We’ve been pretty pleased lately to be one of the American Museum of Natural History’s top MySpace friends. Even if they’ve got a Top 40 instead of a Top 8, we’re still sharing space with prestigious (yet highly unlikely) MySpacers Sir David Attenborough, Scientific American, and Margret Mead.
I also learned through this that under “Favorite Book” on Charles Darwin’s MySpace profile he listed a bunch of his own works. LAME!!
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.
The flash card that came with the device we use to record interviews held just 126k of info. For that reason, we recorded those interviews for episodes one and two as mp3 files, we couldn’t fit very much info on a card at an uncompressed quality level.
Memory is cheap, though, and we jumped up to a 2 gigabyte card recently and started recording at higher quality levels. The problem is that it takes a lot longer to load up a file for editing. Anna transcribed the recording from a recent interview yesterday, but really had trouble being patient waiting for the file to load. It’s not really a big deal, just that the process becomes more cumbersome as opening a file or laying an effect like normalization or equalization on it takes 5 or 10 minutes.
I’m not really even sure if it makes sense to record .wav when everything gets shifted to .mp3 for downloading, anyway. I think it’s a good idea to record at the highest quality we can, though, because we might want to put the episodes on compact disc or something down the road. I know that when I listen to cd quality for a while and then switch to .mp3, i can discern the lower quality. If we record at high quality we can alway compress the files to make them more manageable, but if we record compressed we can never make them sound full.
Viewing the InsectaPod search keyphrase data (the phrases people type into the engines before heading to InsectaPod Cast through the results) is depressing, because the numbers just aren’t very big. But I got a big kick out of this one, which indicates someone planning ludifisk for dinner wound up on the transcript of episode 2, in which Anna compares insects as food to “a regional dish, like ludifisk, or tripe.”
The other day I was trolling MySpace loooking for potential InsectaPod Cast listeners. Anna, who has a clearer sense of the distinction between online and physical worlds, expressed a general distrust of site (truthfully, she called it trashy).
MySpace has come under a lot of fire for a website that’s only been around a few years. So of that is just do to little misunderstandings: lots of people express contempt for the concept of “friending” someone, but I think that’s just a matter of a piece of nomenclature that doesn’t translate well between users and non-users (non-users being typified by the old guy in this parody video). More alarming is the Delete Online Predators Act, a reactionary and piece of legislation that fails to make a distinction between pedophiles and the spaces in which youth congregate.
I’ve had good success using MySpace to gain new InsectaPod Cast listeners, though. It allows me to parse more than 100 million users into two disparate groups- those who dig bugs and those who don’t- and then let those who dig bugs know that InsectaPod Cast exists. Further, when we release a new episode of InsectaPod Cast, I can send an update notification to all of our friends on MySpace letting them know.
Our site statistics indicate that the InsectaPod Cast MySpace profile drives users to the website, which I think means it’s successful tool for us. I don’t think a presence on social networking sites is required for a successful podcast, but if the target audience is like ours- young and wired- it becomes pretty important.
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.
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.
After the semi-success with feedburner last week I decided to try to employ some more tools to boost the functionality of Insectapod Cast. Most of these were social networking kind of tools. Namely, del.icio.us, technorati, and digg. I placed code for each in a line at the bottom of the podcast page and waited.
A few hours later I got an email from my partner Anna, who was at the Ecological Society of America meeting in San Jose last week. She said she didn’t know what technorati was, but assumed it was something I thought would get us more listeners and, as such, she was excited about it.
In the event she’s not the only one in the dark on these tools, here’s a run down:
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows users to manage all of their bookmarks in one web-based place. User’s also tag bookmarks with short descriptive words and develop a network, so friends can view each others bookmarks. I added a button on insectapodcast.com that allows del.icio.us users to bookmark the podcast page quickly and easily.
Digg is a community-based popularity web site. The more people that claim to “digg” insectapodcast by clicking through the button on our page, the more exposure we’ll have to other digg community members.I may add more items to this list, like a link to comment on a facebook profile. I think most of our listeners won’t be interested in these features, and I doubt the digg or technorati systems will yield great numbers of potential listeners for a niche podcast like ours, but I figure there’s little danger in having these links waiting for people who might expect them.
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:
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.
When I started InsectaPod Cast I had decided I wanted to do nearly everything on my own. I wanted to learn how to record and edit through the process. I wanted to design the web page rather than just using a wordpress (like this blog) and I even did it all in code, without a WYSIWYG editor, so I really understood how the whole thing went together. I also wrote the RSS feed and distributed it on my own, even though I knew a service like feedburner could do that for me for free.
Today, though, a decided to start using feedburner. Mainly, because I need more statistics about users and downloads and things of this nature. iTunes doesn’t provide any statistics whatsoever, but if I run my feed through feedburner, I can get the kind of info I need. InsectaPod Cast is partially grant funded, so it’s important to be able to demonstrate reach and impact. I’m excited to see how this changes my understanding of our listeners.
