Venture Geek

I had my first experience with producing a podcast this week as part of my Fellowship at UC Berkeley. The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation there was interested in trying out some of the new media methods, and podcasting was an obvious place to go.

The first episode is an interview with Prashant Shah, Principal at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The interview was done on the spur of the moment with very unsophisticated equipment, but I think the whole thing turned out to be not too shabby for a first shot.

You can find the direct link to the MP3 on the Lester Center blog (also part of the new media experimentation), or subscribe to the podcast feed.

For those interested in the mechanics of it all and my first impressions of podcasting production, read on…

The recording was made using an iSight camera as the mic and GarageBand to record and mix on my PowerBook. We talked in a conference room. In the future I’ll try to talk in a smaller room, as I don’t have the audio equipment to overcome the acoustic challenges of sitting in such a big room with a single mic between us. I also wish I’d asked Prashant to sit a little closer to the mic.

The recording itself sounds far from professional, but in this age of peer production I don’t think that matters much — it’s definitely good enough to get the point, and if we’d been in a small room I think it would have sounded even better. I have learned that it’s a lot harder than you might thing to actually find a “quiet place” to record voices — even doing the little voice intro had to be done a few times because of random background noises in my house getting picked up. I suspect if I had a better microphone and had any clue what I was doing when it comes to audio mixing it wouldn’t have been as much of an issue.

GarageBand is a pretty nice program when it comes to mixing together tracks — and it was very easy, especially after my experience in iMovie, to whip together a little intro music and deal with fade-ins, fade-outs, etc. My giant complaint about GarageBand, and I’m not alone judging by some Google searching, is that it can’t export directly to MP3. That’s just a load of crap — I’m surprised that Apple would have been so blinded by their love for AAC that they would push GarageBand as the best way to make a podcast and then make you jump through hoops just to get your files in the format that everyone on earth is using (and the same goes for music!). The basic option is to import the song into iTunes, then convert it to MP3 (then dig around in your music folder looking for the MP3 it created) — and there doesn’t seem to be a way to specificy on a per-convert basis what kind of MP3 compression you want to use. I have mine set very high for ripping CDs, so I had to go in and change it to much lower resolution or the file was going to be too big.

In terms of publishing, I just used Feedburner, which has the very nice feature of “SmartCast”, which automagically detects when you have links to rich media files in an RSS feed and turns that into a podcast feed with enclosures (and optionally all the iTunes add-in info). Given that I don’t have great access to the web resources at Berkeley I struggled a little on that end, but that’s not really relevant to anyone else.

I did find that WordPress.com is considerably less flexible than installed WordPress software. I’m not terribly surprised, but I was a little shocked to find out that when you click on “Categories” in a WordPress.com feed you are actually clicking through to a global tag-based search for all WordPress.com blogs, not just the posts in your blog with that category (for that, you need to follow the links in the Categories sidebar widget, which took me longer than I care to admit to figure out since I had turned off the Categories sidebar widget). You also can’t upload MP3 files to a WordPress.com blog apparently, which is a bummer. I’m a huge fan of the WordPress software this blog is running on, so I hope WordPress.com will iron out some of those kinds of issues (though, in fairness, they likely don’t think of those things as ‘issues’, merely features). I still think I’ll suggest WordPress.com when people ask me what blogging service they should use (people who couldn’t install their own WordPress or have interest in buying a hosting account that does that), but I’ll have more caveats than I used to.

My final comment is that podcasting can be time-consuming to get started if you want things like intro music and don’t have a ready-made way to store your files and serve up your feeds (if I’d hosted it on a WordPress installation of my own it would have been much simpler, for instance), but now that I have the basic template down, I think I could crank them out quite easily.

Any tips from experienced podcasters out there?