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. 

Just learned that the delicious pun baked right into InsectaPodcast is a hand-me-down. Jason Robertshaw of Sarasota Florida runs Cephalopodcast.com, a great blog and podcast about like-minded (to me) marine issues. The blog is updated pretty regularly, and the podcast a little less so. But the audio quality of the podcast is great and the elements Robertshaw employs in the blog are social-network-friendly (flickr, twitter, etc.).

Interesting science presented with style. I like it.

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.

We are working on writing episode 5 right now. The content we gathered is a little different from what we’ve done in the past, and we have to approach the task from a different angle if we’re going to put everything into a coherent structure. the material isn’t bad, it’s just different, and that means the writing habits and techniques that have helped Anna write previous podcast scripts aren’t working this time around.

Usually, we interview someone, pull out a few choice quotes, and then fill in the gaps in the conversation with Anna’s narration. This time, though, we spoke with an amateur insect enthusiast, and Anna plays the role of bug expert more than that of interviewer. All of our recordings are more field-oriented than interview-oriented, and even the one 12 minute interview segment we recorded is actually more a recording of a discussion that Anna and the subject engaged in equally.

The process by which the two of us each realized we were trying to tame a different beast this time around is interesting. I listened to the recordings last wee, looking for sounds we could pull out for non-interview “actualities” and, unlike most months, found a great wealth of usable stuff. Yesterday Anna sat down to write the script, which usually takes an hour or so. A few hours later she was frustrated because she was having trouble identifying enough of the formal interview quotes that are the framework around which she usually writes the script.

We had to sit down, figure out what was differnt about the way we’d gathered recordings for this episode, and then develop a strategy for how to handle them. In the end I think there’s a lot of potential for this to bring some variety to the series, and the make us better at thinking about how we’ll use recordings when we’re out getting them. If we think critically about these things ahead of time, it shouldstrengthen our repertoire of techniques and themes. Right now, though, we’ve still got to get the thing written.

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.

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.