Category: Podcasting

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SQPN, Daily Breakfast Under Pressure to Cease Podcasts

Update: (April 1, 2006)  I’m a sucker. This was an April Fool’s joke.

Father RoderickI’ve been a long time listener of Father Roderick since his early days of podcasting. At that time, he did a lot of live recordings from the Vatican during the last days of Pope John Paul II. They were fascinating, new, and revolutionary in the new medium of podcasting.

Since those days, the Catholic Insider subsided and turned into the Daily Breakfast (check out this Wikipedia entry for some more info), a program created, produced, and hosted by Father Roderick, with new episodes coming out nearly every weekday. He’s continued the same passion for the new medium of podcasting with all of his endevours. The quality is great, the material is interesting and entertaining, and he promotes the Catholic faith through subtle ways, making this a program that can cross over many religious boundries.

The people in charge of his diocese in the Netherlands have asked him to cease his podcasting projects. They do not see what Father Roderick is doing as being beneficial to the projects that are going on in the diocese, even though he is able to reach many people around the world. He is currently looking to appeal this decision on this Saturday to his Bishop. Listen to episode #99 of the Daily Breakfast to get the full story, the last fifteen minutes detailing the current situation.

Father Roderick is also asking for testimonial emails from people to give to the Bishop when he meets with him. These messages are meant for the Bishop and the diocese to understand the effect his podcasts have around the world and that they should not be regarded as insignificant.

To provide your support: dailybreakfast@sqpn.com

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PodPress 4.2 Update

A great WordPress plugin for podcasting, PodPress has been updated to version 4.2. I have yet to make the upgrade, but this was the major reason I made the jump to WordPress with RadioZoom. Publishing is that much easier with this plugin.

This update is a matter of days old and has gone from version 4.0 to 4.2 within a matter of days, updates fixing minor issues and bugs. Other details to the release:

– Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM)
– Auto Generation of enclosure tag
– Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
– Podcast Download stats
– Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
– Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
– View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
– Control over where the player will display within your post.
– Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
– Supports unlimited number of media files.
– Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
– Preview image for videos
– Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes

I hope to make the upgrade soon, but might hold off to make sure that there are not any major issues requiring a new update.

Update: As of March 31, 2006, PodPress is now up to version 4.3.

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Working the Podcasting Madness

I’ve been shoulder deep in my ongoing podcasting adventures. So much of it is behind the scenes and not very exciting, but they are details that all add up in the end. In all actuality, listeners probably don’t even notice. The fact of the matter is that I am learning with every little experiment that I do. You also have to keep in mind that not everything I do makes the final cut. If I don’t like it, I don’t do it.

There are so many varibles that keep popping into my mind. They come and go at all times of the day, and it’s important to keep them in mind or get them into material form before they’re gone.

This is what I get for leaving my roots in producing material and becoming a guy behind the scenes making it all work. I’m relearning everything. Producer, talent, and engineer. Nutty, eh?

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Always Something Going On

The RadioZoom Podcast SetupI’ve been spending a heck of a lot of time lately on the non-programming elements of my podcast. The biggest piece of news is that radiozoom.net is the new URL for the website. I’m working more and more at separating my podcasting from this site. It works better in terms of the marketing portion of the whole project. When you are a one man band, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to every element of your podcast. Promotion, marketing, producing, and hosting, it can be quite the process.

I’ve gone to RadioDaddy.com to experiment with what talent I might be able to find there. If you don’t know about it already, you can submit scripts for voice talent to record and send back to you for free. It’s a great service, but the combination of my audio editing talents and voice over experience finds me being really picky about what I’ve been receiving.

The structure of every episode has been pretty static until now. I’m experimenting with the flow of a typical podcast as well as the ventures in soundseeing and video podcasts. Until I get feedback from subscribers about what they don’t like, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.

What I really need is a new logo. The one I made in the first place isn’t cutting it for me anymore. That’s a whole other issue when I start slipping into marketing mode, figuring out what makes a good logo, something that can be a stand alone logo without lettering, color schemes, etc. I’m open to any and all suggestions, but be warned. I’m picky.

Quit your day job? This is my day job. Well, at least until the government says I’m legal to work in Canada.

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Educating the Masses

SNL did a sketch last night about a couple of guys who do a video podcast called “Joplin: Alive”. It was pretty okay, but it really could have been a lot funnier. The fact that they were doing the podcast live from Bennigan’s was enough to make me laugh. The only true gag here was the amount of people walking through the frame, but I’m not sure that the audience really caught what the joke was. There wasn’t much to distinguish the sketch from being too different from public access television, but I think that’s been done before. There was just so much more that you could have made fun of, but I’m not sure that people would understand unless you knew more about podcasting itself.

Oddly enough, the Vancouver Sun came out with quite the spread on podcasting this past Saturday in the arts section. Rebecca’s mom saved the paper edition and passed it off to me this morning. Tod Maffin had quite the feature in it as well as highlights on a lot of other things going on in and around Vancouver. The article is a really good read. There were a total of about five articles, but only the following two are available to non-subscribers of the online edition.

“Now hear this!: PODCASTS | Millions plug into downloaded audio files — to listen and communicate”

“Is podculture just a return to the past?”

Next week should have a follow up with more podcasting related content.

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The Risk of a Bridge

Already this year, five people have died in vehicle accidents on the Pattullo Bridge. This is a fact that is simply staggering to me as one of the first things I recall Rebecca teaching me about this structure was its history of being notorious for car collisions. And just yesterday, another person died in a head-on crash with an oncoming vehicle.

This takes the number of people who have lost their lives from similar accidents on the Pattullo to 15 since 2001. Further up the river, the Port Mann is about to be twinned in order to solve congestion issues with traffic. It’s obvious that people want to get to destinations faster than they can now, but at some point, I would think that you have to weigh the value of life over the value of time.

I mentioned this in a podcast with Rebecca some time ago, and today I released a video podcast that has a brief segment going over the Pattullo. The timing is erie, but perhaps you can see a little of this for yourself.

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Thank You, Clubside Breakfast Time!

Coffee Award!Much apologies to Cosmo for not letting him know sooner, but the humega special award that I won from the Clubside Breakfast Time Podcast came to us about a week ago. Very sweet!

Thanks so much, guys!

Now I wonder if Bill can find me something I can ghetto together to grind these coffee beans down. Maybe a computer hard drive cobbled together with a rock tumbler or… something.