Category: Social Media

Podcasting 108: Subscribing to Your Podcast

This is a one-credit course in the Podcasting curriculum for Social Media University, Global. It shows you how to subscribe to the podcast feed you’ve created (or to our guinea pig Toby Palmer’s) using a manual cut-and-paste method.

Here’s the slidecast for the course. When you’re done viewing it, see the homework at the bottom.


Assignments:

1. Try clicking this link and see what happens. Then describe what happened in the comments below.

2. Open iTunes, and copy and paste this URL into the “Advanced/Subscribe to Podcast” window as described in the slidecast above.

http://smugpodcasts.wordpress.com/category/lilly-and-the-russet-gigantus/feed

Podcasting 107: Posting Your Podcast Episode

Here is a slidecast with audio showing and telling the steps involved in posting an audio file to a wordpress.com blog. Please check out the prerequisites in the Podcasting curriculum to prepare you for creating your first podcast episode.


Now that you’ve seen how it’s done, it’s time for you to join the fun.

Assignments:

  1. Create and prepare an audio file using Audacity and iTunes (See Podcasting 103 and 104 for instructions.)
  2. Get your own wordpress.com blog if you haven’t started one already, or at least get a username so I can add you as an author for the SMUG Podcast Blog.
  3. Ask to be added as an author, and tell me the title you would like to use for your podcast.
  4. Create a new post that includes your audio file.
  5. Post the link to your post in the comments below.
  6. Get ready for Podcasting 108, 109 and 110 which will tell you how to subscribe to your podcast, enhance your feeds and promote your podcast’s existence.

Updated: The file type Toby had sent me was a .m4a, which I could play in iTunes but which doesn’t appear to be a type recognized for podcasts. I will try to get this as an mp3 so we can move to the next stage.

Still Later: I converted Toby’s file to an mp3 using iTunes, and now it works. In Podcasting 108 I will show you how to subscribe to your podcast (or Toby’s), and where the information you put in the blog post appears in iTunes.

Four Words For Free

I’ve been following the controversy about the Associated Press and its attempt to charge bloggers for excerpting content. Jeff Jarvis has had an extended discussion here and here, and many bloggers are just boycotting AP and declaring its content off limits, including some of the big ones like TechCrunch.

So it was interesting today to read from Nick O’Neill that apparently AP considers quoting anything more than four words a copyright infringement.

I agree with Jarvis that AP needs to seriously re-think this strategy. I’m not a lawyer, but there is such a thing as “fair use,” and as Jarvis says, you can’t assign a specific word count to it.

The link ethic in the blogging community strikes me as much more genuine than the rewrites AP does, generally boiling down the writing of its member organizations and removing the credit from the original article’s author.

What do you think? Will you join Jarvis and Arrington in bypassing AP, and just quoting and linking to original sources?

Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel in the News

The Rochester (Minn.) Post-Bulletin has an article in today’s paper about Mayo Clinic’s new YouTube channel.

Here’s a snippet in which I’m quoted:

“A recently published study indicated that about 37 percent of all videos viewed online are seen through YouTube,” Aase said. “We need to put Mayo Clinic video where people can find it instead of just expecting them to come to our Web sites. But the YouTube channel does have a link to mayoclinic.org, and through that to other Mayo sites, so sharing in this way should lead to more traffic.”

The story also includes links to our Mayo Clinic “fan” page in Facebook and our podcast blog, which is a new and better way of organizing and delivering the podcasts we’ve been producing. And here’s a finishing quote that sums up the reasons behind our social media efforts:

“We think we will build awareness of Mayo by ‘word of mouse’ in the 21st century, much as word of mouth was chiefly responsible for building Mayo’s reputation in the 20th century,” he said.

I believe the article will disappear behind the Post-Bulletin‘s pay wall in a week, so if you want to read it, click here before 6/24/08.

Blog Council Dinner in Chicago

Last night I made it back from Galena, IL, where I spoke to the ILCMA group about blogs and social media (and also played my first 9 holes of golf in a couple of years and achieved a par on the second hole, as verified by this video.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbzaLk9eM8o]

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