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5 Responses to "iTunes = Podcasts"

1. | Reply Chris G.
   Posted 02 Jul 2008 at 3:21pm #
   

   What I typically do is early in the week (usually Monday-Thursday morning) I listen to podcasts on my way to/from work. Usually by Thursday afternoon I enter music mode and listen to non-stop music until Sunday night. I also occasionally listen to music at work.

   That seems to give me a good mix of podcasts and music.

2. | Reply Charles Stricklin
   Posted 04 Jul 2008 at 6:04pm #
   

   How would you suggest I improve the podcast?

3. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 04 Jul 2008 at 6:35pm #
   

   [quote comment="48245"]How would you suggest I improve the podcast?[/quote]

   It's simply a matter of (my) time. I don't have 44 minutes or 68 minutes (the length of your last two episodes) to talk about only one piece of the technology spectrum. Buzz Out Loud, for example, covers many more topics in half the time (often).

   My list of plugins has always been fairly static, too, so I don't need to find more plugins. I'm pretty well set up, and if something important comes along, I'll hear about it through one channel or another.

   So if it was entirely up to me, I'd push you to talk faster and/or less. I'd cap shows at 20-25, maybe 30 minutes, tops. But it's not up to me, and there are probably ten people out there who like the format for every one of me who wants to like it, but doesn't have the time.

4. | Reply Charles Stricklin
   Posted 04 Jul 2008 at 6:53pm #
   

   Okay, fair enough. From your characterization of the podcast as 'dumb' I was afraid you meant we were being silly or otherwise unintelligent.

   I have considered breaking up the one show into several different formats. Would something like that interest you?

   More to the point, what would you like to hear?

5. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 04 Jul 2008 at 7:15pm #
   

   [quote comment="48247"]Okay, fair enough. From your characterization of the podcast as 'dumb' I was afraid you meant we were being silly or otherwise unintelligent.[/quote]

   No, just a word chosen in haste. I've since replaced it with a better phrase. "Dumb" is usually my fill-in, and apparently I didn't go back and replace it with something else. I used to have a script that prompted me any time I used "dumb" in a post (to replace it), but apparently it's not working now. 🙂 I'll have to fix that. I had a few other such fill-in words that may have snuck through in the time being as well. 😛

   [quote comment="48247"]More to the point, what would you like to hear?[/quote]

   Quite honestly, Charles, I don't think I have even 20 minutes a week to listen to a strictly WordPress-only podcast. Though WordPress is still a large portion of my day-to-day job and hobbies - I use it, I'm comfortable with it, I set it up for other people - nothing about it changes enough for me that I can't figure it out when I need to in five minutes. Too many of the topics you cover - which again I'm sure meet the needs of 99% of your audience - don't interest me. I don't care about wordpress.com hosted sites. I don't care much, again, about new plugins. I don't care about a version that's not yet released (until it's released, and then again, five minutes of research usually answers any questions I have).

   Let me take this opportunity to recommend that you talk to Judi Sohn and have her on your show. I just helped her re-launch a non-profit cancer group she works with, fightcolorectalcancer.org, and the entire site is powered by WordPress. She's quite pleased, and I think interviews with people who have used WordPress in situations like this ("Beyond the Personal Blog" so to speak) might be interesting, perhaps even as separate 10-minute episodes or something.

   One final thought: even when I was listening to the show, I never really felt like I was your target market. Generally, advanced users are going to be the ones to seek out a podcast on a blog package, yet the shows generally felt as though they were aimed at the more casual computer user. I could be completely off-base here (and I do know you've mentioned nightly builds in the past, or your co-hosts have, and other "advanced" topics), but the podcast always seemed a bit more "intermediate" or "beginner" than "advanced." Perhaps that's why "dumb" was the fill-in word I used. Whether it was lack of interest in a bunch of new plugins you'd talk about with your co-host(s) or general WordPress usage, I found myself tuning out and having to remind myself to check in every now and then to see if you were talking about something more advanced.

   I'm just not your market. Again, I'm sure you have a large market, and a lot of listeners who wouldn't change a thing. I've just lately added a few more podcasts on some other topics, and I had to cut back in some others.