Georgia Podcast Network

So you bought a shiny new iPhone 3G or upgraded your iPhone to the 2.0 firmware (raises hand) and you're wondering which applications you should install first. For podcasters, a voice recorder is a logical choice.

Of course, like every other category of software in the iTunes Application Store, the number of options is simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming (I don't need four separate flashlight apps that make my screen turn white, thanks much).

I've picked four choices of voice recorders that might be useful to a podcaster for conducting interviews, installed them, made some recordings with them, and taken down some impressions. Read more »

We've been a little slack about updating the blog the past couple of weeks. Real life hasn't been as quiet as the blog though! Read more »

We're going to take a crack at another live episode of Mostly ITP this Sunday, June 15, at 6 p.m. Eastern. We hope you'll call in and join the discussion!

Here's a link to the show's information page, and here is the basic information:

Episode 2 - Mostly ITP Live!
Sunday, June 15, 2008 - 6 p.m. Eastern
Phone Number: (724) 444-7444
Call ID: 17403

Planned topics:

• Listener voicemails. We have somewhat of a backlog of these due to our two most recent podcasts being a video and an interview, neither of which are good places to play and respond to voicemail.

  Most of them are short, though, so we'd still love to have more to play! Give us a call at 678.389.9441 before 4 p.m. on Sunday and we'll try to include your voicemail. That is, if you won't be able to join us live by calling in.

• Review/discussion of CBS' Swingtown - We have lots of opinions about CBS' new show, and intend to share them at length. We'd love for you to call in and share yours as well.

If you call in and we're in the middle of playing a voicemail, we may not acknowledge you immediately, but will as soon as the voicemail is over. So just hang tight for a few minutes. Otherwise, we'll try to get people on as soon as possible. Hope you'll join us!

I remember a few months ago Griftdrift and I were discussing what makes a blog (or a podcast or a news outlet or whatever) popular. My theory was simply that the best content went a long way toward distinguishing an outlet. Alan Cooper called this Best of Market Trumps First to Market.

This article from Podcasting News makes me wonder if that theory is malarkey, and if there are other factors which are more important:

Internet research firm HitWise reports that, while Hulu is getting big shows, it’s not getting big audiences.

Hulu.com., the joint venture between Fox and NBC that provides streaming video content online, came out of beta on March 15 and has seen a steady share of US Internet traffic since:

The site ranked 33 among Multimedia websites last week and 84 among television websites.

While it is often compared with YouTube, YouTube is attracting nearly 300 times more traffic than Hulu.com.

I say this because Hulu has some really excellent content. You can watch entire episodes of professionally-produced television shows from the major networks, including The Daily Show, Family Guy, The Office and The Simpsons. All legal and free and with high quality encoding, unlike on YouTube.

And yet, 1/300 of YouTube's traffic.

Podcasting News posits that the lack of alternative interfaces (podcasts, Apple TV, etc.) is holding Hulu back. I don't think that's true though. YouTube got huge without offering downloadable content or podcasts or access on Apple TV/Tivo/whatever, though some of that stuff has since been implemented.

Maybe you'll say Hulu isn't the best case study because of their early (and arguably ongoing) marketing problems. Fair enough. But that doesn't explain why YouTube is so big and everyone else is so small, despite YouTube's obvious shortcomings (crappy video quality, dependence on illegal content, etc.).

So, if best of market doesn't trump first to market, is it the other way around? Is being first the most important thing? I think one word is enough to discredit that idea: Friendster.

So what is it then? Is it just that YouTube has built a more active community than the other sites? If so, why did it succeed where others have failed?

We want our interview-based podcasts to sound like a perfectly natural conversation. Somedays we get lucky and we capture that perfect collaboration between interviewer and interviewee. But what can we do to ensure that slice-of-real-life experience every time? It is time to ask some questions and maybe find some answers, starting with ...

What makes a good podcast interviewer?

This might seem blinding obvious, but an interviewer ought to display a certain confidence in asking questions, coupled with an ability to capitalize on the initial answers, finding those revealed routes to interesting stories and even better answers. The interviewer ought to have a neutral voice that is not distracting, but audible and clear. I'm not saying that everybody needs a voice like a radio announcer, or that we should all remain as flat in tone as androids, but the "character" of the interviewee's voice shouldn't be overpowered by the interviewer. Most of all, be personable and adaptable, especially patient with delays or interruptions due to the "intrusion" of real-life during the interview. Often, those entirely unscripted moments become the best part of an interview.

Another question ...

What makes a good podcast interview?

The recording doesn't need an "official" introduction (i.e., "Welcome to the So-And-So Podcast"). That only takes up valuable time that could be spent building a rapport with the podcast participant. Introductions can and will be added during production. Instead, initialize the podcast conversation simply. Let the participant introduce him/herself, or just ask them for their name, then proceed.

After asking the first few questions -- those basic questions that the listener would expect (Who are you? What do you do?) -- the interview ought to become a conversation. Any prepared script should become invisible. Let the conversation happen naturally. If tangents are uncovered and pursued, so be it. If the conversation runs over the time needed, so be it. Time is a concern during editing, not so much during recording. Basically, you're gathering raw information that will be refined later into a podcast.

At the same time, remember that this podcast is about the interviewee, not the interviewer. As Amber Rhea tweeted during a bit of on-topic research, "Don't be Charlie Rose. [S]hut up and let your interviewee talk, but also don't let them ramble like an idiot for too long."

To me, it is helpful when a podcast has "bookends," one point where we are introduced to the podcast participant and another point where that participant is thanked for their time and/or given an opportunity to conclude. These are not always necessary, particularly when an interviewee says something that makes for a perfect conclusion.

These answers are subjective and not all-inclusive. And there are surely more questions to be asked. So this is where you come in. Get involved, step into the comments, and let me know what works for you.

The University of Georgia has developed a national database of Civil Rights -related materials. Here's how Doug Shipman at the Center For Civil and Human Rights Partnership describes it:

For many years libraries and institutions across the country have had extensive collections of papers, oral histories, videos and photographs illuminating the modern Civil Rights Movement, but accessing them required going to those physical spots or visiting each website. The fine folks at the University of Georgia have developed a national database of these holdings in one easy to use website.

[. . .]

The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries.

A quick tour of the site led me to this WSB archive footage of a press conference held by Coretta Scott King on April 6, 1968, two days after her husband Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The look on her face is just heartbreaking.

Many thanks to UGA for putting these materials online. It looks like it will be an amazing resource.

The newest edition of the Georgia Carnival is up. If you've never read a Georgia Carnival, it's always a great way to learn about the different things being written about in the Georgia blogosphere. Elementary History Teacher and the other guest contributors do yeoman's work collecting and summarizing submissions. Among many other posts, our recent video episode of Mostly ITP was included in this edition.

Check it out!

I just wanted to post a quick "thank you" to the good folks at Georgia Podcast Network (GPN) for accepting "The Georgia Road Geek on BlogTalkRadio" (GRG On BTR) as a GPN affiliate and to all the listeners who have tuned in live and/or downloaded my podcasts.

If you haven't checked out my talkshow yet, please do so at...

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/georgiaroadgeek

You can find my blogs, "ROADGEEK-CAM!!!", photos, and everything else on my main website...

http://www.georgiaroadgeek.com

Again, thanks to GPN and to all my listeners for all their support.

Girls meet the hippie van, Piedmont Park 1971 ©Boyd Lewis

Our friend Boyd Lewis, whom you might remember from a Mostly ITP interview last year, is holding another photo show in June. Here are the relevant details:

“hippies in Atlanta! however did they get in?”

Just when the Counterculture was dying out on the east and west coasts of the nation, it exploded like a leafy ocean of out-of-control kudzu in Atlanta. Head shops, communes, tokin’ circles in Piedmont Park, free concerts, the last of the nation’s great outdoor pop festivals, antiwar protests and the advent of a totally new way of life got off the Magic Bus and set up on The Strip.

The photos by Boyd Lewis are from his time reporting for Atlanta’s black weekly newspapers and writing a column (“Political Periscope”) for the legendary underground weekly The Great Speckled Bird between 1969 and 1975.

Relive those thrilling days of yesteryear in these photos, when the Counterculture blazed the trail we still follow today: cherishing the environment, pursuing justice for gender, race and sexual orientation, advocating peace, questing for enlightenment and yes, getting a little loopy at times. Conformist, whitebread Amerika was never the same.

Where?
The Mason Murer Fine Art Gallery 199 Armour Dr. 30324
404.879.1500

When?
Opening reception Friday, June 20, 2008 at 7 p.m.
Continuing through July 12.

For more information, contact Boyd Lewis 626.398.8889 or boyd.lewis@charter.net

Amber and I have a video episode of Mostly ITP we plan to put up (hopefully) tomorrow. Other than that, it will probably be a pretty light week. We've been very fortunate to have a new episode of one podcast or another posted nearly every day for the past two weeks or so, save for the holiday weekend. Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Generally, I'm setting a goal of having something new up every weekday, whether it be an episode of our podcast, an episode of someone else's podcast, or a blog post.

We've been meaning to put together a blogging section in the FAQ with a few ground rules and guidelines, but haven't quite gotten around to it yet. It was brought to our attention late last week that we need to get on this.

Someone found our site through a search engine, signed up for an account, and immediately posted a press release as a blog post last week.

That seems like spammy behavior, right? Well, not so fast. People have been allowed to post press releases as blog posts in the past, including releases for events with no affiliation to this site. The event in question was in Atlanta and it was technology-related, so it's not like it was totally off-topic. It wasn't an ad for Viagra or an online casino.

We occasionally have press releases for our own events that we will post here, and so we aren't going to ban press releases outright. On the other hand, we are not going to allow the blog to become a dumping ground for press releases for every event under the sun. Check out the Atlanta Daybook for that.

So we need to set up some prerequisites. My thought is that someone will need to have contributed to or participated in the site in a sincere way before being allowed to post a press release or other event announcement.

What is sincere probably sounds kind of arbitrary, so I'd really like to hear from you on this.

I don't think that signing up for an account, writing "nice podcast" in a comment, and then dumping a press release is going to count. I'm thinking you need to have contributed an episode to a podcast, host your own podcast here, be an affiliate, or be a frequent commenter. That, or the event should be related to Georgia and podcasting, which probably won't be the case too often.

Thoughts?