21/100 Making a Miniseries
See here
Far away in some coffee shop there are three guys sitting, taking gulps of their frappes and writing an insanely great idea on the back of a napkin. They’re going to blow apart the world of social network and provide the basis for the next great revolution.
Internet/Web 1.0 seemed mostly to be about discovering how to sell things online – dog food, books, videos and content. We discovered that food was a bad thing to sell online unless you were local to your customer. We discovered that books and videos can be compelling if you have a great supply chain and a few huge warehouses. We discovered that people don’t like paying for online content but if it’s a reasonable price, they’ll part with their readies.
Web 2.0 was hyped as being about the conversation but it really continued the idea that content should be free. Not just free to the consumer but also free to the provider. That’s why YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are all doing so well. They chewed through investor money and then were either acquired or got huge investments from massive companies. What’s paying for these services? Eyeballs. Companies seem convinced that online advertising is worth billions.
Our three entreprenerds are working on inventing Web 3.0.
I see it as being some of the following (inspired by the Web 3.0 article on Wikipedia)
I’m expecting better and more intelligent heuristics in my mobile applications. I think SaaS/SOA only works with properly ubiquitous networking, something which we do not have yet and it will be a while before we do. So we need storage and processing power locally – not a lot though more than ever before. A rich client accessing web services is obviously the way to go as evidenced by the Google Maps application on the iPhone. The experience is much better than the vanilla web
I’ve used that term twice now, vanilla web. That’s the web we access every day using a web browser. It’s a lot better than it was, with all this AJAXy goodness but it’s hard to beat a dedicated client. That’s why I prefer an RSS reader app compared to Google Reader. Why I prefer Maps on the iPhone to maps in my browser. Why I want an IM application rather than using web-based IM clients.
I think Web 3.0 will be the start of the end for the Vanilla Web.
What do you think?
I have no clue.
Which community?
Dads? Ego-mad idiots? Single Dads? Gamer geeks? Mac users? Guys who are getting married a second time? Mac “Power” users? Guys with iPhones? Guys with amazingly hot girlfriends? Home-owners? Guys who have just bought a house? Guys who have a new car? Guys who have a blue car? Guys who have MacBooks? Guys who own a company? Guys who own more than one company? Guys who live within 5 minutes of the beach? Guys who want WiFi everwhere because they carry a WiFi capable device everywhere? Guys who don’t know how to dress themselves?
That’s the first challenge: identify my community.
Once you’ve identified me, then you can start to engage me.
This is something that people forget. That’s something that internet marketeers forget. That’s something that spammers don’t even attempt.
Make sure you know what you’re talking about and to whom you’re talking to.
That’s all I have to say about that.
This is one that I’m going to be learning as I write.
Technical
The technical side of things is possibly the easiest to fix. Apple has a quick guide to Podcasting on their support site which covers a sample recipe for Podcasts and the bullet points in how to actually record sound and get it published via RSS. It’s a little high level but I guess this means that my mum would find it easier than me as I tend to overthink things.
Non-Technical
I’ve left the non-technical issues until last. This actually involves the content itself and is best covered by the Podcast Recipe on the link above.
Talking for 15-20 minutes is a tough job for a lot of people which is why you have to plan it. I’ve only ever been involved in one Podcast as a guest (The Spodcast (#28) and it wasn’t hard to fill the time – mainly because it was a conversation about interesting stuff that was timetabled and, at the end of the day, there were four people talking. 20 minutes of talk-time is a lot easier to fill when there’s four of you.
Accessibility Issues
Not to be sniffed at, there are real problems if you’re producing podcast content and that is simply accessibility. The first issue is obvious – anyone who is deaf or has a severe hearing impairment will probably not be able to access your content. In the US that’s possibly 2% of the population (link). If you include any kind of hearing impairment it rises to almost 14%. The solution here therefore is to offer a transcript which, as you can guess, is a poor substitute, but if your content ain’t rubbish then it shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Another problem related to accessibility is what is required to listen to your content. MP3 and AAC formats should be fine because one is a defacto standard and the other is an actual standard. Once you start making a political statement (like Ogg Vorbis) then you’ve just thrown away another chunk of listeners. This becomes even more problematic when a format is owned wholly by a company, like WMA, and is poorly supported on other platforms.
There’s also the problem of file size. A minute of conversation might take 512Kbytes, which is the same as about 500 pages of plain text (or seven and a half lines of text in Word 2008). Using plain text means you can feed it into a braille machine or a screen reader or magnify it to ungodly levels without much distortion. A 20 minute podcast is a much higher bandwidth and storage sink compared to the same amount of content as text.
My recommendations:
I don’t know how useful this was, taking podcasting advice from someone who’s never really done it. A lot of it is common sense. But I’m going to be starting topic 19 from Chris Brogan’s 100 blogging topics. If any of my readers (yeah, both of you) do a podcast, chuck the URL in the comments as I’m interested to listen.
I may be a tad old-fashioned but if someone gives me their number or their email address, even in the form of a business card, then I assume they want me to use it.
The Business Card is an amalgam of the Visiting Card and the Trade Card.
Visiting cards included refined engraved ornaments and fantastic coats of arms. The visiting cards served as tangible evidence of the meeting of social obligations. The stack of cards in the card tray in the hall was a handy catalog of exactly who had called and whose calls one should reciprocate. They also provided a streamlined letter of introduction.
With the passage of time, visiting cards became an essential accessory to any 19th-century upper or middle class lady or gentleman. Visiting cards were not generally used among country folk or the working classes.
Trade cards first became popular at the beginning of the 17th century in London. These functioned as advertising and also as maps, directing the public to merchants’ stores, as no formal street address numbering system existed at the time.
When I started out, I was a lot less comfortable with making these lukewarm calls. It’s not the same as a cold call because there’s been some contact but it’s certainly got a chill about it.
If you’re not sure about the call, then attempt another way to remind the contactee. Using services like LinkedIn or FaceBook can be a good way, even if they don’t accept you as a contact or friend. You’ve made contact. Just pipe an email to them through the built-in invitation features and wait and see. The problem with this is that you have to have your LinkedIn or FaceBook presence updated. That’s easy enough on LinkedIn but be aware what “friends” can see. It’s not just that a potential contact may be offended by the photos of you in your gallery bench-pressing barmaids with the tagline “Absolutely shitfaced on the company tab and loving it” which might be career suicide in many cases, but also what people write on your Walls. Remember also that your friends can see your friends which means that a lot of the content produced by the eejits who shared your trip to the Canary Islands will be on show as well. I’m not telling you who to have as friends or to edit out friends who might be embarrassing, but if they are likely to be putting up photos of you dressed as Freddie Mercury with a racoon in your boxer shorts, then you might want to reconsider using FaceBook or any of the non-professional-oriented web sites. There’s always LinkedIn which is a lot more no-nonsense!
The old cliches are true, of course.
The point being, don’t be afraid to take the next step. The next person you meet might be the person who changes your life. And maybe it won’t be today, it might be in a years time when you’re in a different place.
But if you don’t make that callback. If you don’t make that first step, then you’ll never know.