Sometimes you should just jump into a new project. Especially when the plan is to work on the project for the long term, as I’m doing with Farm Report, a daily video podcast I started this morning. The production values of the video aren’t worked out yet, the format isn’t solid yet, but the general idea is there. Improvements to come.
The goal with Farm Report is to generally inform people about local growing in Western Massachusetts. There’ll be interviews, commentary, nice photos. But, I’ll probably also include videos about weight loss and it’s relation to the food we grow. [click to continue…]
When video podcasting you need to look your best. Increasingly production values (how your video looks) are important. Picture quality is getting better even for the smallest video producer, which puts pressure on everybody to improve. Check out the lesson I learned from movie star Paul Newman on how to get rid of your puffy face before vlogging.
We record the Photo Share Podcast using a Skype to Skype call; I make a Skype call to my podcast co-host Sandra and record the conversation, editing and mixing the audio file (.wav) later. We do this because it’s convenient and cheap (Skype to Skype calls are free), but there’s a bunch of problems that can crop up. Here are my top 5 potential screw-ups when recording these calls: [click to continue…]
Would you like to encode your podcast file to mp3 and fill-in the ID3 tags with just one right mouse click? Then this tip is for you. To brand your podcast effectively, consistent ID3 tags and file encoding is important; you want your listeners or viewers to feel like you’re dependable, that your podcast will show up on the same day every week and that it’ll be in the same format every time. This tip will show you both how to get that consistency and speed up the time it takes you to prepare your podcast file for upload. [click to continue…]
One of the ways to cheaply record a podcast that has multiple hosts is to use Skype, the voice over internet protocol (voip). I’m using this technique when I record Photo Share Podcast with Sandra, my co-host. This post will try to steer you away from some of the mistakes we’ve made. [click to continue…]
Robin Good makes some interesting observations about the future of radio in a world with podcasting, though it seems to me that he glosses over how talk radio will be changed by podcasting/netcasting.
Music radio as we have known it is probably dead, and not because of satellite radio or netcasting. Radio has killed radio as an entertainment medium; they have advertised and marketed to us until our ears started to bleed, and now people are giving up. In addition, the nature of the technology makes audiences very hard to measure, meaning either the technology has to get better or advertising rates will drop (to keep advertisers with radio). As the television and Internet audience measurement technology improves this will probably negatively influence the world of commercial radio. There are too many other alternatives, including netcasting, to be annoyed by the commercial pitches. After all, the content of music radio is not original. [click to continue…]
The European Union, 34 countries in all, voted to work towards making the Internet accessible to all. The press release states:
A pan-European drive to use information and communication technologies to help people to overcome economic, social, educational, territorial or disability-related disadvantages was endorsed by ministers of 34 European countries in Riga (Latvia) today. “e-Inclusion” targets include halving the gap in Internet usage by groups at risk of exclusion, boosting broadband coverage in Europe to at least 90%, and making all public web sites accessible by 2010.
As this is a netcast blog, this news inspired some thinking about podcasting and accessibility, namely, does podcasting make the Web a more accessible place? I would like to hear from people that have accessibility issues and listen to podcasts. Please describe your experiences using podcasts. [click to continue…]
You would think that educational institutions would be all-over the podcasting technology, but they’re not. At least they haven’t been in 2006. There are exceptions, but as a rule educators are missing the podcasting wave. I think there are great opportunities: marketing colleges and universities, disseminating news to a campus community, podcasts by college newspapers . . . and I haven’t even mentioned teachers and professors themselves! [click to continue…]
According to MacWorld News, Queen Elizabeth II’s Christmas speech is being podcast. The Royal podcast is going to be posted on the BBC’s Web site, available when the speech is broadcasted.
Westminster Digital, a company that provides the U.K. governement with other media streaming services, is hosting the podcast.
On the one hand this isn’t really a big deal. Do you think the Queen even knows that her speech is being podcast? Probably not. I don’t picture the ol’ girl listening to herself on an iPod; and I don’t think she is going to down mix or sweeten her own audio. But, this does indicate how podcasting is becoming ubiquitious. Another note in podcasting history.