Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
part deux (actually this is the regular conference session)
This is the session on Saturday morning at 9. Moderated by Deepak Singh (coast to coast bio) and Kiki Sanford.
What is podcasting? audio or video plus subscription plus portability.
Some of the podcasters have gone away from calling things podcasts – they call them “shows”.
Deepak’s experience is different – they’re only looking to talk about what they’re interested in, which maybe 50 people are interested in. He’s found that the conversation is better – have 1000 people listening a week. They’re not worried about doing it professionally.
Podfade phenomenon
q: there are lots of ways to find related/recommended music, but few that work well for podcasts.
a: someone’s working on that, but it’s going to be human tagged/categorized
a: really much harder – best directory right now is spokenword.org
best mic: blue snowball is the best microphone for podcasting (USB)
best place to record: in your closet. from Patric – even better is to have a towel over the door and another over your head (like a tent, not a turban, lol).
does quality matter? yep – people won’t listen if you don’t have consistently good quality. It does matter.
hosting - posterous is a new service – will push to youtube, itunes, etc.
(see Deepak’s pictures here: http://flashingneurons.deepaksingh.net/)
You have to put it in iTunes if you’re doing audio.
q: how often do you have to release stuff?
a: important to be regular. can create a bunch of content and not release it until you get a bit ahead so you don’t have a gap later
for videos definitely youtube, but also vimeo, viddler, etc. Tubemobile (?) allows you post to lots of places at once.
q: analytics
a: has been difficult/problem – what if people have downloaded twice. She hosts at libsyn.com and they have better metrics now.
Deepak rolls his own content distribution network using S3 (of course!)
So then they can find which of their episodes has a ton of downloads and try to see how people found it and then replicate
Podtrac (sounds sort of like feedburner mixed with an advertising network) – even if you don’t have a ton of listeners, they group you with a bunch of other similar podcasts
Owly hooks on the iphone to help recording. Cisco bought flip – next version will probably have wifi
ooyala- even how much of the podcast people have listened to
This week in virology – hardcore science.
