Goldie's Stories - Episode 2

This Thursday will be the 18th of the month Elul, which is the anniversary of the Baal Shem Tov's birthday. In honor of this, this week I read two Baal Shem Tov stories from the book "Extrodinary Chassidic Tales"

Goldie's Stories - Episode 1

At the last Denver Area Podcaster's meetup Len Edgerly spoke on his Kindle Chronicles podcast and gave six lessons on podcasting. One of his points of advice was to start before you know what you want to podcast on, and when your subject finds you, you will already be ready. He also told a story about a poet, William Stafford, who advised his students to write a poem a day. When one complained that he couldn't do that the teacher told his student "Lower your standards."

So in that spirit, I have started a podcast now rather than waiting for all pieces to come together, knowing that it will improve as I continue.

Without further ado - Here is "Goldie's Stories with Goldie Katsu - Episode 1"

Podcamp - Coming to Colorado in 2008

Today I went to the Denver Area Podcasters Meetup. It was great talking with Eve and Jim and meeting them in person. I arrived a bit late, so there had already been some discussion, and that discussion included having a Podcamp in Colorado.

We are still at the very beginning stage of it all, but it was very exciting to start talking about it with others. I shared my ideas for doing the event PodcampXL style and I'd love to see those ideas develop.

We have yet to set up the wiki for Podcamp Colorado, but I will post the information on that once it is set up.

PodcampXL - First Form

PodcampXL - Podcamp with the Local Focus

So here are my first ideas on how I envision PodcampXL Boulder.

Attendees:
First of all this is a local event for the Boulder/Denver Area. If you consider Boulder/Denver to be local then this is for you.

So who is this event for. This is ostensibly for/about podcasting but podcasters in a rather broad definition. If you have done audio or video on the internet that you have made public, whether an official podcast or a viddler video or a seesmic video or an utterz, (etc) then this is about you.

Also if you are interested in watching, listening to, or influencing video and audio casting this is also for you. You don't have to be making the content to have a stake in the content.

The event itself:
First off, this is a participatory event. Everyone is expected to contribute whether presenting speaking, or contributing opinions. If you aren't comfortable getting up in front of a crowd to talk there still are ways you can contribute to the content.

There are two parts to the camp.
The first part is creating and evaluating content.
During the course of the podcamp people will create 'casts in whatever format they prefer to present what they do - what their content is.

This would be started off or done concurrently with some workshopping on how to make 'casts. Different workshops would be held on various aspects of casting - the tools, the process, etc.

At the end of the camp there will be a showing of these casts. Depending on how many people are participating and how much content is produced we may need to find groupings of the casts and have simultaneous showings.
Also I would like to have several audio listening areas so that the audiocasts can have fair listening.

Watching is fun - but the point is to get feedback, and this is where everyone can contribute. These showings will be evaluated. The details on how they will be evaluated and what kind of evaluation will be done needs to be fleshed out.
Some possible ideas:

• Where would you enjoy watching/seeing this
• How would you categorize this
• How would you promote this? (Would you promote this?)
• What would you want to see more of/less of?

These are just ideas off the top of my head, but the purposes of the evaluations include giving casters things to think about to improve their work and thinking about what the next steps for casting are.

And that brings me to the second part of the camp. 'Casting has been going on long enough that it is time to ask where are we going next. There are plenty of blog posts on "getting out of the fishbowl", "How do we monetize", "How do we get distribution" and other areas. Its time to talk about these questions and think about next steps and how we reach those next steps. This is where ideally we will have not only podcasters but people who distribute media and promote media - both old and new - as well as business people and others who want to join the conversation.

So in addition to making content and evaluating it, we will be thinking about what 'casting means and where it is going.

What sessions go here? Well that's also to be fleshed out. Some ideas:

• Monetizing podcasts - how to? should you? what is the impact on monetizing?
• Out of the fishbowl - How do we get visibility beyond the already interested parties, like to those who's view of new media is "Oh yeah my husband forwards me YouTube videos" (Real quote from someone who is a film critic and has written a book on such.)
• How audio content is different between mediums?
  
• Social implications - Are we in an age of meritocracy? How do we preserve such a democratization of media - or is this destined to fade away like other moments of meritocracy? What differences does the easy 'casting present to how we learn information and share information?
• Etc.

And then of course from these discussions and evaluations I would like to see the discussion continue, whether in living rooms, meetups, or in other ways.

But for all of this we need to come together and create this event and share in this event.

Get involved!
So if you are in the Boulder/Denver Area and are interested in a Local, Participatory, Discussive event let me know. If you want to help create it - really make sure you let me know.

Feel free to leave me a comment below or send me an email: I'm goldiekatsu at gmail

Thoughts on Location and Local

I mentioned PodcampXL and an interest in doing one locally back in July which is when Eric Rice first mentioned it. Its nice that I was interested, but until now not much had happened with that.

Recently I took a road trip, which was prompted in part by a need to reflect on where I am and where I am going. Of the many topics of thought one was about location and community. Between twitter and Second Life, and the chatrooms of BlogTV, Ustream and Operator 11, and the recent advent of Seesmic a lot of what I think of as my community and my friends with like interests are found all over the globe. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. We are living in an increasingly global society, that is one of the effects of fast ubiquitous communication. However, when it comes at the expense of the local community that is a problem.

Sure I do have friends locally and a community that I live within, but the majority of the local community has no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about global friends, video on the net, cool new technologies, and the desire to think deeply of the consequences and future of these technologies. For that discussion I go to the net.

The network will always have a broader pool of people with similar interests. Yet at the same time the ease of finding such people with such interests over the network sometimes causes a person to overlook the local. Case in point, I was visiting Seesmic in San Francisco and Loic pointed out that there were a lot of seesmicers in Colorado. I had noticed that, but the truth is that I have not yet met any of them. In a sense it is kind of silly. People with similar interests are living (figuratively) in my own back yard and yet we wave from the distance over video.

So...that brings me back to PodcampXL. I know, it sounds like a super big podcamp (extra large) but as Eric Rice describes it the focus is local, extra local perhaps? Community comes together from doing things together. Sure gatherings are nice but what seems like the next step for me is to start working on this PodcampXL. It is inspired by podcamp but the focus is participation and presentation - of one sort or another - by all. I'd like to see this PodcampXL be the start of something rather than just a great event. Afterwards I'd like to keep the discussions going the working together going. How that works isn't clear to me, but it shouldn't be - it should come organically from the process of the PodcampXL.

Rather than describe the ideas of how I envision PodcampXL and make everyone scroll through my thoughts I will write more on my PodcampXL idea in the next post.

Innovative Media 30 Years Ago

On one of the shows Chris Brogan hosted on Blog.tv he invited me to co-host with him. We talked about security, Jewish mysticism, and how I might use this new media for the things I teach and do. When he asked I was struck a bit by how much of this "new media" has been used, in the past 30 years, for spreading Jewish mysticism and the like. I was going to email Chris some thoughts on this, but I decided I would put this here and share it with everyone.

Right now there is a project going on called The Living Archive where they are working to digitize vast stores of magnetic media from 12 to 30 years ago. These are videos and films of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Now what ties this to the new media theme is the following. Although some of the film is from professional recordings, a large portion of the film is from individual people making their own recordings of something they thought was significant in their life.

Even more relevant to the new media is that talks that the Lubavitcher Rebbe gave were broadcast over an improvised phone network (I think it may have been a call in line) not unlike the live podcasts of today. There were also real time translators who translated from Yiddish and Hebrew to English. (In the videos you can see people listening on earpieces to the broadcast translations as they watch). For some events, like Menorah lightings they did at an international satellite linkup of live Chanukah Menorah lightings around the world. This was done in the 1980's.

So many of the features of the "new media" have long been used, but only recently have the tools been developed that enable anyone to implement global broadcasts at the push of a button.

I'm still working out what I can contribute to the video podcasting/new media trend, but I found reflecting on what has already been done an interesting exercise to determine what of what are we doing is truly new and what is the democratization provided by new technologies.

Out of the Fishbowl, or Are We Ready for the Middleman

I've been hanging out on twitter and on some of the BlogTV and Ustream live broadcasts put on by Jeff Pulver and Chris Brogan and one of the popular topics has been how do we get podcasting and videocasting out beyond the fishbowl . There are a few thoughts and ideas I have on this, and of course please share your own - this is best done as a conversation. (I have a few ideas specifically for how to get listeners to podcamps as well, but that is another post.)

So the first way to get beyond the fishbowl is the slower technique. Talk to people. No, I don't mean talk to other podcasters and techies, I mean talk to people outside the fishbowl who you interact with. Talk up your podcast, or your favorite ones, to your dentist. (My dentist bought an iPod because he thought mine was so cool.) Talk to the cashier who rings you up at the grocery store. If you feel really adventurous walk up to someone on the street and strike up a conversation. You could even throw in a "man in the street" interview as part of the pitch. As these folk outside the fishbowl find the podcasts they like they will spread it onward, slowly, and only as fast as the non-technical grasp and find their podcasts.

The other way, the one more likely to succeed, is building the new middleman. It is funny that each time we destroy the middleman - no more big networks, no mainstream media, we can do it on own - we rediscover the purpose and need of the middleman. This isn't to say we shouldn't periodically blow away the middleman. A complacent middleman can become selfish and greedy. There is a reason why independent music labels have sprung up. But even as it is necessary to wipe the slate clean there comes a time when we need to build the new middleman, or curator as Chris Brogan posted today. So why the middleman?

We talk about how great the new media is because we have the freedom and power to chose whatever we want. This is incredibly powerful from a creative perspective. However, from the consumer end, those who would be only listeners, choice can be highly overrated.

Think about some product that you consume that isn't your passion. Lets say toothpaste. So you can have mint, wintermint, ginger, fennel, bubblegum, tutifruti. And in each of these flavors you have, plain, with fluoride, with baking-soda, with baking-soda and fluoride, tartar control, fluoride with-tartar control, and whitening. And this is all one brand, there are also 5 other brands on the shelf. I don't know about you, but I usually settle on a flavor and feature combination and that is what I buy unless I'm feeling like trying something new, which isn't every shopping trip. It works, why change it?

Now apply that to podcasts. Even if they are free they still cost, they cost a person's time and attention. Why should they seek them out instead of some TV show they can buy in the iTunes store? Even worse, they don't even know what to do with it. I know I need toothpaste, what I use it for and why I might or might not want fluoride in it. What do I do with a podcast? How do I know I'm interested in it? How do I know what is any good? Sure people may try out a podcast here or there, but if the first one they pick isn't remotely what they are interested in they'll go back to their pre-packaged TV. This is where the middleman becomes useful.

The middleman can provide a categorization and winnowing of podcasts into podcasts that meet a standard. The middleman can then speak to the potential listeners and tell them why they would be interested and what they would do with it. They can curate for the listeners to the pod/video/livecasts they are interested in. They can be the trusted introducer. This is what it will take to bring this new media to those non-early adopter listeners.

One thing to note, even with the introduction of the middleman it does not mean every 'cast needs a middleman. Once listeners find out that they have a use and desire for these casts they will look around and try an occasional independent cast. In a sense the middleman develops the market, but everyone can benefit from the market being developed.

I know there are some networks out there that cull and categorize podcasts, but I think we are still at the preliminary stages of the development of the middleman role. The mainstream listener still doesn't understand why they should seek out the podcasts. When they see the value to them, they will come to listen and the 'casts will become part of the new mainstream. Are we ready for that?