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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Over the Rainbow and A Wonderful (Digital) World

This morning before we started a big department-wide meeting at work, this song was being played, and it drove me nuts. I love this version of “Over the Rainbow” and I knew I had heard it in a film or on a TV show, but I couldn’t remember where.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A2Jt4WOxN8]

Thankfully, searches in iTunes and through Google reminded me fairly quickly that this had been used in LOST. I remembered how much I liked it, and listened to it again a couple of times.

So it was kind of eerie to read in the YouTube comments on this video tonight that it had been played at the end of the memorial service for Tim Russert earlier today. I hadn’t thought of this song for several months.

It’s also sad to discover a musician I really like and find out his name, only to realize he died 11 years ago at the age of 38. His name was unpronounceable: Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. I guess that’s why his nickname was IZ. So while I can explore some of his music, but unfortunately there won’t be any more of it.

My, how things have changed in a generation…or actually just since about 2002. Formerly if you thought of a song you didn’t own and wanted to hear it, you called in a request on your local radio station, or had to drive to a music store and buy a full CD.

Now we can buy a single track for 99 cents on iTunes and hear it immediately…and some songs are available for free on YouTube.

So I think to myself: what a wonderful (digital) world.

Michael Davis’ General Mills Presentation

Michael Davis from General Mills is giving a presentation this morning to our Mayo Clinic Public Affairs meeting. General Mills is the only other Minnesota-based company (besides Mayo Clinic) that is in the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. Michael is the Senior Vice President for Global Human Resources.

Michael talked about how General Mills tries to strike the balance between a high-performance culture and a family-friendly environment. The company also has a legacy of community involvement, with 80 percent of its employees volunteering in the community, and the company gave over $80 million charitably last year.

The company mission is Nourishing Lives. They want to both nourish the communities they are in, as well as the people.

Located on the banks of the Mississippi, General Mills had a significant disaster in 1878 when its mill exploded. Mayo Clinic also had a disaster in its origins, with the Rochester tornado of 1883.

General Mills is working sustainability, having set goals of reducing energy usage, greenhouse gas, solid wast and water usage by 5 percent to 15 percent between 2005 and 2010.

For employee amenities, they have put an auto service station on their parking lot. They have a summer hours program that lets people work 45 minutes longer M-F and then quit 3 hours early on Fridays.

Mike says Commitment has been the only factor proven to correlate with high performance, so they have reverse engineered the factors involved in creating commitment.

Forbes just named General Mills to its list of World’s Most Respected Companies. This led to a highly favorable story on WCCO TV. The story also mentions Terri Gruca’s reporter blog, which has a post on other highly ranked Minnesota employers, including…Mayo Clinic.

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.