Muffin Bottoms [not] Just another WordPress weblog

I love when someone at Radio Shack tells me something’s impossible so I go to Goodwill and build it from leftovers and for pennies!

Equipment is the third most important factor in the ideal podcast.

Whether the podcast you’re about to make is commercial and monetizable,
hobbyist and fun — or even a little of both — there are two things
more important than equipment. You and your content, and not necessarily
in that order.

Content is the number one element by far. If you don’t have content,
you really don’t have a podcast. Content drives the podcast, keeps
it interesting and it really is the only reason someone will come
back for a second listen, or if you’re lucky, click on the RSS button
and subscribe for all the upcoming webcasts to go directly to their
device.

Whether you intend to entertain, inform, generate sales, find a buyer,
educate or some combination of the previous, your content should be
easy to acquire, orgainize and discuss. The rest is just the business
of formatting it into a fairly logical “story” that will hold the
listener to the end of your show.

As mentioned, you are the second most crucial part of the podcast.
You should be an expert in your field, already have access to people
who are, or at least you must have some skillset in interviewing,
and a very inquisitive personality. If you have none of that but
are formally trained in say, broadcast journalism or TV, sales or
print, there is a chance you’ll make a good podcast, but that
really is not likely and it’s definitely not automatic. There’s
a synergy between the voice and tone of a personality and the
topical nature of a good podcast that is not easily described
in words. As they say in many fields, “you either have it, or
you don’t.”

Take the Dawn and Drew Show, for example. Dawn Miceli and Drew
Domkus are a couple who just converse for an hour with a nice
microphone on RECORD and then save it to MP3 format for syndication.
Voila, one of the most popular podcasts ever, hobbyist OR commercial.

Others have come along and tried to emulate the same synergy of
two hosts, no guest, a microphone and recording tools, but have
found far less success. Is it Dawn? Is it Drew? Dawn and Drew
together? Is it the place they’re recording their show? Or the
time of day they pick to make it. All of that and more, to be
sure. You can’t describe it any better, but you go back and hit
the page, and become one of the literally millions listening
every time.

So a little bit about that third most important factor; the
equipment. You can do a decent podcast with only the most basic
gear, but it had better be even more compelling than most. For
a podcast with just amateur sound quality to do well over time,
the content and the personality must be consistent, exciting
and fresh. A listener, especially one listening with headphones
or earbuds will have a very low tolerance for abrupt dynamics
in volume, or background noise, or even changes in tone throughout
the presentation.

Some successful podcasts are done using just the condenser mic
on a laptop or the built-in mic to an iRiver and free open source
recording tools such as Audacity; while others have found success
with Audition, Protools, and Garageband; Audio Technica, Behringer
and Shure mics ranging from $79 to $1000. Many people these days
swear by a USB mic or an interface to connect your 1/8″ or 1/4″
mics, while others like to use a soundbooth in a recording studio
producing their content first; with post production at a console
and then their only interaction with computers being the uploading
of their content.

I’ll discuss technology more deeply another time, but with whatever
equipment you already have, or can acquire quite easily, your main
focus should be on getting the cleanest, hottest signal of each
sound or spoken word that you can. The rest can be done in post
production without too much trouble at all. If the signal is too
low; or it is so hot, noisy and clipping there isn’t a whole lot
you can do to make it sound better.

One can spend a lot of time, energy and research over the issue of
equipment and too much can never hurt unless it becomes chaotic and
counterintuitive. But you can’t possibly spend too much time preparing
the other two elements. Those of, content and personality.

Some other supporting roles that can help your podcast along.

1) The index.
2) The audience
3) The host

Briefly I will say that search engines, indexes and databases are
just made for podcasts. Transcripting your show is a good idea and
it helps a lot with discoverability. Every word you sing or speak
in a podcast can be transcribed to .pdf, .doc and .html and suddenly
it’s searchable in the engines. Someone will accidentally see you
as the first hit when searching for something only indirectly related
to your content. And more importantly, someone will find you when
looking for some of your main themes.

If your podcast gets successful over time, the audience themselves
will evolve into a culture all to their own. Have forums, perhaps
chats and guestbooks available that people can participate in. Again,
if someone replies with a reference to one of your particular shows,
they’re sure to put a link to the webpage where that edition sits.
And Voila, more discoverability. If an argument breaks out where
someone wants to point out something positive or negative, it will
elicit replies like, “Oh yeah? Where,” or “Show me the link,” and
again, out comes URL’s and you sit back and watch your product climb
in the search engines.

Hosting is very important. If you anticipate ever having to serve
lots and lots of hits, it is best to already be paying for hosting
that will give bandwidth that is nearly “unlimited.” If you use
the free sites, or your local ISP’s bandwidth that comes with
your monthly email accounts, brace yourself. I’ll mention a time
early in Adam Curry’s podcasting days when he was slashdotted for
the first time. (slashdotting is a new expression to describe the
phenomenon of your server shutting down for a long time because
there was too much unexpected volume all at once.) He was just
placing each podcast on a server that gave him some small amount
of bandwidth such as 2MB which can easily mean if you’re one of
many trying to download the MP3 at the same time, you won’t get
any content at all, just an error message. Days went on without
anyone being able to hear the daily show they’d come to love,
and bad feedback was pouring in. His next two podcasts spent much
time explaining that they were trying to work out bandwidth, and
he tried blogging it and explaining his troubles in forums where
he frequented. A nightmare in any broadcast field: explaining
why you can’t broadcast. This is perhaps the newest expression
to replace old-time radio’s concept of “dead air.” The word
“dead” was a triple entendre there. It literally meant there was
a painfully long time period void of signal, and it also served
as a career killer for the guilty party, while potentially killing
off a station’s “brand.”

A podcast is similar. You want people coming back. You want them
expecting your next show. And if you’re planning on monetizing
your podcast in any way, you want to be able to show that you
get many listeners that might consider the advertisers’ products
or services. If your potential advertiser or a venture capitalist
goes to your page and gets an hourglass, or an error message,
s/he WILL assume that many others are seeing the same.

So think about hosting ahead of time.

Hosting, audience, indexing, equipment, you and your content.
A magic six, of sorts.

Here’s hoping this essay got you some hits.

Vistannoyances
by marco

1) Startup takes forever.

2) Shutdown, even right from a startup gives a “general fault” type error.

3) RECLAIM FILETYPES – freeamp/zinf mp3player needs you to put “reclaim filetypes every single time you
open it up. The built-in Windows MediaPlayer overrides it and makes itself the default no matter
what. Every time. EVEN AFTER telling it it’s NOT the default.

4) FREEZE-UPS – ctrl alt del takes about as long to get to as every other program during a freeze-up

5) Just opening Firefox with 2 tabs, Opera with 5 and checking email at the same time uses all 2G RAM???

6) If you inadvertantly leave a music disc in your CDRW/DVDRW don’t even think about opening a
few different applications.

7) I don’t need 301 fonts built-in totalling 160+ MB.

8) In the end I didn’t really like prefetch. What made them think I’m going to like Superfetch??

9) I bet I’m going to hate the newest version of indexed searching too. I don’t even want to look.

10) Why does search NOT default to showing you the filesizes? And I just tried to add FILESIZE as
a button and now I’m frozen up on that, notepad, opera, and two directories opened.

(In fact I’m retyping this in notepad on my xppro laptop right now while reading it off my PC’s
LCD screen beause VISTA’s locked-up “hourglassing” before I had a chance to save the last 6 items
I “hate.” How surreal and postmodern is that???)

This is NOT the top 10 personal problems. It is literally the first 10 I found a few days out of
the box. I have a factory installed version of Vista on a machine that can handle it. Don’t get
me started on the things I found the next few days while trying to put XP on this thing with their
“easy to use” partition shrinking application before deciding to just keep Vista in its current
state on the harddrive which I’ll just tuckaway for a while and then install a new SATA drive for
a clean XP Pro install.

I’m typing this in notepad.exe and even THAT is fighting with my global search of 1627 factory
installed .GIFs

But wait, there’s more.

The OS takes up 14+ GB memory on the harddrive, plus a 9G partition for restoring
since they don’t trust the end user with serial # and install disks anymore!

Ummm. what if there’s one little bad sector in the OS with another in the restore???
Or worse yet, a complete harddrive hardware failure?

And why is the first 300MB of my 2G RAM seemingly nonexistant? No, I don’t mean
already used up in taskmanager, it’s hidden from view!!!

It took me 3 weeks to hunt down drivers for an XP “downgrade” on this machine.
But I finally did it. I’m running XPPro SP2 on one harddrive and Ubuntu 7.10
on the other. Each is about 10 times faster than the Vista factory install,
boots up in about a minute and a half, and lets you power down without any
Fatal Errors or anything.

I’ll stop here. I could go on for decades. I think Vista needs to get back
to me at Service Pack 3 or so, because I’m not even in the mood to try SP1,
ok? This was a nightmare, of epic proportions, let me tell you. So let me
just say, I didn’t like VISTA when it first got discussed, as Longhorn, etc.,
and I wasn’t planning on running it ever, but I did this on a brand new
machine just to see “up front and personal” what everyone’s complaining
about. And boyeeee were they right.