InsectaPod Blog

Anna and I got word recently that our proposal to present InsectaPod Cast at the National Extension Technology Conference. NETC will be held April 27-May in Raleigh North Carolina. This is a pretty big deal for insectapod cast and we are very excited about the opportunity to share our podcast with other extension-minded communicators.I’m on some ag-comm list-serves and there are always lots of questions about podcasting. The discussions can usually be categorized as half believers in technology and half skeptics, and I’m never sure where I fit in.I don’t think podcasting is right for everyone, there are specific goals Anna and I had in mind when we started that made it a right choice for us. But, on the other hand, sometimes it is right and doesn’t get acknowledged.I can’t imagine how many times people have printed up three-panel brochures when a podcast or blog or even just a frequently updated website would have been a better idea.I’m excited to get to spend a week a conference with folks whose communications ideas move beyond printed brochures and newsletters. Hopefully we’ll get some good (constructive?) feedback on InsectaPod Cast and maybe come up with some new ideas for making bugs (and MSU Entomology) interesting. 

I was looking for other science podcasts the other day and realized the Invasive Species Podcast hadn’t come across my feed reader in a long time. I header over to Jennifer Forman Orth’s Invasive Species Weblog and found that she’d stopped doing the podcast back in September. Which is too bad, because I liked her podcast.

She posted “The ISW Podcast is hereby suspended due to a general lack of interest. It was fun to try, but a fairly labor intensive process for not much return. Please do stop by the Invasive Species Weblog if you need an invasive species news fix.”

It is a lot more work to record speech with audio rather than writing, which is counterintuitive. Speaking is pretty undeniably less work than writing, so you’d think recording would be easier. Bt the thing is, with writing you enjoy a continual and familiar editing process. Recording audio is more performative, you have to prepare and get things right while you’re recording and pay attention to a host of different issues like mic placement. Even tone of voice, which is certainly a concern in writing, becomes a new challenge recording simple because the nuances are different.

One of the things we learned quickly when we started doing the podcast was that It took a lot more time to do any one episode than we had expected. Probably the biggest surprise was transcribing the interviews, which is a prerequisite for writing the script. Once we finished writing the script, if that’s all we’re doing, we’d be done. But instead there’s still recording and editing to do.

So I can understand why it might seem like its not worth it, but it’s too bad there’s no more Invasive Species Podcast.

I spent the last two days working on Episode 4 and posted it this morning. This one was tough because Anna and I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the material we left the interview with. After we got it transcribed, though, she was able to look at the materials and find an angle of approach. She ran at it hard in the writing stage, though, and the script turned out well.

There are two sections of audio taken in Dr. Tibbetts’s laboratory, and those were difficult to get prepped for the final program. There was a lot of room noise (especially duct fans and air conditioning) and the people were spread out in different direction. With recordings like that I really have to sit and futz with them in cubase for a long time, trying different compressions and editing sections together to get rid of the unwanted junk. I think the office interviews can get dry though, and it’s worth it to try to get whatever “in-the-field” action we can.

Ultimately, we’re both pleased with this episode, and we’re really starting to get used to the process of making InsectaPod Cast. Anna’s getting very comfortable with the microphones, interviewing, and writing, and I’m learning how to work with the audio editor faster and better. I think it will be fun in eight months to listen to these in order and the improvements we make with each episode will be evident.

I was glad to find recently that some people have seen fit to pick up the press release CANR wrote for us (clearly, because this is the third post in a row related to it). Something’s been bothering me about it, though.

Looking at one of the websites, Green House Products news, I’m not sure how genuine their use of release is. There’s a move in online publishing to have new content, regularly updated, in order to get people clicking back. The relevance of the content to the audience is really, in many models, secondary to the relevance of the advertising. GPN is a trade journal targeting greenhouse products buyers. I doubt they count a lot of iPod-toting bug freaks among their readers, but a quick look and I know they definitely have advertisements for greenhouse stuff. Doesn’t really mean I’m not glad they used the release, I am glad. I just find it useful to examine the way people are using written content online and to be aware of what their motives might be.

The other thing that is more substantial. The sustainability center at Aquinas College didn’t link to Insectapod Cast, they linked only to the newspaper article from which they lifted their information. This is annoying, because it drastically reduces that chances that anyone who reads that item on the Aquinas page will actually make their way to our website. I think if there was just one rule in online writing, it would be “write concisely and clearly.” But if there were two rules, the second would be “link everything.” Failing to link not only reduces the reader’s ability to take action on what they read on the site, it also limits your sites involvement in the rest of the online world. Hyperlinks are the greatest innovation in writing since the movable type printing press. We should use them.

I’m finding some new things each day. The Daily Press in Escanaba put the release on their web site. And the folks at the Sustainability Center at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids noted it on their news board (there’s no permalink, though, so it’ll probably only be viewable for a few days). It’s nice to see some things happening with the release and I’m impressed with the reach the folks in the College of Natural Resources communication office demonstrate. I’ve seen them take dairy scholarship press releases and get tv stations frothing, just because they used a (totally accurate) phrase like “ozone burning bovine emissions.”

Early in September I met with a colleague in the communications dept for the college to develop some strategies for getting the word out about the podcast. She put together a press a release that went out a a little over a weeks ago. I’ve been keeping an eye out for references to insectapod, and today found some things.

The Michigan Farm Radio Network apparently made mention of us last week. I found it through a google hit, but they don’t archive their news, so the cached google description is the only evidence. I’m wondering if that means we were discussed on one of their programs? If they podcasted I could have a listen and find out…

The other reference is from a Greenhouse Product News, a publication based in Illinois. The link is here.

I actually found out about both of these from viewing our web stats. Both the Michigan Farm News Radio and Greenhouse Product News Web sites have been driving traffic to InsectaPod Cast.

I was hoping the campus paper, the State News, might bite. It’s a little confusing that InsectaPod doesn’t rate in a paper that ran an article about nail polish today.

Anna and I spent the labor day weekend with some friends in the woods of northern Michigan and came back with around an hour of bug-related recording. We had a chance to speak with our friend about his impressions of and interest in insect life on a 100 acre property that was recently rid of 30 acres of red pine. Then we also took a walk and recorded while Anna discussed all the bug activity she observed.

I feel good about those recordings because they’re real, very illustrative of how normal people view and interact with “people, insects and the environment.” Some clips will turn up in a future episode of InsectaPod Cast; others might be bound for some other insect related new media effort.

We’ve gotten some good reactions from InsectaPod Cast listeners so far. Folks in the college communications coterie and the university outreach office have shared the podcast with others, which is exciting. Gaining listeners is tough for a podcast like this, and the fact that people are talking about it means we’re doing some things right.

Then there’s the fact that these types of people aren’t really our target audience, though. They’re established communications and outreach professionals, not young, tech-savvy students with a personal interest in bugs and the environment. It’s important not to conflagrate our successes within these two distinct groups of listeners. They’re both valuable, but the numbers indicate very different types of success.

Our plan since the beginning was to orchestrate a media push in September to coordinate with the posting of the third episode and the return of students. If we handle that right, maybe we can convert some of this attention from colleagues into more widespread exposure to our actual target listeners.

I posted the second episode of InesctaPod Cast this morning. I’m happier with the sound quality of this one, and with the ease of editing the interviews and voiceovers together (hopefully that will get faster every time). The process of cutting up all the parts and then splicing them together into the narrative order took maybe 5 hours, but it was fairly smooth work. I used a different audio editor this time, Cubase instead of Audacity, and I think that made things go more quickly. Also, the included effects in Cubase are better than Audacity. That probably doesn’t make any difference as far as, say, the tube emulating distortion, but the compressor in Cubase offers a lot more control.

After spending that time yesterday creating the audio file, I updated the web pages and the rss file and posted everything. I also cut out a snippet of the epsiode audio for the InsectaPod MySpace profile (the entire episode is too big to upload to myspace). Probably another 2 hours spent on that stuff.

Worth it, though. It feels good to see a second episode up there.

Yesterday we met with an interviewee to rectify and earlier failed attempt to record an interview. The first interview we did was in March at an educational presentation for youth and the audio turned out to be unusable. I didn’t have a very good idea how the equipment worked and I was using the microphones built into the Zoom H4 unit exclusively, which made background and foreground noise nearly indistinguishable.

This time we used our new Electro Voice RE50, which worked great. The pops and esses that marred earlier recordings are greatly reduced with this mic, as are handling noise. There also isn’t as great a difference in volume depending on the distance of the mic from the sound source, and less general handling noise is audible on playback. The room we recorded in, a small library on the fourth floor of the Natural Science building, was also great. Very quiet and without echo, but not sterile-sounding. I’d like to do all our recording up there!

So the interview is done, and because we’ve switched up the format and will be focusing on one subject per episode, that means all field work for episode 2 is complete. I transcribed the interview before work today and I think Anna plans to start writing the script tonight. If we can get the voice-overs recorded before she leaves for a professional conference next week we should be in good shape to have episode 2 posted pretty close to the first of the month.