something you might call evergreen.  That means did you find it interesting when I talked about the chauffeur coming from steam engine?…okay…so that’s two years old…it’s still interesting today if you didn’t know it, it’s going to be interesting two years from now.  So it means I can build as every new episode comes, I’m building a larger and larger target and hopefully a web property that’s valuable to me.  But it has a down side as well.  RSS technology was never designed to carry…now I have 540 episodes up there.  And when I got to around 300 I started to get feedback from some listeners that it was breaking their feed meters.  Now that doesn’t mean that smoke was coming out of their computers.  It meant that they were starting to have repeat downloads of stuff they’d already heard.  So that was a problem for me for two reasons; one, I didn’t want to annoy my listeners and have them go away.  I also didn’t want it to screw up my statistics.  So I had to fix it and what I did was I peeled back so the RSS feed just has twenty items on it and the last items…it’s not working right now…but the intention is and it’s worked in the past…if the last item is a backstop episode.  So if people come and they find my stuff and they’re interested and they listen to it and they get…they listen through the first 19, the 20th says there’s hundreds more back at the website.  So I also set up archive feeds so it’s a static feed with a hundred episodes so they can get it through iTunes as well.  And back at the website there’s alphabetical listing to try to round out the value of the web property.  So the tip here is, if you’ve got stuff that’s going to be interesting in the future, keep it available.  See if you can build up the value of your web property around that.

I won’t spend too much time here.  Find other ways that people can subscribe.  Everyone knows how to use email even if they don’t know what RSS is.  Now you never know where this stuff is going.  I mentioned Grammar Girl before.  Well the other thing I found out when I visited her…when I visited iTunes and found out that I was being featured the second time was that she has an audio book for sale.  Less than an hour of audio for $5.  She was number 1 audio book sales for more than a week on iTunes.  She was in the top 20, 30, 40 for weeks, months.  She made real money.  I thought I want one of those.  So the reason I want one of those is because if I have an iBook, first of all I’m going to get some money for something I’ve been doing for free for 2 years.  That’s a good thing.  But you know what else?  iTunes is going to make some money off of this.  And if they’ve been willing to promote me twice with no money involved, I think they’re going to be able to promote me more when there’s money involved.  And even if people who don’t buy the audio book will be interested more likely to find the podcast.  And then they’ve fallen into my trap.  They’re gonna fall in love with me and buy my book.

So, see if you can build parallel vehicles to your podcast ‘cause it’s not only has a chance of making some money…not that I’ve made any yet…and it’ll bolster your interest in your podcast because there’s now, for me, there’s 3 legs to my stool.  There’s no…an audio book may not be the right route for everyone.  Usually audio books are an extension of the product for the publisher ‘cause they already have a successful real book.  And her audio book was unusual in that there was no real book behind it.  So I had the advantage of approaching the publisher.  I actually…she had been a listener of mine before she started podcasting.  So I asked her who her publisher was.  It turned out her publisher was the same publisher that was doing my book.  So the synergy fairies were working for me and so that won’t necessarily be the case for everyone else.

So I thought I was doing this because it was going to help me sell a book.  But it turned out that its’ been a lot more than that.  It’s also advanced my career as a writer, as an author, as a podcaster too.   I know more now about the subject I’m writing about.  I have more credibility.  This is Lynne Truss.  She wrote “Eat Shoots and Leaves”.  Sold multi-million copies.  She, before I even did the podcast, was willing to give me an endorsement blurb for my book.  But this gal would never have given me an endorsement blurb if it hadn’t been for the podcast.  Her name is Erin McKean and she’s the Editor-in-Chief of “American Oxford Dictionaries”.  And she gave me an endorsement blurb for my book because she got to know me through my podcast.  So it’s worth more than money here.  The guy in the funny hat, he’s Richard Lederer.  He was a co-host of “The Way With Words” that NPR Show.  He also gave me a blurb.  And a lot of other people have, you know, taken me seriously, given me the benefit of their time and credibility based on my podcasting.  So with that in mind, once I take some questions, I’ll be happy to do that.  But even afterwards, if you want to talk to me about your show and if I have any ideas to help you juice it up, I’ll be happy to do that.  So that’s it, that’s all I have to say.

Bob Goyetche:  Thank you Charles. I think Joe’s got a question…I’m coming…Sunday morning.  What do you want from me?

Joe:  Not bad. Joe Chisholm, Indie Can Music.  And I just wanna say that what I knew before this weekend was fucking toaster.  And what I’ve learned since has just been fabulous.  You make a good point about a number of things.  I know that just looking at my web statistics that although everyone I know in the music business, and I’m sort of a music oriented show is all Apple, Apple, Apple.  But the people who actually listen, who actually download my show, they’re less than 10%.  And so the iTunes thing is very limiting.  Did you say or not say that there is any kind of pc based promoter of podcasts out there?

Charles Hodgson:  Well iTunes is cross platform.  But the problem…the barrier there is someone who hasn’t bought an iPod is unlikely to have downloaded and installed iTunes.  Now there are lots of people who have. But there’s lots more, there’s the majority of people who haven’t.  So for them, it’s your website that they…they don’t have access to the Apple directory or the iPod or the iTunes directory and that sort of thing.  So…and getting someone to download and install software they don’t really care or know about, that’s a barrier.  Anyone else?

Audience Member:  Did you bring your book?

Charles Hodgson:  My book comes out in August, this in an advance copy.  You can see I’m shamelessly promoting every way I can.

Bob Goyetche:  I hadn’t noticed.  So, any questions?  Well, thank you Charles.

Charles Hodgson:  Thank you.

Bob Goyetche:  This episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Mark Blevis:  Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.

Bob Goyetche:   For more info on Canadian Podcast Buffet you can go to our website www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca.

Mark Blevis:  For more information on Podcasters Across Borders visit that website www.podcastersacrossborders.com.

Bob Goyetche:  To contact us you can leave us a voice mail area code 267-220-3701 or our email at: canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.

Mark Blevis:  Of course you’re welcome to join any and all of the Rogic forums including the Canadian Podcast Buffet forum, and Podcasters Across Borders forum, and there’s a link to that at www.rogic.com/forum on the Canadian Podcast Buffet website.

Bob Goyetche:  Canadian Podcast Buffet and Podcasters Across Borders are proud members of the Rogic Podcast Conglomerate.

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=146 0 PAB2007 – Neil Gorman http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=151 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=151#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2007 03:56:44 +0000 Mark http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=151 Photo of Neil Gorman by Whitney HoffmanBroken Toasters, William Shatner and Podcast Burnout: Trust me, they’re all related presented at PAB2007 by Neil Gorman

Neil Gorman’s now famous presentation in which he explains the value of a podcaster’s hard work, gives real examples of why that work should not be abandoned and offers strategies to keep your podcast fresh.

NOTE: Songs performed by William Shatner removed for copyright reasons. This podcast qualifies for the iTunes explicit tag.

Photo by Whitney Hoffman.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW…

Mark Blevis: I’m Mark Blevis.

Bob Goyetche: I’m Bob Goyetche.

Audience: Your podcast is not a fucking toaster.

Bob Goyetche: And welcome to special coverage of Podcasters Across Borders 2007 right here on the Canadian Podcast Buffet.

Mark Blevis: We don’t work well off scripts. Nevertheless, this episode is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Bob Goyetche: So after listening to this session, you’re going to see even once again why you want to be at Podcasters Across Borders 2008 which is June 20th, 21st and 22nd in lovely Kingston, Ontario. You can be there, you should be there, just be there.

Mark Blevis: This next session is one that earned the only standing ovation at Podcasters Across Borders 2007 and it was given by a…well, can we call him a virgin presenter?

Bob Goyetche: Ah, I’m not going to call him that.

Mark Blevis: Okay, what would you call him?

Bob Goyetche: I would call him a friend.

Mark Blevis: A friend who would never…who by his own admission had never presented in public before.

Bob Goyetche: Now, we gave him a lift to the conference in our car and he was feverishly working away at this presentation in the back seat. And he gave such a polished performance and it was talked about and there’s video available of this session. It was talked about for weeks afterwards.

Mark Blevis: So I would potentially call this the defining presentation of Podcasters Across Borders 2007 given by Neil Gorman of the Comicology and Ology Podcasts, this is “Broken Toasters, William Shatner and Podcast Burnout”. Trust me, they all tie together and there’s a few expletives in here.

Neil Gorman: My name’s Neil Gorman. I do tend to talk really, really, really fast all of the time. I got a lot of stuff I kinda wanna get through. But if I’m really overwhelming you, if you just kinda like give me a signal, I promise to try to slow down. I might not be able to, but I will give it a shot. So, ah, you know, just wanted to say that up front alright everybody good?

Like I said, my name is Neil Gorman and I’m a podcaster currently doing two shows; one’s called Comicology and it started in February of 2005. So been doing it up until then. I’m over a hundred episodes, don’t know exactly how many at this point. Do another called Ology. And Ology is really just a show where I talk about other things that are interesting to me because they just wouldn’t fit in the other show that I was doing. And I had other things that I wanted to talk about. So most importantly, you guys got to get this, I’m fucking cool, alright. I mean that, like I am really, really, really, cool. And if you think that I’m not, you’re wrong and that’s really important.

So today, I got to talk about something very important. It’s called podcasting burnout. And I really want people to understand how to avoid it. You can call it a bunch of different things: pod fade, flash in the pan, taking a hiatus. There’s a bunch of different things. But really it all boils down to the same thing. Sometimes podcasters decide that they’re going to not do their show anymore for whatever reason. So we have to agree on this that we all want to avoid podcaster burnout. Do we all agree? Okay great, we’re all on the same page, wonderful, yes, alright. My goal by the end of this talk, I want you guys to kinda of have achieved three things here right. I want you to have a better understanding of how to avoid podcaster burnout. I want you to have fun as you podcast. And I want you guys to think that I’m more cool than Julien Smith, alright. Julien who? If you guys don’t know, there’s Julien alright. He’s cool, alright. This guy, that’s me, I’m more cool alright. That’s just the way it is, moving on, alright.

At times, it’ll seem like I go off on really bizarre tangents, like I’m coming out of left field. I’m talking about William Shatner’s Studio 60, Broken Toasters, what the hell does that have to do with podcasting? It does, and if you wait until the end, it will make sense, I absolutely promise you that, alright. And if it doesn’t, you know, you can direct your hate mail to neilgorman@gmail.com and I will read it and I will respond…okay…okay…we’re going, let’s talk about podcaster burnout.

To understand podcaster burnout we had to take a look at motivation. What it is that motivates a podcaster? Alright, you got to take a look at what is it that makes a podcaster hungry? These are very, very important questions that we all need to consider here alright. So the best way I think you can understand podcasting motivation is to take time before podcasting, or as I call it BP, because before podcasting, there wasn’t any and we all got motivated to do this somehow. Basically, at that point, content was created and distributed mainly by idiots who wanted to sell you stuff. That’s what their goal was, right? Okay, selling stuff isn’t bad. I buy stuff. I’ve been sold stuff. Some really, really good stuff. I’ve actually sold other people things. Not a bad thing in and of itself.

However, when you’re NBC or MTV, you’ve got to realize what they’re doing here is they’re marketing, their trying to sell to that blue section of this pie graph right? That’s not the most number of people over all. But it’s the biggest section of the pie. The way to look at this is to think of this part over here as like rock music right. There’s a lot of radio stations that play rock music. There’s not a lot of radio stations that play country or polka or some other kind of niche music. But if you added up all those other kinds of things together, they would equal a bigger part of the pie than the people who listen to rock. But since they’re all niches and everybody kinda has different aesthetics, nobody really markets to them, right. One thing were you can…and what this leads to is really stupid decisions being made in my humble opinion here. Here’s an example of one. Studio 60. Did anybody watch this show? Okay, it was a really great show I think. And if you take a look at the numbers of the show, it had the highest percentage of people with 4 year degrees watching it, highest number of people making over $75,000, over $100,000, and also the highest number of people watching it in a time-shifted nature, meaning they’re watching it on a TiVo, a DVR, they’re downloading it from iTunes, things like that. Those numbers are impressive, I think. I’d look at those and I would think, that is a very successful show.

However, they didn’t agree. It was cancelled, alright, gone. Why is that? Because people who had that much money, they had a large disposable income. With a large disposable income, you can do things like buy a TiVo, right? TiVo… when you watch things on TiVo, how many of you guys have TiVo’s?…anybody…do you watch commercials? That’s exactly it. Now those advertisers, those people I talked about NBC, MTV, the big part of the pie graph they’re trying to market to. They’re not actually selling you a show. The show is not the product they’re trying to sell to you. They take that product, they sell it to people who make ads, right. They say, you know, this guy over here he makes ads. We got this show, a lot of people watch it. If you put your commercial on our show, that means a bunch of eyes and a bunch of ears are gonna see and hear your commercial. And you go, okay, I’m impressed by that, I want to advertise with you. So what they’re actually selling is your eyes and your ears. That is their product. When you are watching the show on TiVo, they weren’t selling that anymore. Therefore there wasn’t a lot of advertising dollars. So basically, you had great content on this show that looked like it wasn’t selling things. And as a result, got cancelled. No more great content. And that, I think, is a very, very bad thing, which is why making content only to sell stuff, only to make money, can be bad. It’s not necessarily bad, but it definitely can be.

Quick review. Before podcasting, a time when mainly idiots were concerned about making money, they had control over content creation and content distribution. Bad times until really, really smart dude, really, really, charismatic guy team up and more or less create podcasting, which is why we’re all here today, alright. They did this thing, bunch of people. First it wasn’t a big thing. I mean, obviously podcasting started and you didn’t go from like one day no podcasting to this, that we see here today, you know, over a hundred people sitting together in a room jamming about podcasting, you know.

But over time people, more people start to listen, more people start to podcast. It builds momentum, it’s that snowball going down the hill getting bigger and bigger and bigger as it goes, you know. The numbers grew, nerds started to talk about it in the days before, you know, DiG and things like that. They talked about it on Slashdot, Warren Ellis, Usenet, Scripting News, Curry.com. What were they saying? They were saying two things mainly I believe; the first thing – freedom, alright. That’s what people were saying with podcasting – freedom. They had freedom from idiots who only wanted to sell them something. And that’s actually a great freedom. Have you guys ever gone into a store wearing your ear buds before? When I do that, people don’t come up to me and say “hey can I help you find something?”. And I love that because I can find the stuff myself. I don’t want you to come up to me and try to sell me things.

That was one of the great things about podcasting. It was…you freed yourself from that. There wasn’t commercials, there wasn’t people constantly trying to say “buy this, buy this, buy this”, do you feel inadequate? we’ve got something that’ll make you feel great, you know. They just kept on saying whatever it is they wanted to. There was freedom from content that you just didn’t care about anymore. How many times have you guys been watching a commercial, a TV show, there’s a commercial for a product you care nothing about, alright. Like I’m a man, I don’t care about tampons. Sometimes there’s commercials for them on TV. That’s ineffective marketing, because I just don’t care, right.

Freedom to speak about things that matter to you and most importantly, I think, freedom to innovate is what was really, really important. It gave you the freedom also to take something that you always wanted. You always wanted to hear a show, in my case, about comic books. Comic books aren’t in main stream media. They never have been, probably aren’t ever going to be ‘cause they’re a very small niche. You don’t hear them on the radio, you don’t see them on television. Maybe an occasional reference in a Kevin Smith movie, but that’s it, right.

Podcasting gave me the freedom to make the show that I always wanted to hear, and it gave everybody else here that exact same freedom. It’s open to you, it’s still open to you today. If there’s…you wanna make…I remember last year at this conference, I was like, you know, I said this thing to somebody here and I’m like, it would be really great if there, you know, somebody wants to make a show about libraries, you know. And I mean, they could do that. And Jim from Check It Out was like right nearby and he was like, actually, you know, I did that. And I was just like, that’s what I’m talking about! You know, you would never see that on TV, but now you hear in on the radio, right.

Second thing – explore. And this is something that was really, really cool about podcasting. Podcasting was a frontier. Ted said this in his speech on Saturday, remember that, alright. Remember that I said podcasting is a frontier. Put that in your brain, file it away ;cause I’m going to ask you to remember it later. You had…it was easy to try new stuff. It was easy to go where no one had gone before. It was easy to say something that no one had said before and that felt great, you know what I mean? When you feel like you’re the first one to do it, you feel like you’re the first one to step out onto that frontier and like claim something as your own. That’s a really good feeling. It made people feel great. Those endorphins started pumping in their brains and podcasting made people feel good, alright. So review, answer the following question out loud.

What did I say podcasting was? Frontier…exactly alright a frontier. Ted said it as well on Saturday. Good job, you guys are very smart. Which brings me to…anybody want to take a guess at what I’m going to say? Shatner…that’s what it brings me to, alright. Okay, did you see that coming?

Alright, I’m going to talk about Shatner for two reasons, alright. The first way that Shatner pertains to podcasting burnout is Shatner is a symbol. A symbol of Star Trek, which is a story about space, the final frontier. Frontier – podcasting is a frontier. It all comes together here, you see what I’m saying? You see that connection coming? Alright, humans need a frontier. They need to explore it, they need to keep themselves happy. Imagine a life where everything that can be done has been done by you in every conceivable way that it can be done. Is that a life worth living? For most people – no. The thing that keeps people getting up in the morning and going out into the world is the idea that they’ll experience something new. We’re always exploring new ideas, we’re exploring new people, we’re exploring new places. That’s why we travel, that’s why we go to parties where we know there’s going to be a lot of annoying people. But there might be somebody who’s worth meeting. We want to explore a new relationship. That’s just part of being human. Its part of the human condition, alright.

Podcasting in the frontier. People explored, they experimented, they innovated, they reinvented, they did a bunch of different things. They basically went out into their digital wilderness and said, I want you to listen to what I have to say. I’m not going to try to sell you something. I’m not getting paid to say this. Someone just had something to say and they said it and people listened. That was it, right? That was the beginning of podcasting right there. I got it, I’m going to say it, you’re going to listen. And the thing is here, it didn’t stop there. People were surprised, ‘cause you went out into that wilderness right. And you said, this is what I have to say and then somebody over there said something back to you. It was like what? Somebody said something back? Somebody cares about comics? Wow, you know and then somebody else did it and somebody else. You got e-mails, audio comments, IM chats. A bunch of different things and everybody…all of us have relationships with the people who entertain us. Those characters on the show Studio 60 I talked about, I have a relationship with them, they affect me. But they don’t know how they affect me. It’s in one way. They just affect me and I can’t communicate back to them. Podcasting – totally different. Podcasting gave people the ability to create meaningful relationships because of that interaction that was going on here. So as you’re exploring, you’re exploring new people, you’re making meaningful relationships. And that created a buzz. So, in short, podcasting is a time when people were creating new content, listening to new things with newish technology and a new mediascape frontier with new people and creating meaningful relationships.

But as the years went by, the new kinda became old. The sheen kinda faded a little bit. You started to do things and that new factor sort of wore off. And despite however many times you’ve heard the word monetize, that was like the…it was like Prozac for podcasting is what I like to call it. You know, you go to a shrink. You’re like, I’m kinda feeling a little depressed. They go here, take that, it’ll make you feel better. You know, it’s like that’s not the answer, you know what I mean? And monetization I don’t think was the answer for podcasting either. And I don’t know if anybody agrees or disagrees here but that’s just my opinion and I’m sticking to it.

Alright the frontier became explored and that led to a sense of quiet desperation. And was very careful in choosing those words to describe what I think happens to podcasters as they get burned out. Quiet desperation. You’re desperate to recapture that feeling, you’re desperate to get those more meaningful relationships, you’re desperate to get whatever it was back that you had when you started podcasting, you’re desperate. And that desperation makes you quiet. You stop talking. And when you don’t talk, you can’t make meaningful relationships. Quiet desperation can also be called podcast burnout. It’s a very, very terrible thing to go through, seriously, because you have this great feeling. It goes away, you’re feeling burned out. No one ever wants to feel that, but it happens. We need to find a way to stop it. See, cool for an American. Want to put that in there?…yeah…un huh. All you French-speaking. Oh, and by the way, I find…William Shatner…he’s a Canadian, you know, so.

Umm, so in short, you can…you guys can keep exploring alright. If you start to feel burned out, you can do a new show. It’s not hard to do a new show. Making a new podcast is easy. You can do new things with your current show. And they’re simple things. Adding a co-host, right. I did that really recently. Totally changed up my show, you know what I mean? I…it was like wow, I had this guy, I can play off of him and he can play off of me. Maybe you start doing interviews, you get a guest, you put something in there that wasn’t there before. It changes it up. You change up your format, you know what I mean? Maybe you do a long show, you make it shorter. Short show, you make it long, but you do something different, you know what I mean. And that can really make things better.

And this is a really important thing here. There’s often times not an easy solution to problems, but there is simple one. And this is what I think is that simple solution. Burnout’s nothing more than a state of mind. It’s a way you think, right. It’s not magic, it’s just the truth, okay. If you think burned out, you will act burned out. If you change your thinking, you will not do that. And I don’t know what it is that changes people’s thinking. Different people have different things. But change your thinking. Don’t think burned out thoughts, think exploring thoughts and it will change things. And, I mean that’s sounds really simple and maybe you people think it sounds new-agey and corny and stuff like that and I’m about to pull out some crystals, but I’m not, you know. It’s just the truth. You think differently, you’ll act differently. I guarantee it because you have freedom, okay. So that’s something that I think is really important, period, end of discussion. How’s that for a universal truth, Tod?

Tod Maffin: That was a great universal truth.

Neil Gorman: You would…wow, he said that without even having a microphone. It’s almost like I staged it…oh my god…alright. So second thing…this…the way this pertains to podcasting burnout. We’re talking about Shatner here. Shatner was an example of a dude who always tries new things like “hey Mr. Tambourine Man” you know. Music. He was doing music and it sucked, alright. But sometimes he did some new original stuff…like this…. Alright, this is a song that is on the album I just showed you called “Has Been”. It’s a song called “I Can’t Get Behind That”. It’s hilarious, it’s new, it’s innovative. When you hear it, it’ll get stuck in your head and I guarantee you’ll want to hear more, but I won’t share. Alright so that song that you just heard here, alright, that was amazing. That…basically what happened here and this is sort of a mini point I’m going to make. That’s Ben Folds. He heard Shatner doing “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man” and he’s like no, no, no, no, no. But this is just way too cool to pass up. So he’s like, I’ll produce you, right. So you got the production talent. He teamed him up. The other guy you heard was Henry Rollins in that, with William Shatner, to create that song. That’s what I’m talking about. Teaming up with new people, doing new things, totally…I mean Shatner. Did you ever expect to hear that from Shatner? I sure as hell didn’t, you know what I mean. It changed things up. So the mini point is that sometimes working with the right people can turn something that’s really crap into something amazing which you just heard.

Another thing that can happen is sometimes, to cure podcaster burnout…wait, what the hell…my slides are out of order here…ununuh…I’m going to catch up, gonna catch up…okay, we’re back to Shatner…alright that’s what was going on here, alright…sometimes he does like old things, alright. This is a song called Common People…alright so there you go. That’s the gist of it there. But the point is…the reason I brought Shatner up and I did those little songs is to really drive home the point. He’s always trying something new alright. Always exploring, constantly. And you know what? Sometimes he does stuff like “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man” and it blows. And no one likes it and everybody makes fun of him in newspapers, on the internet and stuff like that. And he’s actually got to deal with that. But the point is, like he might have failed at doing something. But when you try to do something, sometimes, you know, where you get to, either success or failure, is not as important as trying to get there, the journey along the way. You know ,more new agey stuff, right.

So like I said before, when you feel burned out, you just think of Shatner alright. Seriously. Take this image. Look at this alright. This is wacky alright. This is like what the hell? You put that image in your head and when you start to…you’re like man, I don’t want to do a show today, I feel burned out, try to remember this right. You’ll smile, I bet yeah, you know what I mean. And if anyone wants this picture again, neilgorman@gmail.com. I’ll e-mail it to you. You can put it in the drawer for a rainy day when you feel bummed out, pull that out, start laughing. It’ll change the way that you think. And just doing that, when you start to laugh, you feel better. And, you know, it’ll probably be easier to do a show. Change the way you’re thinking, you can cure burnout alright. So just let that crazy ass be an inspiration to you, never stop exploring.

Next point – broken toasters. I…what, you guys wondered how I was going to work this in, ‘cause it’s in the title of the talk here okay. Broken toasters. Question: what do you do when your toaster breaks? Yeah, exactly. You go out and you get a new one. Why? Well, there’s a lot of reasons why. Toasters are cheap, they’re easy to get. It’s not like you have an emotional attachment to it. Sometimes your old toaster doesn’t do bagels and you start eating more bagels. You killed somebody with your toaster. You need to get rid of the evidence. I misspelled the word. Your toaster starts to burn crap, you know. There’s lots of reasons here. But the two things that I really want you to remember is that your podcasters…did you hear…that didn’t work, you missed my sound cue…turn that up, we’re going to try that again…first thing I want you to remember…your podcast is not a fucking toaster…thank you Julien. I’m so amazed. Again, somebody without a microphone talking to the crowd. The wonders of technology.

Alright, so you know, the thing is here your podcast. You’ve invested a lot of stuff. You’ve invested your time, your energy, your passion and money over time. Over time is really important. It doesn’t take a lot of money to start a podcast. $20 for hosting, right, a month. You do that over months. 20 becomes 40, 80 and it adds up, So if you’ve done your podcast for 6 months, you’ve actually, just for hosting, tossed in a ton of money right. That’s a lot of money over time. That’s an investment. Much more, much, much more than you will ever invest in a toaster alright. You see what I’m saying here? People shouldn’t treat their podcast like a broken toaster, where it’s like, oh, it’s broken. No, like you’ve invested something into this. Take some pride in it, take some ownership. Don’t toss it away like a broken toaster. When I demoed this talk for people, they actually said that they were going to start using that as like a way to describe things. When a podcaster just gives up their thing, they’re gonna say, yeah, their podcast is a toaster. And that’s the thing, like don’t treat your podcast like a toaster. It’s not a toaster alright, remember what Julien said…”your podcast is not a fucking toaster”. You want a picture of this? Okay…alright and that’s really important. Again Julien, thank you very much for your wonderful participation. I appreciate that alright.

Your podcast is not a toaster, that’s true. Except when it’s false.

Mark Blevis: Can we get a shirt with that printed on it?

Neil Gorman: Let’s do it, okay. Like I said, sometimes your podcast is a toaster, ‘cause podcasting…I said it costs over time. And when you start to feel burned out, you can start a new show because starting a new show is about the same kind of investment as buying a toaster. It doesn’t take a lot of time. About as much time to go…okay…to go, you know, out and buy a toaster. And about as much money as it costs to buy a toaster, you know what I mean? It’s a quick investment seriously. So maybe you decide one day you’re bored with talking what you’re talking about and you want to talk about something else which is really interesting to you, right? And I’m gonna just make this up on the fly here. You’re doing a podcast about cars and you’re kinda sick of talking about cars. And you just saw something and it was about Sigmund Freud and you’re like, that’s interesting. And you did some reading and you thought it was cool. And you maybe want to do a new show. If you don’t want to put a long term investment into it, make a six show, a four show, a twelve show, you know, micro series or miniseries, whatever you want to call it, about that. You know, just for a change of scenery, just go ahead and do that. It won’t cost you a lot of money. There’s a lot of tools out there where you can host the stuff for free. You can make the stuff for free. Just do it as a side project for fun, seriously. Doing new things for fun changes the way you think and it cures burnout. It’s real easy. And it’s as easy as starting, you know, getting a toaster. So review. Starting a new show is easy and as cheap as buying a toaster. But the more you put into your show, it costs, you know what I mean. And people start to get something out of it, you start to get something out of it. You invest more and more and more. And it becomes worth a lot more than a toaster over time. The longer you’ve been doing your show, its…the less you should treat it like a toaster, because the more you’ve put into it. Alright, that’s something which is really, really, really important to remember.

So review here. I’m more cool…your podcast in not a fucking toaster…I just said that sometimes it is like a fucking toaster, Julien, alright. This is about me, not about you. You need to stop, okay. I’ll kick your ass…sit down…anyways, you guys got to remember this. This is the final stretch here, alright. Never forget that you have freedom. That is a very important thing to remember. As a podcaster, you don’t got a producer or advertisers or other people coming up to you saying “you know what, I really don’t think this works, I think you need to take that and make it a little bit shorter because if you don’t, then we’re not going to be able to get the advertising in and, you know, get those people who really like those carpets” or whatever. You know, I mean, you just don’t got that goin’ on. You’re free, you know what I mean. If somebody comes to you and it’s like, you know, “you know, your show dude, I mean there’s this thing about it”. Just be like, okay, yeah whatever, I don’t care about you. You know, or you can care. You have the option. You’re free, you know what I mean. And that’s why I bring that up. Sometimes people will give you criticism which is not valid. Other times they give you criticism that’s very valid. It’s up to you to take it or leave it. You have freedom alright. You always explore because the frontier’s just a mindset. It’s a mindset, remember that. Frontier – mindset. Start thinking like a frontiersman. Start thinking like that and you will see things differently. Don’t think like a burned out podcaster. Think like a frontier person podcaster. Go crazy. Alright, once again, just remember that when you start to feel burned out. It’ll make you feel better, alright. So, that’s the end of my talk. I don’t know how much time I got left, if I got time for questions or not.

Wow…thank you.

Mark Blevis: We have 8 minutes for questions. The floor is now open for questions. Or did he say it all. I’m sorry, Julien…where’s Julien? Do you have something you want to say?

Julien Smith: I hate you… your podcast is not a fucking toaster.

Mark Blevis: Any questions?

Tod Maffin: Again.

Mark Blevis: Hit it one more time.

Neil Gorman: You know, I think it’s really interesting that…like I have a clip up here and the real guy is sitting back there. Like, you could just go to Julien and be like, say it, say it, you know, and it’s…

Julien Smith: It’s on Flickr now. What the hell did you do?

Neil Gorman: My goal…actually I had a little side goal that I decided not to tell anybody about. My goal is that years later, like, you know, 15 years down the road, someone will see Julien Smith, you know, at an airport or something, and be like, “dude, your podcast is not a fucking toaster” or something, you know. So if I achieved that, I’m really happy.

Mark Blevis: And you know, it’s too bad Shane and Tom already left, ‘cause maybe they would’ve printed up a shirt.

Neil Gorman: They actually…yeah, they left. I saw them on their way out.

Mark Blevis: No questions? None? Oh, play the Shatner song.

Neil Gorman: The Shatner song?

Mark Blevis: You’ve got a couple minutes to burn. Go for it.

Neil Gorman: Which Shatner song do you want to hear? I don’t have that one. I…okay. You have two choices. You have…“Can’t Get Behind That” is one and the other one is “Common People”. Who wants to hear “Can’t Get Behind That”? “Common People”? Okay, they won.

Mark Blevis: You have six minutes to play that song.

Neil Gorman: It’s not that long, I don’t think.

I can’t remember what Julien said.

Mark Blevis: Broken toys…

Bob Goyetche: Wait, wait, let’s…everybody, ‘cause the audio is still recording. It would be great if everybody said to Julien quote, at the same time at the top of your lungs. So, on the count of three, you’re all Julien.

ONE – TWO – THREE

Audience: Your podcast is not a fucking toaster.

Bob Goyetche: This episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Mark Blevis: Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.

Bob Goyetche: For more info on Canadian Podcast Buffet you can go to our website www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca.

Mark Blevis: For more information on Podcasters Across Borders visit that website www.podcastersacrossborders.com.

Bob Goyetche: To contact us you can leave us a voice mail, area code 267-220-3701 or our e-mail at: canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.

Mark Blevis: Of course you’re welcome to join any and all of the Rogic forums including the Canadian Podcast Buffet forum, and Podcasters Across Borders forum, and there’s a link to that at www.rogic.com/forum on the Canadian Podcast Buffet website.

Bob Goyetche: Canadian Podcast Buffet and Podcasters Across Borders are proud members of the Rogic Podcast Conglomerate.

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=151 2 PAB2007 – Jack Ward http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=145 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=145#comments Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:38:54 +0000 Mark http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=145 Photo of Jack Ward taken by Mark BlevisAudio Drama In Podcasts presented at PAB2007 by Jack Ward

Jack speaks about using audio drama in podcasts… encouraging it through different shows, creating audio works and telling stories.

Photo by Mark Blevis.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW…

Bob Goyetche:  I’m Bob Goyetche.

Mark Blevis:  I’m Mark Blevis.  This is special edition coverage of Podcasters Across Borders 2007 on the Canadian Podcast Buffet.

Bob Goyetche:  Hey you got through it. Cool.  This episode is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Mark Blevis:  Podcasters Across Borders 2008 featuring lots of amazing sessions just like the one you’re about to hear is taking place June 20th through 22nd, 2008 at the Holiday Inn, Kingston Waterfront, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.  Keep watching the Can...keep listening to the Canadian Podcast Buffet and watching Podcasters Across Borders.com for details on how you can register.

Bob Goyetche:  Our next speaker Jack Ward from the Sonic Society with his special session on Audio Drama and Podcasting and How It Might Just Save Your Life.

Jack Ward:  Good afternoon and welcome.  I realize it’s only 10:00 in the morning, but we’re podcasting.  And currently in Korea, it is a quite pleasant 12° this winter and 3 this afternoon.  Podcasting allows us to cover the globe and effectively be anywhere at any time.  Here I am…I am here…and that’s me with the President.  Sorry about the WMD’s.  Audio also allows us to be any nationality.  And even though I’m not English, it allows me to pretend to be so, quite badly. 

Tonight’s topic is “Audio Drama: It Might Just Save Your Life”.  My name is Jack Ward and the person operating the machinery is God.  I know what you’re thinking: sure, audio drama is more fun than sex in a bucket of chips.  But can it really save my life?  Before we define what audio drama or audio cinema is, as we like to call it, remember that.  Before we draw audio cinema is what we’d like to call it, let us identify what it is not.  Audio cinema is not podcasting novel or short stories.  In our in-depth study, we discovered some very disturbing facts about pod novels.  They tend to fold in upon themselves in various ways.  For example, JC Hutchins, famous for his “Seven Son” trilogy can be heard on Scott Siglers podcast Sharing the Pain who’s often more times than not found in one of Tee Morris’s podcasts who talks a great deal about Mur Lafferty’s “Geek Fu” and “I Should Be Writing” or as a podcast “Pseudopod” that sister to Steve and Lisa ’s “Escape Pod” which is also nominated along with Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff’s “Shadow Falls” and Patrick McLeans “How to Succeed in Evil” not to be confused or succeeded with Michael Mennenga’s “Slice of SciFi” or the Time Travel Show although he has alternate evil personas.

In fact, the whole business is so incestuous that if Tee Morris and Mur Lafferty ever did come together, their love child would be “Teeheelaf”.  Yeah, not a joking matter indeed.  All the while LibriVox waits for us all to die, and our work to drift into the public domain.  Is Hugh McGuire here?  Yeah, I’m sorry, is Hugh McGuire here? Thank you so much for coming out, you smug bastard.  Orwell wrote about you, you know.  It’s a shame you can’t record Animal Farm yet, isn’t it?…you communist…anyway, where was I?  Audio cinema is not simply sound effects put into your rants, discussions or interviews and to make you sound clever.  If it didn’t work for Benny Hill, it won’t work for you.  Audio cinema is not a dead art.  The afterlife is better left to god.  Thanks to podcasting, audio cinema is alive and well and growing.  It’s even moving past the BBC and into Canadian companies.  I can’t sustain the British accent anymore, I’m sorry.  You can look for some really fantastic audio cinema like Decoder Ring Theatre, they’re just out of Toronto.  There’s some really…you ever heard of Decoder Ring Theatre…anyone?…oh good, that’s good… every, hear every other week, you can hear every other week Decoder Ring Gregg Taylor, Clarissa der Nederlanden and a company of actors that bring you one or more continuing episodes of two different shows; 13 episodes of the “The Red Panda” and homage to such classic audio hero’s as “The Shadow” and “The Green Hornet”.  And they have “Black Jack Justice”.  Which is a gritty classic film audio noir detective show.  There’s also the works of Pied Piper from Southern Ontario that’s begun on radio.  And a tiny little show that’s doing very well on the Podcast Pickle…okay, very well on the Podcast Pickle.  “The Sonic Society”, for those of you who do not know us, showcases the very best in the modern audio cinema from around the world.  Quite simply audio companies and individuals send us their shows and we showcase their work on our weekly series.  We’ve done fairly well, although this may be pushing it. 

So we’ve got some examples of modern audio cinema.  What do you need to put together to get your own?  Five things.  So simple you can count them on your hand.  Number one: your thumb, or as I call it, my script, because you need an opposable thumb to hold a pencil…yeah…you need to format your script to industry standards.  And you don’t really need to format it, but if you don’t, some people will sneer at you.  While the BBC has its own format, the CBC does as well and then there’s the old-fashioned radio drama format.  Most folks tend to go with the modern style of audio script writing…hmm, you can do this in your Word or favourite word processor, but that can be really slow.  There’s some professional programs out there; there’s like Final Draft.  And you’ll have to make some modifications in the template for Final Draft to get it what you want.  Currently I’m working with some folks in Open Source with a program called Celtics and we should be able to announce a Celtics audio drama template very soon.  Open Source, for those of you who don’t know…you all know…but it’s an all purpose vehicle working on both Windows, Apple and Linux.  There is all kinds of references on writing audio drama if you’re looking for that.  The To-Do’s, the Not To-Do’s and the big To-Do’s of the whole thing.  And soon I’ll have a 5-minute series called Jackie In The Land Of Hackneyed Writing” which all describes this in short five minutes audio snippets. 

Once you have a script, you’ll need someone to speak your lines.  Actors.  Let’s call that your pointer finger, simply because you want someone else to do it.  There’s also three routes to go this way.  You can go with the ACTRA Members professional.  They will run you about $100 an hour with a minimum of 4 hours each person.  And with a show like our old “Firefly – Old Wounds”, it would cost us somewhere in the neighbourhood of…yeah…more like that…there’s also the ultra cheap route of friends and family which has the added benefit of sounding as cheap as it is…so…the third route of actors who will do it for free.  These I can recommend from the local variety, I recommend searching out university campuses, little theatres, local listers on drama. Just make sure you treat them well.  Gregg Taylor feeds his troop every week on Tim Horton’s Donuts.  And we order in pizza for long sessions.  So ignore actors at your own peril.  Or else you can go through the intra-web where there are several websites of all kinds of people aching to fill up their resumes…sorry Shannon…now it’s all out, everyone knows what you do…but you feel better about that, right?  There’s also the added potential problem with working with net actors, but that takes us to the next part.

Let’s call this a combination of recording equipment and studio, because, frankly it cheeses you off.  You can go the route of a professional studio like we did for recording “The Dead Line” but that could cost you again.  Or you could make a deal with a local radio station and use their facilities, which could be a problem for booking time and quality.  Radio stations are set up for interviews.  Most of them aren’t set up to do solid audio drama recordings.   Of course, you can and probably will record your own space.  You need some decent recording sound software, a place that is as close to sounding dead as you can make it; mike stands, cords, headphones and neighbours that won’t mind if they hear strange noises emanating from the next door every once in a while.  I had one actress do an orgasm probably far more times than she needed to but you have to get it right so…if you live where I do, that’s not a problem. 

Editing software, why? Because whatever you pick, you’re more than likely to be wedded to it.  Most of you in the crowd now use something that’s…there’s of course GoldWave, Audacity, Cakewalk, Adobe Audition, GarageBand, Pro Tools, many others.  For audio drama, it’s best to have software that allows multiple tracks so that you can provide vocal tracks, ambience, room tone, music and, of course, sound effects.  Science says that while the pinkie may seem insignificant, you require it for the stability to walk…well alright…while sound effects may not be necessary, it adds very much to the aesthetic of the hand or the radio drama.  Sound effects can make the difference of two people speaking in a cabaret or on a submarine or in a crowd or on a street or in space.  Sound effects can make all the difference in the world.  And while you certainly can get by with an audio cinematic piece without any music, an audio drama without any kind of sound effects sounds very flat and unprofessional.  Audio cinema represents the highest evolution of storytelling.  It’s taking that story and fitting it squarely between your temples. 

They’ve done studies with pet scans.  When someone’s watching TV, very little is operating in your noggin…and that’s a medical term…noggin…when you read, that’s why I’m an English teacher…when you read, much more is going on.  And when you’re listening to an audio story, the brain is in overdrive.  We live in a visual world that’s overwhelmed with the visual.  We become couch potatoes.  North Americans are in the worst shape of the industrial nations.  Not us, ‘cause we’re podcasters.  But most North Americans.

 But imagine if you will a new age, an age of audio Huckleberry children getting other kids to paint fences.  Will they listen to their latest “Fantastic Four” audio on their…well  “Cat Woman”, “Harry Potter”…“Harry Potter” creating the worlds in their heads, creating, getting fresh air and rafting down the river with Jim to freedom.  I only slightly exaggerate.  For me I can honestly say that audio drama has at least made my life more vivid.  I may have begun with CBC’s “Vanishing Point” and “The Shadow” as a kid, but I’ve been able to extend stories into my classroom.  And now after they’ve listened to an episode of “Biff Straker”, I can actually say to them questions like “What do the Cretin Aliens look like anyway?”  After they’re confused initially, new neurons are firing, new connections are being made, new possibilities.  When you can make your own pictures, you can make anything.  That’s when creativity and divergent thought have opportunities.  How many people have seen “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Movie?”  How many people have read the books?…even more…and yet the radio drama alone seems to best grasp the fantastic, the Zen, yeah…the fun of the story…wouldn’t you agree?  That radio drama’s the best? 

You wanna tell a good story?  Every medium could be argued as the best.  Only audio drama is the most intimate.  Only audio cinema requires you to put the pictures in your mind, requires you to be the cinematographer.  It’s not passive, it’s active.  With other mediums, you can learn and know concepts.  In audio, in our own minds is where we truly grasp things.  Okay, the teacher in me wants to test you.  Let’s try a few reviews.  Okay, instead of audio drama, we prefer the term of?… I need a hand…I’m a teacher, I need a hand…I can’t hear very well.  Time to put up your hand…yes…audio cinema, thank you very much…and we don’t have all the right presents…write down…we should write down his name and we’ll give you…I have stuff to give out so I have them in the other room, I’ll bring them out. But I have a CD for you…and it’s a CD of…what did I…oh a CD of Biff Straker, I think.  So it’s one of our first audio dramas that we did. 

Second question…second question…oh, here we are…What does this mean?  No, you fail…yes…software, recording equipment, studio yes, that’s good…and I…I’ll have for you the complete set of Firefly Old Wounds, the radio drama fan fiction that we did, first one in the world so that was good.  And then who’s here representing LibriVox? You are? Great, then I shall give you just because you let me play, have some fun with you, we’ve got “Right Number, Wrong Party” our very first radio drama based similarly on Sorry, wrong number”.  Whose two shows does Decoder Ring Theatre produce?  What’s the two shows they produce?…yes sir…Black Jack Justice and the Red Panda, an episode of Biff Straker and Philip ____ for you…make sure we get those names down for Shannon…and finally, who’s the number one podcast audio cinema in the world?  I need a hand…I need a hand…who are we?…I need a hand…yes sir…Sonic Society…and you get my book, young lady…thank you very much, that’s wonderful.  For all those who have missed out, you can find many of these shows and past episodes on Sonic Society.org and our own production company soniccinema.ca.  Any questions?…questions?…oh this is good, no questions.

Mark Blevis:  How long does it take you to put together one of your episodes?

Jack Ward:  My episodes, yeah.  Shannon says it’s an eternity.  It really depends on how long the show is.  We’ve done five minute episodes, we’ve done twenty minutes episodes, we’ve done hour long episodes of radio drama.  And it could take about a week from, you know, once you write it to all that kind of stuff.  And that’s assuming if you write really fast, so…but sometimes they’ve taken a month even.  But it’s amazing…Black…for Decoder Ring Theatre, he releases a brand new show every other week.  The guy is scary.  We’re actually going to his place just after this.  They call it the Panda Pad.  He just had a little baby boy, Maxwell Grant.  So we’re giving him a panda with a squirrel, ‘cause how many people listen to the Red Panda? One…

Mark Blevis:  They’re apparently going on hiatus

Jack Ward:  This is sad, this is Canadian audio drama, you guys don’t even listen to it.  It’s fantastic, isn’t it?…well just for you, we’re giving him a red panda with a squirrel tail attached so it’s a panda-squirrel.  Go listen to the show, you’ll know what the joke is.  Alright any other questions?…I have given you a full meal, thank you so much, appreciate it.

Mark Blevis:  Jack, thank you very much.

Bob Goyetche:  This episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Mark Blevis:  Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.

Bob Goyetche:   For more info on Canadian Podcast Buffet you can go to our website www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca.

Mark Blevis:  For more information on Podcasters Across Borders visit that website www.podcastersacrossborders.com.

Bob Goyetche:  To contact us you can leave us a voice mail, area code 267-220-3701 or our email at: canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.

Mark Blevis:  Of course you’re welcome to join any and all of the Rogic forums including the Canadian Podcast Buffet forum, and Podcasters Across Borders forum, and there’s a link to that at www.rogic.com/forum on the Canadian Podcast Buffet website.

Bob Goyetche:  Canadian Podcast Buffet and Podcasters Across Borders are proud members of the Rogic Podcast Conglomerate.

]]> http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?feed=rss2&p=145 1 PAB2007 – Andy Bilodeau http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=144 http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=144#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:22:16 +0000 Mark http://www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca/?p=144 Photo of Andy Bilodeau taken by Bob GoyetcheThe 4 R’s Of Podcasting (because We Are 1 ‘R’ Better Than The Rest Of The World) presented at PAB2007 by Andy Bilodeau

In the real world we have the 3 R’s of schooling…Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic…then there are the 3 R’s of conservation Reduce, Reuse and Recycle…in podcasting we have the 4 R’s Reseach, Writing, Recording, RSS’ing.

This session will briefly delve into these 4 areas of the podcast production cycle. The emphasis of this session is not as a “How To” but more as a community created resource for the podcaster audience. Participation is not only encouraged, it is DEMANDED.

Photo by Bob Goyetche.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW…

Bob Goyetche:  I’m Bob Goyetche.  Welcome to the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring audio from Podcasters Across Borders 2007.

Mark Blevis:  This episode is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Bob Goyetche:  Our next presenter from The AndyCast is Andy Bilodeau with his session “The 4 R’s of Podcasting”. 

Andy Bilodeau:  Good morning…how’s everybody going…your well?…good.  I’m not. I’m nervous as crazy.  But anyways, I like to start off all of my shows…I have the little disclaimer stuff, but I like to do this first…kind of gets me in the mood…I like to put this right at the start of the show so that, you know, I’m listening to it too as it’s going…and it kinda gets you in the mood to kinda do stuff…alright, that’s enough of that stuff.  So first thing I wanna do is a…move my notes around first…it’s the first time I’ve ever done a presentation like this in front of people.  I do it all the time in front of a mirror and…what’s out there…okay thank you’s…First of all, I want to thank Mark and Bob for accepting my last-minute proposal.  And they have no idea what they’re in for.  And it’ll probably be the last time I’ll be presenting at something like this but…eh, you got to do it once.  I also want to thank the actual power behind the men, Andrea and Cat, of course.  Sometimes, we tend to see the two bigger voices and we often forget those behind us. And, of course, I want to thank my wife, Vivian, who is also a podcaster herself.  And without her encouragement and constant prodding and saying “are you recording tonight?”,  “are you…are you going down…are you going to go down and record?”  I don’t think I’d have as many shows out as I do.  And, of course, I want to thank all of you because, you know, we’re all learning together.  And I’ve learned just as much from all of you as…I’m gonna pretend that I’m presenting to you. 

I wanna do a couple…’cause, you know, I tend to do my uninformed biography where, as Dave Brodbeck says “I just make up shit about people”.  I don’t put a lot of myself out.  I just…that’s just who I am.  That’s the Scorpio in me talking.  So I thought I’d share a little bit and this doesn’t go outside this room…okay, so nobody…it’s recorded…oh well.  A little bit about me…oh no, actually that’s later…I’ve rearranged the slides…what to expect.  I’m…from Tod’s presentation, you know, he said you tell people what you’re going to do, tell them and remind them what you did.  So what we’re going to do, I talk a little bit about me, some of my personal experiences and some of the things and mistakes that I’ve made podcasting.  Some things that I’ve learned from other people.  And we’ll try and share some of that stuff.  It’s going to be an interactive session so I’m going to make Mark and Bob run their asses off answering your questions and adding your comments and things to it.  But please be on point and be brief and, you know, because there’s a lot of other people who wanna, you know, share with us…and where is…that’s just…he wasn’t watching thank god. 

So, who am I anyway?  First and foremost, I’m somebody’s Dad.  I’m also a husband.  And my real job, I have this really fancy title for basically a web monkey.  I work at the American Chemical Society…oh, it didn’t show up there, okay there we go…basically that’s our building in D.C.  And basically we try to placate our editors because they bring in the authors who submit to our journals who then sell the journals to people, subscriptions to libraries, and stuff like that, which helps pay my cheque.  So we have to take care of our editors.

So a little bit more on me.  I have a Bachelor of Physical Education from Brock University, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.  And I’m a Certified Help Desk Analyst.  I have no idea what that means, but I have it.  It’s a little piece of paper sits on my wall and I point at it every time somebody gives me a hard time.  Even more, more about me, more in the podcasting side.  I’ve been listening to podcasts since 2004.  I’ve been a podcaster since July, 2005, almost 2 years now.  I sort of got the ball rolling at my own company, ACS, to get podcasts started.  I was actually the host of the first 2 and then they did one without me and it kinda stopped after that.  They don’t want to pay me to do it, so screw them.  I’ve also started this informal podcast production company called “Bazmakaz.com”.  There’s a whole story behind that and I’ll bore you later with it, if you want to know about it.  Produce a number of different podcasts including my wife’s podcast.  And one that we’re really proud of “100% Kids”, which is the Grade 2 students she was talking about yesterday.  There’s a couple of other ones that she uses for her courses and stuff like that that aren’t as widely…when you talk about niches, like 12 people from her class  are subscribing to these things.  There’s a couple of podcasts in the wings, mostly family who want to start recording stuff and putting stuff online.  And basically anything else that Viv can come up with, I find a way to get it done.  She’s the ideas and I’m the monkey behind the machine. 

So what do I mean?  I’m not an expert.  I still have so much more to learn and I’m learning it all from all of you…and I think that’s it for that slide…I have no idea…and oh, and the one thing that I do firmly believe in is that you have to share what you know with whomever will listen to you.  It’s the only way we’re going to expand our realm, because we all do things differently and we do them uniquely.  And sometimes somebody else is doing something the same way or slightly different and, you know, you can benefit from their point of view.

Now I decided that, you know, how could I present what I think I know to folks who already know more than I do?  So I thought, maybe let’s try and have some fun with it.   So I decided, I came up with 4 R’s.  Because, you know, everybody else does 3 R’s.  There’s the classic, you know, the old Reading, Writing and Arithmetic…see I’m talking way faster, I need to be in the studio so I slow down…today would be nice…and, you know, we have the 3 R’s of conservation.  You know, the classic Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. So I thought, you know what, hell, we’re way better than those guys.  We’re at least one better, you know, like one_______. 

So first off, its research.  Gathering your information, collecting the data that you want to present to your audience; secondly is writing.  And we’ll go into a little more specifics on all of these.  It’s taking that data.  And from classic computer science, you know, data is just the pieces.  Information is what you make out of the data.  You take this data, synthesize it in some way.  And lastly, recording…or, no, thirdly, recording is converting, as Bruce was saying, converting the analogue sound that’s coming out of our mouths to a digital format that we can then go and edit.  And releasing, which I included all the post production stuff.  It’s getting it out to the people, so people know what’s going on…I think I finally got the hang of this…this things doing it differently…okay I got it…takes me awhile, but, you know, it’s a thick skull. 

First of all, research. Show preparation.  This is, you know, there’s only a handful of folks that I know of that can really, you know, just turn on a microphone and record.  And some people pull stuff from the deepest, darkest recesses of their minds, or talk about events that are happening to them all over the place…I’m one behind, okay…or most people just go online and Google the crap out of stuff.  That’s what I tend to do…that’s just me.  One of the…one thing that I’ve found while I’m doing research and gathering links and information online is to use the “Google Notebook”.  I don’t know if anybody knows this.  It’s a great little plug-in.  It’s got a great little plug-in that works with Firefox.  It throws this little thing at the bottom of your browser window and you click it.  It pops up this little notebook where you can add notes.  And if you’re on a webpage, it will automatically put the URL in there, then you can write all kinds of stuff about that.  I find that very, very useful.  And I’ve just got into “Google Reader” which allows you to bring…you don’t have to go visit websites anymore to read blogs, go figure out.  You don’t have to go to all  those 175 different…you just pull their feeds into one place and “Google Reader” does a fantastic job.  And it’s not a bad podcatcher either.  You can subscribe to a podcast feed.  It has a nice little player in there.  And the nice thing is, it’s, you know, you just go browser to browser.  You just…wherever you can pick up a browser, you can grab, you can listen to a podcast.  So that’s…I find that very cool. 

And one of the ones I just added to this was “CastRoller”.  Mr. CastRoller’s here somewhere, I think…there he is…fantastic service.  What it allows you to do is to aggregate podcast feeds and then you subscribe to one feed.  And it pulls in all those episodes, all the subscriptions that you want to listen to and then you just…one feed and you can just knock them off.  I use it. It’s great on my Shuffle.  I use it on my little 1 gig Shuffle and just pull in a handful, throw them on there and away you go.  So you can just listen to them on the go.  Now sometimes you have to go where the research takes you or, you know, use any opportunity that you may have to do research…opening computer audio…oh, this is way funnier when you can hear…and just let, you know, ideas flow and let, you know, let things mature while you’re doing, you know, basically a mindless task of driving…ooh, okay, never mind…that was nothing, nothing, nothing to worry about…nothing that you need to worry about and nothing that insurance can’t cover.  So, you know, if you are doing research in the car…keep  your eyes peeled…

So yeah, see it’s…I coordinated my outfit…We have Aloha shirt Fridays, so this was on a Friday.  So that’s sort of my take on research.  Basically gathering bits of data and so you can put it altogether.  Writing is the process of synthesizing your research into a coherent manner.  The goal is to create a well formed thesis prior to the presentation, of your ideas.  And it’s not just two people hitting “record” and talking…well, oh, okay there’s these guys…they can do it…oh well, you know, of course Bob and Ajay can do that too but…nobody else…alright, Cat and Bob, okay, they can do it too.  So writing means different things to different people.  Some of the things that I’ve found that I can use well for writing is “Google Docs”.  It’s a free service that Google offers.  It allows you to create and import regular Microsoft Word files into an online format so that you can access them again from anywhere.  They can do the same with rather complex spreadsheets.  And the nice thing, the thing I like about Google Docs is that you can then edit the HTML.  And the nice thing about that is you can just take all that HTML code, copy it out, drop it in your blog, so that way you don’t have to retype everything.  You just cut and paste.  And then it shows up relatively well formatted.  Sometimes you have to go and jerk it around a little bit, but it’s a nice shortcut.  I use that all the time.  Microsoft Word does create HTML, very poorly, but we won’t go into that.  On the Outliner, I use that right at the very beginning.  The nice thing about that too is it sort of allows you to format stuff with…well, it’s an Outliner.  So basically you just have major headings and you have details and you can export that out as an HTML file also. 

And the one…I have used the last one, I’ve used crayon and construction paper to get notes down.  It’s not as efficient as using the computer.  My handwriting sucks, so I end up spending more time trying to read what I wrote.  But you can do it.  Now one of the questions that people ask me who are just starting podcasts is, should you script or not?  I usually say for the first handful of episodes, yes.  Script the crap out of everything.  Some of my first episodes I even scripted in my jokes, my off-hand comments.  Everything was scripted.  And if you listen to those episodes, you can tell – it really blows.  But really, it really depends on your own personal comfort.  I know Sage, when I talked to her a long time ago about this, and she scripts I’d say about 90% …99.97637492% of what she talks about and that’s her comfort level.  And I know Scarborough Dude is very heavily into scripting.  He…I see him…I’ve just heard his computer banging in the background.  And, you know, that’s the other extreme.  I didn’t even know if you have notes, Dude, Ken…no, just as the mood…and, you know, there’s a happy medium between that.  I know Bruce isn’t a particularly strong typer.  I’ve had instant message conversations with Bruce that, you know…I’m a fairly quick typer, but Bruce isn’t.  And I’ll be three thoughts ahead of him before he’s finished the one.  But typing isn’t his bag, baby.  So he just turns the microphone on and goes.  I’m sure he uses little jotty notes here and there but…but that’s just Bruce.  And again it depends on the nature of the podcast.  Some of the conversational podcasts, there’s no way you could script what Shane and Tom do.  There’s no way.  You know, they play off each other and I think that’s one of the benefits of having, you know, a partner or several people.  You play off each other.  You know, I have lots of voices in my head, but it’s too hard to record them.  You know, you have to stop and rewind and it just doesn’t work the same. 

And again, you know, nothing is cast in stone.  What works for one particular episode, may not work for another.  And some, like Tod was saying, you know, if you’re out on the street and…just leave the recorder on.  You never know what you’re going to pick up.  It could be audio gold, it could be audio crap too.  But, you know, there’s that one little nugget that you spend an hour and a half recording that, you know, just makes your story.  And the way I do it is, if any…I think a couple of you listen to the AndyCast…I have the “Uninformed Biography” which is now the cornerstone of everything that I do.  That’s fully scripted.  It’s scripted…every line is ‘cause I want it to sound a particular way.  I want the language to be specific.  I want it to convey, you know.  I’m going to take some of Tod’s tips and work some of the more storytelling kind of elements in there.  But, you know, you build it up, but I want it to sound a specific way, so I script that very, very heavily.  But the rest of it is just whatever takes, you know.  I have some set bits that I do but again, it’s all just me reacting to what’s there.   So you may want to consider that too is partially scripting what you do.  And then have a little more in writing.  Have a plan.  You know, don’t…some of the worst recordings I’ve ever heard and it’s just people just open up the mike and go.  Even Scarborough Dude, even though he doesn’t fully script and doesn’t really prepare, he does…he has a mind set.  He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, but he knows something’s going to come out and he has a plan, or not. 

For me personally, I like to strive for a consistent flow going throughout from show to show.  Just that I personally, I like that.  I like to have, you know, little inside jokes, little running gags that come on…that’s a lovely one, see this…that’s one that everybody looks for on the show.  It’s an instant laugh for me every time.  It doesn’t matter where I throw it, it gets them.  Now there…let’s move on to recording things…I just got the big ten from Mark back there…that’s a big 10…

Recording.  Some people can do live to drive.  Cat and Bob do live to drive.  What I mean by that, it’s the old…and it’s now a live to tape.  You know, you just basically turn the microphone on, record everything inline, add all your sound effects as you go along and then just record it out and, you know, minimal convert to mp3, post it.  That works for some people.  You can do that with CastBlaster which is…oh, where’s the picture?…there’s no pictures, oh well…you can also do that on the Mac with Audio Hijack Pro, which basically you can capture all your…anything, any sound that’s coming through the computer, it just goes and it’ll pick it up.  It’s similar to the  Windows Version called Hot Recorder.  I’ve heard mixed reviews on Hot Recorder so I don’t…Audio Hijack Pro I’ve used many, many times.  And you didn’t hear it here, but I’ve heard that you can use it to run around copy protection on some copy…just a rumour, I don’t know…oh here’s the pictures now, thank you, oh good…

There’s another one, Ubercaster which is a new one on the Mac which is very, very slick.  It’s far too complex for me…umm, I didn’t have any pictures…Audio Hijack Pro, I don’t think, no…There’s some, Bruce touched on one of the biggest Cross Platform editors, Audacity.  That’s a fancy Audacity track.  On the Mac, you can use GarageBand or Sound Track Pro or Pete Pro.  That’s one of Ed’s shows.  And there’s Sound Track Pro which is the step up from GarageBand.  Again it’s just a wave formatter.  Just lay down multiple tracks and just record and add in your sound effects and stuff like that.  On Windows, you can use Adobe Audition, which looks very much like Sound Track Pro.  And again, it’s just another way of…another tool to use to record.  There’s all kinds of portable rigs.  There’s a new zoom coming out.  It’s called the H2.  It’s a little smaller, it can do 3D sounds.  We use a little iRiver, or the little microphone.  Some of the more interesting things is Bruce has talked about and touched base…and we have Mr. Talkshoe here…is Talkshoe, which allows you to do live recording.  Another one is Odeo, which is still around even despite all the Twitter buzz about them.  And MobaTalk. Michael Bailey or MyChingo.  They allow you to do recording through a flash and record it.

Bruce touched on a lot of this stuff, so I won’t bore you with all this stuff…faster…faster…faster.  a quiet chair.  Cat and Bob can tell us some more about quiet chairs.  Mark again with the non-dairy beverages.  And give yourself time to record.  Don’t try and slam an hour’s recording in twenty minutes.  It’s not going to work.  And talk and, you know, Sheila Rogers, last year gave us the Uber tip: talk to a single person.  You know, I have a picture taped up on my wall.  I talk to Tod every time.  So, you know, and you can talk to whomever you like. I like to talk to Tod…well this…now if you don’t have…what do you do when all you have is a cell phone?  We were talking about this earlier.  If anybody was watching me on Twitter on Tuesday, I was stuck in the middle of a protest…or actually it was a demonstration, and of course, there’s, you know, we had packed all of our stuff because we’re packing to come up here.  And all’s I had was my cell phone so what’ll you do…Hi this is Andy on the streets of D.C. I’m in the middle of some sort of protest. I’m gonna put them on speaker and see if we can get anything good out of this…blistering hot day out there…this is all through my Blackberry…probably well up above 90…I called my K7 number…as you can see and hear, it’s a rather violent protest.  There are black jackets and weapons of mass destruction everywhere you can see.  The police are here trying to maintain this crowd of people who…it’s unbelievable how unruly they are…actually no it’s not…these are just people protesting the…letting their opinions be known about the immigration policies and things so.  Here’s comes another vocal group…So I’m attempting to cut across this protest…ooh, ouch, hey, hey, ouch…don’t…stop it…hey don’t hit me there, come on…I managed to cross the street against the protest and the lumps are present…Andy reporting for the AndyCast News on the streets of DC…so it pays to have a K7 number. 

I’m getting a peace sign from Bob back there.  So, releasing involves some of the post production stuff, some of the editing.  One of the things: edit tight but don’t edit too tight.  I got one more thing to kill people.  Background music should really be background.  And have some constant bits.  You know, consistent bits have a life of their own…(music – The Uninformed Biography, Who Knows How It Really Went Down Anyway, The Uninformed Biography, Who The Hell Knows How It Went Down Anyway, Uniformed, Uninformed, Uninformed, Uniformed Biography – music) So you can see that…I mean, just with a little piece of music, you can have one bit just take a life of its own.  I play both of those bits.  The one at the front and one here because I paid for them so, I own them.  And this is…we’re talking about background music. Tod was talking about non-descript background mode.  This is the music I use underneath the whole Uninformed Biography.  You can see…it’s just all…it’s like Tod said.  It’s just all…you could listen to this for hours.  But it works well, ‘cause it sets a mood, right.  Use transition bits between segments.  Put the meat of the show at the front, leave the rambly stuff at the back, because people are paying all this money for your podcast so they want to hear what you want to say.  We’ve had other people talk about promoting your podcast and stuff like that.  And I won’t bore you with all that stuff.  One thing I like to do is create content for others with no strings attached.  And I’ve been given the big “T” sign, so I’m done.  And fortunately, I am done.  Perfect timing.  Thank you very much.

Bob Goyetche:  Thanks, Andy.

Bob Goyetche:  This episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust.

Mark Blevis:  Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.

Bob Goyetche:   For more info on Canadian Podcast Buffet you can go to our website www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca.

Mark Blevis:  For more information on Podcasters Across Borders visit that website www.podcastersacrossborders.com.

Bob Goyetche:  To contact us you can leave us a voice mail, area code 267-220-3701 or our email at: canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.

Mark Blevis:  Of course you’re welcome to join any and all of the Rogic forums including the Canadian Podcast Buffet forum, and Podcasters Across Borders forum, and there’s a link to that at www.rogic.com/forum on the Canadian Podcast Buffet website.

Bob Goyetche:  Canadian Podcast Buffet and Podcasters Across Borders are proud members of the Rogic Podcast Conglomerate.

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