InsectaPod Blog

I’m frequently asked if we intend to make InsectaPod Cast a video podcast. Video Ipods are pretty popular now and digital video cameras more prevalent, so it seems like a reasonable action to take, but I’m hesitant myself for two reasons:

1. Our podcast is too long. We always envisioned InsectaPod Cast as something people listened to while doing something else, and the format it takes is a result of that. We can’t expect people to sit and watch 15 minutes of bugcasting. Most of the video podcasts that I see being successful are short, and alarming (like Will It Blend). I’m just not sure if the small screen and mobility of the Video iPod can appropriately accommodate a longer, narrative program like ours.
2. It would be a lot more work. If your podcast involves recording one or two people talking in a studio, making it video isn’t to difficult: you record them talking (any rhetorical gains from doing so are questionable, though, I think…who wants to watch two geeks talk to each other?). We’ve already made a lot of work for ourselves with InsectaPod Cast, though, by using narrative, field interviews, and environmental recording. To mirror that in video would be incredibly difficult because we’d have to video record all those different steps, too. And edit them all together in sync with the audio. It sounds like a nightmare to me.

This blog isn’t super buggy, but its accompanying podcast sure is. As a result I’m always interested in finding other people who are discussing entomology online, especially through blogs. I’be been reading Bug Girl’s blog regularly for over a year now, and I was disappointed yesterday when she posted that she’ll taking a sabbatical in response to someone “outing” her (she’s been blogging anonymously). So I went searching for some more stuff to fill the void. What I found is listed below.

1. The Ant Room. Kari Wilkie writes about ants. Lots of stuff about ants.
2. NC State University Insect Museum. I think departmental blogs are a great idea, I’d like to see the folks in Anna’s laboratory maintain one.
3. Bugs for Thugs. I’m not sure what’s thuggish about this one, but the photos are great.
4. The Myrmecos Blog. More ants, and I learned a new latin word today.

And, finally, just a weird thing that came up in this search. I read a post on Kari Wilkie’s blog in which she quoted a physicist saying that other branches of science are “just stamp collecting.” After that, I was searching google for entomology blogs and came up with this one from Jean-Michel Maes, an entomologist in Nicaragua. The linked post gave me a laugh, because I don’t need to speak Spanish to know that “Sociedad Filatelica de Nicaragua” means stamp collecting.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a few friends and subject of You Tube video came up, along with the fact that I watch a LOT of them. In this discussion I referenced specifically that a thirty minute documentary of the Stanford Prison experiment, conducted and filmed in 1971, is available on YouTube in three installments. My friend Jeff snorted and said, “I don’t have time to waste in front of the computer.” Beyond that fact that, from a time management perspective this simply isn’t true (he does choose to spend a few hours a week sipping whiskey and listening vintage country music LPs) it also was another example of an attitude I see a lot in both my professional as well as personal life: that serious things don’t happen on the internet.

A recent study conducted by Licht and Martin at Iowa State University and published in the Journal of Applied Communications looked at how corn farmers use media. When asked about web-based sources, one focus-group subject said, “You don’t have time to play around with the computer to see what’s going on.” Similar sentiments were expressed in a survey of Michigan Dairy Farmers conducted by my office in 2006. One farmer wrote in the margins of his (no gender pro-noun bias here, I just checked the form and the respondent identified as male) survey, “I don’t have time to read on the computer. My reading is done in print- hobby reading.” Additionally, I’ve been trying to develop more web specific content for the dairy extension publication I work on, and on two occasions authors have been offended when I suggested their work would be more useful in an online environment than print- they see the web as junior varsity venue for writing.

And of course there holes in these attitudes. The process of reading online doesn’t take any longer than reading printed materials. Studies show that we read a little slower on a screen, but the text is usually shorter, and we scan information more. From the academic publishing angle, there are several respected online-only journals in my field, notably the Journal of Extension and the Journal of Agricultural Education Online.

Those facts don’t negate the perception that reading/writing online is an inferior activity to printed materials, though. They fact is that Jeff, the friend who scoffs at YouTube, has preference for watching things on television as opposed to the computer and he firmly believes that preference is based on a matter of time and availability. I know he’s also never listened to InsectaPod Cast, and it’s mostly because he doens’t identify as an Internet Person.

It’s inarguable that the number of people who use the internet to access information continues to grow as access areas and speeds increase, but it’s important for me to be reminded form time to time that there remain lots of people out there who aren’t inclined to access web-based information regardless of issues related to the digital divide: They just don’t trust it, or like it, or maybe something else. Figuring out ways to change those perceptions would be a huge accomplishment, but is it possible?

I’m currently taking a publications management course and yesterday, instead of a lecture, the class of 12 met with a campus sustainability proponent about creating a document to get people thinking about sustainability (the document remains unspecified at this point, figuring out the particulars appears to be a part of the learning process).

This fellow was super excited about sustainability, and in the course of explaining his excitement, he spoke about wanting some communications effort that reaches “the global community” and “changes peoples’ lives.” When asked what he had in mind, specifically, he said that he liked the Sarah McLachlan video World on Fire and that he’d also been impressed by some people handing out pamphlets on campus.

It was interesting to hear both these techniques mentioned in one breath because I can’t really think of two very different ways to communicate a message. One is old, the other new; one stylish, the other utilitarian. A video like McLachlan’s spreads like a virus. Instead of trying to convince the target to take a pamphlet, the target forwards it to a friend. To hear someone say that both of these methods could be an acceptable answer to the same communications need was interesting. It belied his earnestness, and I suspect his belief that action may be as important as the mode of execution.

We need to take some more action with InsectaPod Cast, even if we haven’t much of a plan for execution. We’ve made six episodes now, we’re halfway through, and it’s time to find some other avenue to gain more listeners, to get the word out. A video might work, but a pamphlet might, too. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m definitely not going to be standing outside handing stuff to passersby.

Every few weeks I log onto the InsectaPod Cast myspace account and send out a flurry of friend requests. After I do that, I can look at the stats for insectapodcast.com and see a significant spike in visitors (the myspace page drives more traffic to insectapodcast than the msu entomology page, probably because I can’t actively draw attention to insectapod through the department page the way I can myspace).

After one of these sessions yesterday I got an email from someone at an organization I’d contacted, Conservation Calling. They sell conservation minded ring-tones for download and asked if I had any to contribute. I’m not sure how involved we can be in something like this because of our strictly non-profit mission (even if we didn’t accept the potential pennies they’re offering, the waters seem murky) but I think it’s a cool idea. My friend Jon Slaght is a conservation biologist at The University of Minnesota and he’s made recordings of the Blakiston’s Fish Owl, a rare bird from the Russian Far-east he describes as “Bad-ass” available as ring-tones. I’ve got a shrieking juveline male fish owl on my own phone, but maybe someday I’ll switch to bees or crickets or something.

Recently, while serving in my agricultural editor capacity, I received an email about a new online extension effort. Extension.org is using syndication feeds to create a continually updated and entirely comprehensive resource. My participation, as the editor the Michigan Dairy Review, involves writing and updating an ATOM feed (something I should have been doing anyway). Extension.org then uses my ATOM feed, along with every other dairy-minded extension feed they can get their hands on, to create a massive clearing house of information. I think this is great, as in super neat.

Chuck Zimmerman recently wrote a post on Agwired about another online agriculture communications initiative recently. He says this one uses “Web 2.0 strategies for agricultural communications…that would be blogging and podcasting.” While I’m not sure blogging and podcasting meet the criteria of “Web 2.0″ on their own (E-agriculture has forums and communities, too) I think it’s great to see these efforts moving agricultural communications forward. Around my water-cooler, digital modes are often discussed with skepticism. The only way to change that is to jump in and show the luddites what’s possible.

We recently learned about an interesting project at University of Arizona called Tree of Life. It offers a taxonomic record, podcasts, k-12 learning and more. There’s lots of good insect content, but it’s not limited to bugs. Tree of Life endeavors to do something much loftier: a user contributed web page for every species on the planet. Check it out, in their words:

The Tree of Life Web Project is a collection of information about biodiversity compiled collaboratively by hundreds of expert and amateur contributors. Its goal is to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each group of organisms, living or extinct. Connections between Tree of Life web pages follow phylogenetic branching patterns between groups of organisms, so visitors can browse the hierarchy of life and learn about phylogeny and evolution as well as the characteristics of individual groups.

Included in the Tree of Life Initiative is some podcasting. They’ve got a bunch of video podcasts available, including several about bugs. It’s the podcasts that I turned to first, but the more I explore the site, the more impressed I am by the overall effort. Tree of Life is a great example of using online tools to do unique and meaningful communicating. They package podcasts with learning materials for k-12 educators (something we’d talked about doing with InsectaPod Cast but don’t have the resources for), post podcasts on YouTube, and the website is top notch (they even lay out their information architecture and content management strategies).

Thanks to Bug Girl for bringing Tree of Life to our attention.

I belong to the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Human Resources, and Life and Human Sciences (ACE for those into the whole brevity thing) and subscribe to the organization’s media special interest group list serv. This morning someone posted a question to the list: “what equipment do you use to podcast, and, if you coordinate podcasting among county extension offices, how do you do so?”

Beside being excited about finally having something I could contribute to the list serv, I was also anxious to hear about other people’s experiences with podcasting university communications materials. Namely, this question of empowering county extension educators to podcast. That’s not much of an issue with InsectaPod Cast because Anna and I have made InsectaPod Cast the only professional activity we collaborate on, but it does have big implications for my straight job, which deals with animal agriculture extension work.

I was impressed to learn that one fellow ACE member, Larry Jackson of Kansas State University, said that his unit had made small podcasting kits including mics, audio interfaces and editing software available to extension educators. Others pointed people interested in getting into podcasting towards retailers that sell kits containing the same items.

Jackson also hit on a more pressing issue, though: the question of whether podcasting is a worthwhile endeavor extension and university communications units. Of course, the truth is that many agricultural producers do identify themselves as “wired” and many don’t even have access to the kind of high speed internet access necessary to stream or download a podcast conveniently. But Jackson pointed out that if we don’t begin familiarizing ourselves with the technology now, we’ll be left behind as things change. Podcasting has been around for just a handful of years, but it isn’t going away. The effort we put in now for just a few listeners means we’ll be all the more prepared once everybody starts listening to these things.

Several months ago an author submitted to the extension publication I edit a very topical article about a piece of ongoing legislation. I suggested such information was suited to disemination by web, so that we could update the article as the new developments occurred. The author’s response was, “the people I write for don’t have time to peruse the web… if you’re going to print it I won’t bother with revisions.”

That attitude, of the web’s inferiority next to print publications and the notion that it’s primarily use is recreational, is troubling to me. And it pops up frequently. Last spring Barack Obama’s minions tried to leverage the viral power of MySpace with the same editorial stick politicos have used in the past and the effort stung them as people more familiar with the nuances of online communications lashed out. Then, last week, Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop had access to a specific political blog blocked on the capitol network, claiming that employees were spending too much time reading the blog on taxpayer time.

These situations all illustrate the ways that people who find themselves engaging new media without jettisoning their print media sensibilities can wind up in trouble. Here’s a list of things the people above mistakenly treated the internet as:

• a cheap method for distributing text
• an entertainment device
• a rolodex

Online communications hold lots of potential for communicators, but there are certain things that we give up when we embrace these modes. Mainly, we have less control. When we put words online we can get them to people faster, we have less control over how they are used. The strength of viral marketing is that other are doing the work, the drawback is that they are not necessarily doing the work the earlier author intended. If we treat the internet like a distribution device, we are gaining potential to lower our cost per reader, but if we aren’t rewriting the material for online audience I suspect the cost per reader can actually go up as more and more people click out before the end of the first paragraph. And when we take advantage of social networks but choose not to respect the power of the group, more damage is done than good.

It surprises me so many of us continue to approach online media through the same lens we used to consider print media.

At the Computers & Writing conference in Detroit this past spring I attended a presentation by Nicholas Behm of Arizona State University about using collaborative writing tools like Google Docs in the classrooms. Behm chose to stress that, “it’s important to remember these are political tools,” in that they are created by affluent whites and therefore may have cross-cultural accessibility issues.

I think that’s a cogent argument, but it’s not really my thing, so I didn’t think much more of it until I read this post about the social stratification between teenagers using myspace and facebook. Like most people my age I think of the two social networking sites as fairly interchangeable but a study by Danah Boyd found that they are being used by very distinct groups of teenagers. Namely, Facebook by hegemonic go-getters and MySpace by “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

Which has import for an educational podcast because, while Anna and I endeavor to make InsectaPod Cast available to younger people, we haven’t put much thought into whether the tools we use to do so have more social trappings than we’d thought. Certainly, podcasting and blogging in general are more embraced (and accessible) to some groups of teenagers than others. InsectaPod Cast has a MySpace presence, but not Facebook. I know why I made that decision, but now I’ve got information that suggests eschewing Facebook might have greater ramifications than I thought.