Category Archives: Podcast Tips

Podcasting is not dead

Some people say podcasting is dead. And that videocasting would kill it. They said the same thing about Radio when films and television came to be. And yet radio has survived and it has even gone digital – podcasts and digital radio.

I have been a podcaster on and off for a couple of years and I have found out that there is still a space for podcasting out there. Podcasts are for those who have the patience to download and listen to audio files lasting from fifteen minutes to even two hours.

And podcasts take on many forms:

1. Speech – At its most basic form a podcast could be a speech by the podcaster. A reading of his or her post. it could be a rant, an impassioned speech or a discourse and even story telling.

2. Radio/Magazine Show – A podcast can also be a radio show. A talk show, A magazine show with many features, interviews or even games. It could also be a time where music can be played – assuming of course it is podsafe music – free to be distributed to the public.

3. Radio Play – This is probably the most tedious of all podcasts but also when done correctly the most rewarding both for the podcasters and its listeners. Welcome to the Theatre of the Mind. A good template to follow for this type of podcast would be the radio plays from the Golden Age of Radio – Mercury Theatre’s War of the World is a fine example and even Vincent Price’s Three Skeleton Key Island.

And the beauty of it all is that all you need is a podcasting microphone, audacity , an open source software for recording and editing sounds – available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems, and time.

Podcasting is not dead.

Originally posted on August 28, 2009 @ 11:28 pm

PodPress and WordPress 2.6 Update Two

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So it now looks like the PodPress forum has over a dozen pages of spam where there should be information about the development of the PodPress plugin. The last message from the plugin author on the forum was nearly three weeks ago explaining why the release of the new version was already a week late, meaning that we are now four weeks late with a new version of the plugin.

Will we ever see a new PodPress plugin? If the current state of the forum is any indication, I wouldn’t hold my breath. If you are having any issues that can be fixed through the dozens of simple patches that people have come up with, that might be your only option unless Automattic puts out an interim release based on the fix that they’ve created. Though from what I’ve heard, they would only do such a thing if all other forms of communication broke down.

Originally posted on August 30, 2008 @ 3:48 pm

Making Money Online: Scaling Traffic for Profit

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I was recently talking to a friend of mine about how you can make money online. He does a podcast, and was looking for sponsorship. I was telling him that even if he could get a CPM rate of $10 for every thousand plays that the show gets, with the thousand plays per weekly episode, and selling three ad spots, he’d only be looking at $120 per month.

After realizing that getting one thousand listeners per episode wasn’t easy for him, nor any podcaster, I immediately wondered how well podcast advertising scales. Surely it deals with the same sliding CPM rates that blogs and other forms of advertising get, and so the higher the traffic, the less money for every thousand listens he’ll get.

So estimating a maximum audience of ten thousand plays per episode, four episodes a month, and three sponsors per episode still paying $10 CPM, he would only be making $1200 per month for what, in my mind, would be an outrageously popular show.

Seems like there aren’t really any super easy ways to make money online and that it always comes back to creating a large enough audience that you can sell something, be it services, products, or advertisements, but the audience required to make a full time living off the web, is probably only achievable by two percent of those willing to chase it.

Originally posted on August 23, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

PodPress and WordPress 2.6: A Quick Update

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For those of you wondering what is going on with PodPress like I am, so far it doesn’t look like the programmer was able to complete an update to the popular WordPress plugin in the ten days that he assumed it would take.

There are currently many issues with PodPress’ WordPress 2.6 compatibility, and Dan Kuykendall aka Seek3r seems to be taking his time to work on what should be a major release in version 8.9, despite everyone wishing he would push an interim release to fix the current issues.

Over the last few weeks, people have come up with all sorts of ideas on how to make PodPress 8.8 work with WordPress 2.6 as well as making the experimental version of PodPress 8.9 work with WordPress 2.6.

Andrew Ozz was one of the first to get the PodPress 8.9 experimental release working for many people, with a fix that should fix PodPress for those using WordPress 2.6 and having issues due to the post revisions feature that WordPress now includes.

In the comments of the Andrew Ozz post, there is a person named Otto who has instructions on making it work with PodPress 8.8, but not really any confirmation on if it does, in fact, work or not.

There are also people disabling post revisions, which is a great feature, either through plugins or through manually editing core files.

Some people started a small donation drive in order to try to fund development time of the plugin, and not much money was raised, from what I can tell.

It looks like the WordPress community really wants this plugin to work, but aren’t willing to wait for the final release, nor pay for its development. As I have said before, I think the biggest issue is that this is a hobby project for Dan, rather than an Automattic sponsored project. Automattic should be actively participating in the development of important plugins such as PodPress.

Will we see a new release of PodPress in the next week? And if a WordPress 2.6 compatible version of PodPress becomes a month or more away from being released, will people wait, or try to transition to something else?

Originally posted on August 4, 2008 @ 9:48 pm

PodPress and WordPress 2.6 – Frustrations Increasing

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I am not the only one with issues with WordPress 2.6 and PodPress and so many people on various forums are jumping over to the cavemonkey50.com Podcasting plugin, but finally today, we got word from the developers that in around ten days we can expect a release of PodPress that will work with WordPress 2.6.

Is this good enough?

PodPress is a huge plugin system that brings the ability to quickly and easily manage and embed audio and video to blog posts, providing millions of podcasters with a system to control their episodes and display them with a commonly understood look and feel. To me, this plugin has become a staple for podcasters, and should be treated as a premium plugin system where there are multiple developers, support from Automattic, and a working version ready within a week of a launch of a new major WordPress revision.

I couldn’t imagine how people who podcast every day have been feeling as two weeks will go by before they can either upgrade to WordPress 2.6, or if they already have, until they can easily embed their podcasts once again.

I might actually jump over to the Podcasting plugin, though I don’t really enjoy the interface as much as I enjoy the one that PodPress has, but it does support many of the features I am used to having. One thing I am really happy to see is that the display of the flash based player is exactly the same, meaning that people who listen to the podcast right on the post wouldn’t see any interface change.

And the important part for people like me that jumped on WordPress 2.6 is that the plugin works with the latest version of WordPress and has since before WordPress 2.6 was released.

If you have been having issues with PodPress and WordPress 2.6, checking out the Podcasting plugin from cavemonkey50 might be a great alternative for you to get your functionality back up and running.

I am not entirely sure if you can transition easily from PodPress to Podcasting, but it is definitely something that I might look into next week if PodPress doesn’t soon get a new release.

One great thing about the WordPress community is how their almost always end up being two plugins that do the same things, so that if one does die off, the community has an alternative to flock to.

I hope that PodPress development moves smoother in the future, and I hope Automattic will take some of the flack for not helping support certain premium level plugins.

Originally posted on July 17, 2008 @ 9:18 pm