I got some good feedback… some I didn’t expect.

Just to clarify… I’m in my 20s (okay, 28). I have the most ridiculous commute… 70 miles each way. I have an iPod. And I have a desire to constantly learn. For all of these reasons, podcasts are a dream come true.

The feedback that I received was… but what if people don’t have an iPod? This is a different type of audience we’re going for. I started thinking… maybe this is a tribute to Apple, but think of how much of a royal pain in the ass it would be to subscribe to a podcast without iTunes and the iPod. Yuck.

Not only that, but unless you have a minion to transcribe your podcasts, you’re going to lose out on a LOT of Google Juice. Sure you can toss up some show notes, but key concepts will not be archived as well as they could be.

So, I guess it must really depend on your audience. I’m not sure how to measure this from your Analytics or anything, but I figured it was worth mentioning. Just because I have the time to listen to Brian and his Edgework feed religiously doesn’t mean others do.

So, for now I think we’re sticking with text until I can look into this further.

For our final project, we had to do a 15-minute or so speech to try to elicit some emotion. So, I chose to talk about my favorite hobby: sim baseball. I recorded the speech and synced it up with the slides. I released it as an episode of our video podcast, The TWML Show.

Feel free to look at a few past episodes. Our 21 episodes of The TWML Show video podcast follows 57 episodes of TWML Radio, an audio podcast. Go figure, quick video clips are easier to produce.

I’ve talked quite a bit about Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Oberkirch here. Both have been a huge help to me.

Now hear them talk.

I’ve linked to quite a few Inside the Net interviews on here. Turns out, Amber MacArthur has gotten too good for our own good. She’s been hired full time by City News International in Canada, so her time to conduct interviews for ITN has been severly slashed. It’s a bummer, but it’s geat for her. I first heard of Amber when Adam Christiansen of the MacCast interviewed her for his first interview ever. Since then, I’ve become a very dedicated listener to Inside the Net and watcher of commandN.

Amber is a Leo Laporte proteg√©, as she has worked with him on many TechTV and TWIT.tv projects (including Inside the Net). From what I gather, Inside the Net is far from her most popular venture, but it is my favorite because of the quality of her guests. It seems to always consistently be all the people I want to hear from. Inside the Net isn’t going away completely, but it will be different. Specifically, it’ll be less interview and more live commentary with Leo about new things she found on the web (presumably while researching for City News). I still enjoy Amber’s commentary—commandN is great and I’ve been checking out her early work at City News and it is fantastic.

The last traditional interview episode of ITN (Amberless, just Leo) was with David Sawyer MacFarland, author of the new CSS Missing Manual book. I took a half-day CSS session with David at WebVisions, so it was pretty neat hearing from him again. I hope to check the book out when a bit of time frees up.

Some other great interviews that stick out:

• David Sawyer MacFarland (#39)
• Jeffrey Yan of Digication (#35)
• David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals (#30)
• Jeff Robbins of Drupal (#25) ***
• Dan Cederholm (#19)
• Brian Oberkirch and Alexander Muse of Big in Japan (#17)
• Jason Fried of 37signals (#5)
• Chris Messina (then with Flock) (#2)

In Googling for this post, I noticed Amber’s now a big enough start to have a fan site! Right… I almost forgot to mention that Amber is… what’s the technical word I’m looking for here… adorable?

So, good luck to Amber. Inside the Net completely rocked.

*** Just a note on this one. A few minutes in, it was nice to hear that this was THE Jeff Robbins of Orbit. I absolutely loved Orbit when Jeff was fronting them. In fact, in my former “I want to be a rock star” life, I actually used to chat about Orbit’s label, Lunch Records, with drummer Paul Buckley.

So, who is Brian Oberkirch?

The About portion of Brian’s website describes him as “Social media consultant. Writer. Marketer. Dreamer & tinkerer.” Basically, to me, he is an idea factory. Forget about just social media and marketing, he has great ideas on tech subjects such as microformats and mashups, too. Brian does a series of interviews under the name “Edgework” and he recently rattled off three good ones in a row.

In the most recent episode, as I mentioned, he interviewed Ted Rheingold of Dogster and Catster. Dogster and Catster allow people to make web pages for their beloved pets. So, quite the community has grown around these pages. They talk about how the sites fill niche, passion-centric markets. General social networking sites don’t tend to do so well. It helps to have a common interest that the users rally around. Flickr revolves around photo sharing, for example.

MySpace started off as a site where users discussed unsigned bands that they were fans of. Now MySpace is far more general, but it is sustaining itself—probably because it is so damn ubiquitous. Facebook is now trying to do the same. They were a community that were bonded together by academia. You needed a .edu email address to be admitted. So, there was a sense of community because everyone had something in common. Now Facebook is letting more users in, and some existing users don’t like it. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

Before Dogster, Brian covered Kiva, a nonprofit founded by Matt Flannery. What is Kiva? Let me just let the site explain it:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

There just aren’t many sites out there like Kiva… it’s a great idea. Not only community marketing, but community financing—for a cause. Kudos to Matt.

Finally, before those two episodes Brian talked to Chad Dickerson of the Yahoo Developer Network. The main topic was Yahoo’s Open Hack Day. Yahoo used to hold internal contests to see what types of cool hacks and mashups their developers could come up with. Recently, they opened it up to the outside world. Check out the winners here.

Brian provides a lot of great ideas about the mashup culture, which is nothing short of fascinating. To see more examples of mashups, check out ProgrammableWeb.

To find out more about Brian, check out an interview by Shel Israel on Naked Conversations. I recommend checking it out. One quote from that interview that stuck out to me was when he was talking about how old school marketers will need to be cognizant of the new school “unmarketing” techniques, though it will be a gradual process:

I know we talk a lot about dinosaurs and how everything is changing, etc., but I think it will be gradual. If you don’t eat well, keep smoking, never exercise, eventually that will catch up to you. Same thing will apply. You’ll be able to get away with it for a while, but there will be a tremendous opportunity cost.

I thought this exact quote could relate very well to what will happen if old school table-based web designers don’t pay attention to web standards.

Not to be bandwagonesque, but Jeremiah Owyang also recently had a post about Brian.

So, lastly… I need to ask a question. Brian… when are you going to write a book on all of this? Personally, I can’t wait.

But they’re not. They’re simpler. They’re easier. And they’re better. There’s just no way around it anymore.

Paul Boag does a great podcast called Boagworld that I’ve talked about a couple times. He’s very passionate about standards and decided to do an entire podcast episode (with a slide presentation) devoted just to web standards and how they help business. It’s called The Business Benefits of Web Standards.

What’s different about what Paul does is that he tries not to be too tech-heavy. In fact, this presentation was painfully NON-techie for me. But what it does do is really explain the history and benefits of web standards in ways that directly make sense for business.

You need not need to code any HTML or anything to understand this podcast. It’s really for everyone involved in any type of management aspect for a website. Enjoy.

A few items/products/discussions/tidbits about discussion had crossed my plate recently and I figured I’d write about them. They are

• iTunesU
• TeachMac
• Digication
• The Future of Education in a Digitally Convergent World

iTunesU

I had heard about iTunesU a while back, but a recent post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog made it enter my consciousness again. What is it? iTunes U is a way for universities to make content available to students and faculty through the iTunes Music Store. As Apple itself says it:

iTunes U* is a free, hosted service for colleges and universities that provides easy access to your educational content, including lectures and interviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s the most powerful way to manage a broad range of audio or video content and make it available quickly and easily to students, faculty, and staff.

So, what makes this worth talking about? The possibilites. Only a handful of schools are taking part, but this really could provide a whole additional business model for the iTunes/iPod combo. For me (and many others), podcasting changed the way I used my iTunes/iPod. I was educating myself on web design news and trends and also keeping myself entertained. Taking that education and actually making it a regimented full-fledged course seems like a logical next step. Forget the implications this has for universities—how about training companies that want to charge a few bucks per “episode”? It could use the same foundation as TV shows. A “season” is a “class”. “Episodes” are “lessons”. Buy one class or buy the “season pass” to enter the class and receive all lessons for a flat rate. It doesn’t have to be just tech training. People can be trained on ANYTHING. How to make the best minestrone soup? How to lay down a perfect bunt? How to teach your dog to sit? User generated training? All in iTunes? Apple, of course, gets to take their cut and the author gets the rest.

I’m sure there are many other implications of this (who hosts the content, what pricing model, who handles the tech support, etc.), but those can be answered later. This, obviously, is a braindump.

TeachMac

I first heard of TeachMac because they are a proud sponsor of a great podcast—Mac OS Ken. TeachMac is “The Modular Macintosh Learning and Teaching System”. A lot of what I just said about iTunesU is being implemented here. It is user generated content. TeachMac takes a cut. The author takes a cut. But it is all Mac training. The shell and technology really are independent of the content. They could use this to host training programs of any kind. They just choose to focus on the Mac.

iTunes is huge, though. They could afford to branch out and the be the home of all things training. They already host podcasts from NPR and music from Paris Hilton. Training as diverse as making apple pie to building a skyscraper is hardly pushing the envelope.

So, what I like about TeachMac is they are already doing something that I think iTunes could easily do but hasn’t yet.

Digication

What pissed me off the most when I heard of Digication was the fact that about an hour before listening, I told my boss about how something like it would be a great idea for a product. They thought of it first (and quite a while ago). Congrats to them (seriously, nice product).

Anyway, keeping with the trend of where I heard about these products, Digication was featured on Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte’s wonderful podcast, Inside the Net. Digication is a social networking site (yes, another), but this one is for the use of education. One line I like to use at work is that we have to start designing for people that grew up on Halo and MySpace. Digication uses the great communication and collaboration features of MySpace, but in a learning-friendly way.

Kids are still going to use their MySpaces and their Facebooks, but at least this site helps make education a bit more compelling for them in a format that has already been proven to reach students (just look at any stats on MySpace’s usage). Digication is a walled garden. Students cannot see content or link to people outside of their assigned classes. The discussion is supposed to revolve around the coursework, though I’m sure the teachers and developers would rather see classmates chit-chat about off topic material on Digication than on any of the alternatives. The site features threaded message board discussion, calendars and tasks, easy course material creation, grading (nice addition, better keep that secure though!), and more.

Digication is free to the first 1000 students. There is a monthy, per student charge after that. I’m not a user of the site, so I wonder if the value comes when a single class starts using it or when a whole school is on the system (and that’s if a teacher can even sign up if the whole school is not in the system). For teachers at schools that won’t adopt something like this, a class blog would be a good alternative (though you probably want to password protect it for just your students). Although, I do like the idea of Digication being something a bit more regimented and school-approved. Teachers are human, too, so you never know what they might be saying to your kids on a personal blog. I guess the key here is for parents to just be more observant and involved. Of course, that’s a blog post (or an entire blog) for another time.

The Future of Education in a Digitally Convergent World

I’ve mentioned a few hundred times that I love podcasted conference sessions. One from South By Southwest 2006 that was a good listen was The Future of Education in a Digitally Convergent World. I actually didn’t know anybody on the panel and don’t remember a ton from listening to it, but I remember it being a good conversation. Here’s what the site says about it:

From online degree programs to instant knowledge available on Google and interactive online education in the K-12 space, digital convergence is transforming education in meaningful ways. But we are only beginning to explore the ways in which digital technology can change and improve education around the world. From virtual online communities to adaptive learning programs and 3D simulation worlds, the future of technology in education will continue to change dramatically. This panel will explore what is next in the world of technology-enabled learning.

There’s nothing specific to report there, but it was good to hear a few different outlooks on where this whole education thing is headed.

So, there you have some random notes on education. Sorry it wasn’t more formulaic, but it had been stewing for a while and needed to get out.

@media2006: I love the trend of conferences releasing their sessions as podcasts after the fact. It gives me the chance to catch up on what went on at this great London web conference.

Baseball History Podcast: This one always goes immediately to the top of my playlist when it is published. Bob Wright puts together a bi-weekly podcast where each episode consists of a “this week in baseball history” selection (which turns into the best part of the podcast: an extended biography of the player involved), a term from the baseball dictionary, and information about one the many, many baseball cities around the country (mostly minor league, Negro League-type cities).

Baseball Musings: David Pinto, like Bob Wright, is not one of those over-the-top sports commentators. They just provide information to those of us that have attention spans of more than 30 seconds. David’s weekly show is about the happenings in Major League Baseball with a focus on the sabermetric side of things.

Baseball Prospectus Radio: I actually wish this weekly was a little more sabermetic, as you would think it would be (coming from the Baseball Prospectus folks). But they generally have very compelling interviews every week.

Business Week – Web Smart: This one is still in a probation period for me. They’ve had a couple good episodes on how the web is changing the face of business. Still too early for an adequate review, though.

CommandN: This weekly video podcast is one of Amber MacArthur’s wonderful ventures. With her cohosts Mike Lazazzera and Jeff MacArthur, it is a well-produced look at what happend in the week in tech and some tips and good web finds.

Edgework: This is Brian Oberkirch’s audio extension of his blog where he provides interviews he conducted with some of the best minds in web development and marketing. Brian has this “citizen journalism” thing down pat.

Inside the Net: Another Amber MacArthur weekly, but this one is an audio podcast with the great Leo Laporte. Together, they interview many of the great minds in Web 2.0, whether it is individuals (like Dan Cederholm) or reprsentatives from a company (like YouTube)

Mac OS Ken: Ken Ray provides an informational, yet humorous, daily news report on Apple and everything going on with the Mac. It’s a nice daily quickie (generally about ten minutes long) and the format is something I wish more podcasts would adopt.

Mac Roundtable Podcast: This podcast is a roundtable of four Mac podcasters. I am an avid listener of Adam Christiansen’s MacCast and the other three in the group provide additioaal points of view about current Mac topics. This one doesn’t come out as often… seems like every 2-4 weeks or so.

MacCast: Another bi-weekly, this is the best of the Mac podcasts that I’ve heard. It contrasts really well with Mac OS Ken in the respect that Ken does quick bits with some humor and focuses a lot of financials. Adam Christiansen tends to run in the one hour range, talks in depth about news, includes listener-provided content (whether it is their audio questions/comments or emailed questions), and tips. You need to dedicate an hour to it, but it is well worth it.

MLB Radio Daily: I used to listen to Major League Baseball’s daily all the way through every day, but it has gotten to the point that I only download an episode if there is a particular interview I want to hear. I shy away from the teams’ site reporters and always will download an interview with a Hall of Famer or a player. Marty Lurie (sp?), who interviews players as part of his Player’s Talk segment, is particularly good. His recent interview with Oakland Athletics manager Ken Macha was truly unique. He got Macha to open up quite a bit about his team.

Podcaster Confessions: This is Joseph Nilo’s relatively neglected side project. Nilo, part of the Mac Roundtable, calls the Mac Pro Podcast his main gig. He also has been doing a lot of podcasts for other companies (good for him!). When he is able to release Podcaster Confessions, it’s a good look into what other podcasters are doing.

The Official LOST Podcast: I don’t watch much TV, but Lost is wonderful. Here, executive producers Carlton Cues and Damon Lindeloff provide commentary about the show and answer listener questions. You would think they would be serious, but man… these guys are nuts.

The Web 2.0 Show: This is another podcast that interviews some movers and shakers in Web 2.0. It is a similar format to Inside the Net, but seems to be a bit more technical and not quite as polished. That’s not a bad thing, though. Inside the Net is part of twit.tv and is getting all sorts of advertising money lately. I appreciate the grass roots style of the Web 2.0 Show.

Tiki Bar TV: A guilty pleasure, this video podcast is basiclaly a short-format web TV show. It’s hard to explain, but it is incredibly well produced, funny, and is an internet phenomenon.

TWML Radio: This one is my own podcast for my baseball simulation league, the Ted Williams Memorial League. I have been podfading on this one lately because of a lack of time. But when I do podcast, I like to get interviews with the guys in the league. At certain times during the season, we’ll go the video format (like the Hall of Fame annoucement).

UIE Brain Sparks: I like to read/listen to the work of Jared Spool and Joshua Porter of User Interface Engineering, a company outside Boston. I saw Jared at WebVisions and religiously read Joshua’s blog. Both have been taking part in podcasts published here (among other guests).

Vitamin: Vitamin’s site is a great reasource for web developers. The podcast is an extension of that where interviews with authors and others in the field are posted. The release schedule isn’t consistent, but it is always good content.

Web Design & Development Podcast by Engines of Creation.com: This is another in the probation stage that I started listening to recently. It’s a couple of guys talking about web design and development. I’m a bit concerned that they go on a bit long, so we’ll see if I stay subscribed.

Web Design Podcast from Boagoworld.com: Paul Boag has a great site and podcast that is one of the best resources for web developers out there. Paul likes to open his material up to web site owners, too, so you get a good perspective on all aspects of the development process. Boag and his co-host, Marcus Lillington, provide not only great content but laugh-out-loud Brit humour that is seldom “pants”.

Why did I do this? I’ve been at Aptima for three years this month. I was taking part in an interview with someone who has been with the company for over ten years (she was employee #4; there were around 50 when I was hired; now we’re in the 110 range). When she was telling the candidate what she does, I realized that not only did I not know a lot of what she was saying, but I found out she had a lot of experience in collaborative web sites.

So, that was it. I decided that I needed to share this information about her and other employees in an internal podcast. Each week I am interviewing two people—an Aptima “veteran” and an Aptima “newbie”. I asked the interviewees about their backgrounds, current projects, professional interests, and personal interests. The first episode launched today and I feel it went very well.

This is the first step towards corporate blogging for my company. I want to take baby steps. Perhaps an internal podcast can turn into an internal blog. Then perhaps the internal blog can turn into an external one. We have great minds here and I think blogging could be a hit.

Where this is a really good thing is the fact that I really wanted to attend the sessions by Matt Mullenweg and Rashmi Sinha, but they were up against sessions I really needed to see. So, the podcast is a great after-the-fact fill-in. A colleague of mine was hoping I could grab info from Luke Williams’ presentation. I was not able to, but luckily his session is available via podcast.

Recently, I’ve been catching up on the podcasts from the SXSW conference this past March. There was a ton of great info and I’m glad they put this up for folks like me that cannot attend every one of these conferences.

It’s a good listen if you want to go beyond the standard tutorials and how-tos and really get a look at the history of the technology.

Podcast available here.

I’m still waiting for the WebVisions podcasts to go up. You’ll be alerted here when they are available.

Update: Again, as soon as I post something, something cool hits my RSS reader. Vitamin just send out this list of conference podcast feeds. I love this trend of releasing conference sessions for those who could not attend (or those that want to save a reference).

Well, I guess I’d have five cents. Brian Oberkirch recently interviewed Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path for Weblogs Work. (Link soup?)

Dan talks about Interaction design not just how it relates to software, but to Disney rides, coffee shops, and other everyday situations. Dan’s book, Designing for Interaction, hits shelves this August.

Worth noting is that Dan & Brian were both on the insanely great “Let Go, Jump In” panel at WebVisions last week.

The interview is here.

So, when doing project research, a pair of sites hit me right off the bat as particularly inspirational for the approach I’d like to take. One is Vitamin and the other is Boagworld. Both of these are community sites and both of these have different approaches to podcasting.

Boagworld is a weekly podcast that takes on a (slightly) traditional radio show format. There is a host (Boag) and a co-host. Boag is a web developer for a UK company called Headscape, but he is generous enough to present this show with his theories and experiences of good web design. The show has a light feel but has a structured format that presents a ton of great content.

Vitamin takes a much different approach. There are several contributors to the site, so the podcasts are more like interviews with each to discuss best practices, favorite tools, and experiences in the field. This would probably relate better to the site I’m working on. If the site has a steady list of contributors, the podcasts can be interviews with them. Of course, it can be expanded to other well known practitioners in the field.

A third site I discovered later in my research process. The Web 2.0 Show is kind of a combination of Boagworld and Vitamin. There are weekly co-hosts, but they interview practitioners in the world of web design that are not associated with their site at all. It is another approach I could take, depending on whether or not we have a stable group of contributors.

As a commuter with a long drive every day, I have found podcasting as an invaluable way to catch up on information, and lately that has been web standards and Web 2.0-type content. I can see this easlily transferring over to my current project’s domain and I look forward to implementing it.