UK online reputation management
** Theme reconstruction / tweaking in progress **
I was listening to Donna Papacosta’s ‘Trafcom News’ podcast early Saturday morning and emailing her to comment on an episode of the podcast titled ‘Audio is Not the Poor Cousin of Video’.
What’s great about this medium is the sequence of events:
Wake up, can’t go back to sleep
Listen to Donna’s podcast
Feel the urge to comment, go grab the iBook
Send email and feel part of the show…
Take picture with phone to sum it up
We’re planning to release a set of 12 Brian Griffin sales seminars pre-loaded on a iPod shuffle. The question is… can we?
Initial research shows a number of issues in the news about the re-selling of copyrighted content on iPod. Typically, this will take the form of somebody selling their iPod (complete with music library) through eBay – although it also includes businesses selling video iPods loaded with movies and music in order to inflate the price.
What we have to find out is whether we can sell our own content on iPod – and whether or not we can insert our own leaflet / graphics into the packaging. And that’s what’s so good about podcasting. I don’t know the answer… yet.
My way of making sure I’ve got the equipment I need to capture a seminar. After all, when you’re driving 150 miles to get a recording, forgetting the wireless mic base unit power supply just isn’t an option.
Do you know that feeling when you’ve been doing something the hard way, repetitively by hand, a million times? For those of you who’ve wasted countless hours manually trying to balance the levels in your recordings, GigaVox created ‘Levelator’. But here’s a thing: search anyway you like in Google for software to automatically balance the levels in your soundfiles. You won’t come up with Levelator. There’s a bit of feedback for GigaVox.
At first go, Levelator balanced levels subtly and without hysterics. But it doesn’t last. As soon as Levelator hits a file with a period of extreme quiet (a distant audience question, for example, or a dramatic half-whisper) it loses its head and forces the whisper up to the dragged-down level of the loudest sound in the recording. The result is a series of noise-gates that give the entire game away and sounds awful. .
The bottom line is that for a spoken word recording with a relatively narrow range of volume, Levelator is excellent – so good it’s invisible. But if there’s so much as one half-whisper, it falls to bits and you’re forced to either abandon the whole attempt, or start cutting the recording into sections in order to deliberately NOT levelate the quiet bits.
Rule No. 1 – “Be yourself”
We’re about to launch a new business podcast and we’re thinking about how far we go to try to make the content acceptable to everyone and how far we go in expressing views, insights or opinions.
Podcasting Rule No. 1 says that the most important thing is to be yourself. Which means this time round, it’s not going to walk down the middle of the road – and it isn’t going to please everyone.
We’re creating this podcast to give small, entrepreneurial businesses useful information that isn’t normally easy to get – and to give it to them in a format that is easy to consume. It’s going to be aimed at the commute to work, whether that’s by car, cycle, bus or on foot. There are many ways podcasting can pay off – and for us it’s a great way to highlight what we do; a perfect excuse to go out and talk to loads of interesting business people and way to generate valuable content.
For many people, podcasting is about sitting in front of a PC with a USB mic. But if you’re like us, you’ll be wanting to get out there in the real world capturing interviews with people and ideas and opinions from all over. In which case, you’ll need a portable mp3 / wav recorder. The m-Audio Microtrack 2496 brings the world into your podcast.
Pros:-
• Fantastic recording quality with supplied stereo mic
• Small, light, easy to use
• Over 700 recordings so far without a single error (* DOINK!! See this post!!)
• Every input you need
• Plenty of mp3 recording capacity on even the smallest (supplied) 128mb flash memory card
Cons:-
• Non-removable battery
• Can be difficult to playback files when there are less than 3 recorded
• Clicky mic level controller sound picked up when recording with supplied stereo mic
• Almost feels too light and plasticy
We bought this unit for about £240, the price now is somewhere in the £187 region – a bargain if only you can get hold of one. It may be that currently, it’s a victim of its own success as suppliers everywhere are out of stock and waiting for delivery. Annoying since we need another 2 for a course at the end of September.
Update: It turns out that this unit is now ‘discontinued’ – (“this recorder is now discontinued in its current form and there will be no more shipments. We are advised by m-Audio that the new improved version 2 microtrack will ship ‘in the autumn’ “).
Isn’t it interesting that most podcasts are about podcasting and full of presenters saying ‘podcast’ yet the word ‘podcast’ is about the least-microphone friendly word there is?
Waveform of ‘podcasting’ in audacity:
And who thought of putting the hardest-to-pronounce letter of the English language three times in front of every website address?
I’ve just made up a Podcasting Anonymous 12-Step guide to making a podcast episode:
1. Record things
2. Edit and name individual recordings
3. Organise recordings
4. Edit things into sections
5. Find music & sound effects
6. Draw up a plan
7. Lay sections out onto a time-line & multi-track with music
8. Export whole thing as a guide track
9. Record live commentary over guide track
10. Final edit
11. Export as mp3 and upload
12. Publish
Recent Comments