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

New York Trip Highlights

I’m in my hotel (Quality Hotel Times) at the end of a two-day trip to New York City. The location of the hotel was great, in that I was able to walk to all of my appointments and thereby avoid the nausea induced by NY cab rides. Tomorrow I leave at 4:15 a.m. for LaGuardia, so I’m hoping my cabbie will feel less need for the rapid acceleration and deceleration I experienced Tuesday.

One of the unexpected bonuses from my trip was getting to see a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman. Guests were Charlize Theron, Richard Belzer and Motley Crue. Other than using oxygen to metabolize carbohydrates, I don’t have a lot in common with any of them, but it was an interesting experience. Hard to imagine that people find this fulfilling, though.

Then I went to check out the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, to return a MacBook battery that had failed 11 months into its 12-month warranty. It turned out that this store is too busy to take walk-in appointments, but it’s open 24/7, so I had to schedule an appointment at 6:40 this morning to see one of the guys at the Genius Bar. The good news is I have a replacement battery. Here’s a little shot of the store from last night when it was hopping. The design of the store is every bit as elegant as the iPod, even if the video I shot isn’t.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9KcrBLtLMc]

After having dinner in the ESPN Zone last night, and watching both the Yankees and Mets lose in interleague play, I walked back to the hotel and caught some video of one of the big huge lighted signs in Times Square. Since this is a family-oriented blog, I decided to feature M&M’s instead of one of the less wholesome signs.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw6V8xh03q8]

This all just is intended to document my trip to some extent, and also to show how easy it is to do so with the Flip, YouTube and a blog.

The Black Magic of Compounded Newspaper Losses

It hasn’t been a good decade for newspapers, but the last month has been especially bad.

It’s not like last year was good. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s ad revenue was down 8 percent last year, and is now about 12 percent below that pace. The Times says the Chronicle is losing about $1 million a week.

In school we learned about “The Magic of Compound Interest.” The magic for newspapers must feel like something straight out of Mordor.

Compounding losses have a way of spiraling. Ad revenue falls, so papers cut back on staff and on the number of pages. The paper is less compelling, so circulation falls. Advertisers won’t pay the high prices for reduced reach, so revenue falls still further.

Add to this the general trend among younger people to not read the newspaper, and on-line alternatives such as eBay, Craigslist and Monster.com that are claiming an ever-larger share of what was formerly a classified advertising monopoly for newspapers, and the situation looks quite bleak.

It’s hard to know which of these trends started first, but Clay Shirky has a good analysis of the monster forces conspiring against the newspaper business in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. I hope to write a review in the coming days; it’s quite insightful.

It will be difficult for my review to do it justice, though,  and besides, I might not get to it for a while. So you should just go ahead and order it today.

I’ve got a Podcasting curriculum to finish.

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.

Podcasting 106: Creating an RSS Feed

We have a volunteer to be the class podcasting example. Toby Palmer has done the narration of his children’s book Lilly and the Russet Gigantus, and wants to make a podcast of the narration.

So we will start by creating a category in the SMUG Podcast blog, which I have to do for him as an administrator. I can do this quickly and easily because Toby has used WordPress.com to host his blog.

Once I hit the Add User button, we see that Toby is now added as an Author on the SMUG Podcast Blog. He remains an Administrator on his own blog. By being part of the WordPress.com community, you can have some blogs on which you are the Administrator or an Editor, and you can be an Author or Contributor on others. This graphic shows Toby as an Author:

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