Reports from the Asylum

1. Without ID3 tags, your podcast (or other audio file) will languish un-played because it shows up as “unknown” in media libraries on computers and portable MP3 players.
2. Believe it or not, there are people who don’t use iTunes. That means they won’t get ID3 tags from your RSS feed, so you have to make sure to add them directly to the MP3 file.
3. Even people who do use iTunes might download a test episode from your website to listen to before committing to a subscription. That means they won’t get the ID3 tags from your feed, either.
4. If you don’t add ID3 tags, you are missing a marketing opportunity. Put your URL and other contact info into the comments field.
5. ID3 tags help make your MP3 file accessible and searchable. You want people to find your podcast in Google, don’t you?

Sallie Goetsch explains how to respond to a LinkedIn invitation from someone you don’t know in a short interview with George Smyth for his One Minute How-To podcast.

The most diplomatic option (and the one ”˜Professor’ Goetsch prefers) is to click ”˜reply privately’ in order to give the person sending the invite a chance to remind you where you met, who you know in common, and why you should accept the invitation.

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Most video editing software lets you export to MP3 format along with creating iPod or Flash video for uploading. Here are five good reasons why you should.

1. Bandwidth. The so-called broadband in Central America and Australia is not very fast. In fact, the so-called broadband in the US is pathetic when compared to speeds available in Western Europe and Asia. And many people in the US are actually still on dial-up. There’s just no way that they’re going to be able to download a video file.
2. Media Player Limitations. Not everyone uses a video-capable media player. Pity the person who tries to put your .m4v file on her Sansa Clip—or even her iPod Shuffle.
3. Listening Habits. Many of us prefer to listen to podcasts while doing something else, like driving a car. Since you can’t watch video and drive anyway, forcing those listeners to download a video rather than an audio just fills their players up with useless megabytes.
4. Learning Styles. Roughly 1/3 of the population are hearing learners. They don’t remember or learn from what they see very well. What they hear is much more important. These are the people who turn up the volume on the TV and walk out of the room. No matter how visually interesting your podcast is, all they care about is what you have to say.
5. Show Length and Format. While many people will take the time to watch a short (less than 5 minutes) video online, they may not have the patience (or time) to sit through something longer while chained to their computers. Also, the longer the video, the higher the production values people are likely to want. If you have a long interview where the video really just shows a couple of talking heads, you might be better off showing a short clip in video format but making the full-length version available as audio.

As a general rule, keep the video for things you really have to show, like demonstrations, and break those down into multiple short videos.

What’s new in podcasting on August 27th from 06:55 to 09:30:

• The Playlist: Podcasting–Behind the Hype – ABC News –
• Oxford University Press: "Podcast" is the Word of the Year –
• PodCamp Community UnConferences / FrontPage –
• Power to the People Social Media Tracker: Wave 3; Universal McCann; March, 2008 –
• The Podcast Consumer 2009 –

twtpoll :: Would you be interested in attending a “For Immediate Release” conference w speakers @shel, @jangles, FIR correspondents & select listeners? (via @shel)

That’s right: Jeremiah Owyang got Shel & Neville started on the idea of a “For Immediate Release” conference in which ‘Professor’ Goetsch would be a participant. Where? I have no idea. When? Not a clue. What would I present about? Whatever FIR’s listeners wanted. I never miss an opportunity to get together with Shel, Neville, Dan, Eric, Lee, or fellow FIR listeners. And it would be great to meet Michael Netzley. Though it might be good if I finished reading (and reviewing) David Phillips’ book before then…

The Truth About WordPress

by Sallie Goetsch of the Podcast Asylum and Jon Leland of ComBridges

Recently, in a WordPress group on LinkedIn, the question was asked “Is WordPress the answer to all our prayers?” The writer was extending the conversation about his own blog post which objected vehemently to crazy claims that complete novices could build “killer websites” in minutes if they just used WordPress. It seems that the world of technology is filled with these kinds of false promises and unrealistic expectations.

For those of us who have hand-coded HTML back before tools like Dreamweaver were invented, and who have experimented and had learning experiences with creating web pages in a wide variety of ways, WordPress is an important new platform for website development. Compared to anything we’ve seen before, WordPress is amazingly simple and intuitive, especially given its array of powerful features. It lets you change your design without affecting your content, it has great built-in SEO (search engine optimization) features, and it’s free.

WordPress also has advantages over competing website publishing systems like Drupal and Joomla. For one thing, you can use easy offline editors (like Windows Live Writer and Ecto) to update content on WordPress sites. WordPress also began as a blogging platform, and as a result, it’s “natural” for WordPress websites to include blogs. For many website designers, even those who have never learned Java, never learned Flash, never learned PHP, and don’t know a single programming language, WordPress does answer many prayers.

But that’s very different from saying that anyone can use WordPress to design and implement a sophisticated website. If you try to take advantage of WordPress’ full capabilities as a content management system without knowing anything about HTML, CSS, or PHP—or about WordPress itself—you are simply asking for trouble. Yes, you can set up a basic blog using WordPress.com without knowing much, but to really make WordPress (or any other new software) sit up and do tricks, you have to put some time into learning how to use it. (More advanced users download WordPress from WordPress.org. The supply of tricks available at WordPress.com is limited.)

When you think about it, most people only know how to use the most basic features of the software that they use every day. They treat Microsoft Word like a glorified typewriter and don’t even know most of its tools and options exist, much less how to use them. They pay hundreds of dollars for Photoshop and only use the functions they could have gotten for free with Picasa. (Photoshop is so sophisticated that even advanced users can spend hours studying DVD tutorials to learn new things.)

So why should WordPress be any different? It’s not, but people get excited and apparently WordPress’ many benefits give birth to irrationally exuberant expectations. Either that, or there are some people out there who think that because WordPress is easy for them, it must seem that easy to everyone else.

For example, if you hear that there are 5,000 free plugins that extend WordPress’ platform, and hundreds of free themes in the theme repository, shouldn’t you expect that just looking through them and testing them to see which ones would be best for you might take quite some time?

And then there’s the fact that new versions of WordPress come out a lot more often than new versions of Photoshop. So you have to stay up to date, by doing things like attending meetups and Wordcamps, reading blogs, watching videos, listening to podcasts, or even reading books. (There are several good books on WordPress, but it is hard for print books to keep up with the rapid developments in the platform and its plugins.)

Because WordPress is a web-based platform, it’s much easier for geographically dispersed teams to collaborate on websites. But due to its popularity, WordPress sites are also open to server hacks and other attacks—as ComBridges discovered first hand recently.

While it doesn’t necessarily take a programmer to learn WordPress, if you want to create a sophisticated WordPress site, skills like PHP will come in handy. And, if you want to learn your way around, study the WordPress Codex, and be sure to allow some time to learn important fundamentals such as, for example, which plugins make it easier to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system).

Even though WordPress is easy enough for Sallie’s hairdresser to update, Sallie was the one to create the site, and had to provide more than one tutorial on posting to the blog and editing pages.

WordPress deserves to be praised for many reasons, but exaggerated claims about its ease of use for the complete novice do everyone a disservice. Let’s practice a little expectation management, people.

Jon Leland runs web design and internet marketing company ComBridges. Sallie Goetsch is a WordPress fangirl who maintains several WP sites for her own and clients’ businesses. They have collaborated on some occasionally nerve-wracking WordPress projects.

Podcasting links for August 17th through August 21st:

• A review of podcasting in higher education: Its influence on the traditional lecture – AJET 25(3) McGarr (2009) – Australasian Journal of Educational Technology
  2009, 25(3), 309-321.
• Google brings Listen podcatcher to Android devices | Smartphones and Cell Phones | ZDNet.com –
• Podcasts can change the way you become informed by Mitch Joel –
• Podcasting in Academic and Corporate Learning – 2005 – ASTD –
• Mom on the Go? Bring Podcasting Along with You – DivineCaroline –

I’ve written about the importance of ID3 tags before, but that was two years ago, and apparently many people are still not listening. (Shocking!) 

The Personal Problem

Besides, my most recent MP3 player (a Sansa Clip) has special new tricks in the podcast sorting department that mean I have to do extra tweaking on files that used to be fine. That’s a problem I should address to SanDisk rather than the general public, but just in case there are other Sansa users out there wondering why so many podcasts end up clumped under “Unknown”: you have to have an episode (track) number. It doesn’t matter what the number is. You could number every single episode of the podcast with “0” or “1” and it wouldn’t care, as long as there’s a number. But without it, it will stick the podcast into “Unknown” even though everything else is all right.

What’s more, the Sansa Clip insists on sorting podcasts by Album. Only. It will sort music by Artist, the way I used to sort my podcasts on my earlier Sansa, but this one groups podcasts by Album. This has proved to be a problem in several cases:

1. NPR. I subscribe to the “Business Story of the Day” podcast, which, for some reason, uses the podcast episode title as the album.
2. BlogTalkRadio. Any podcast they produce has “BlogTalkRadio” as the album. Um, no. I really want “Addicted to Race” listed separately from “The Publishing Insiders.” So I have to edit the ID3 tags myself before copying the files to the Sansa.
3. FIR. Shel and Neville, you know I love you guys, but where everything used to show up together under “Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz,” the FIR Cuts are now in one place, the FIR Interviews in another, FIR Live in a third, and the Hobson and Holtz Report in a fourth.

All of these fall into the category of “minor nuisance,” since editing ID3 tags with AudioShell doesn’t take very long, but still, it’s a pain.

The Systemic Problem

Individuals producing podcasts through their own show blogs can learn to include ID3 tags in their MP3 files as well as in their feeds for iTunes. But what about podcasters who use third-party services to record?

When BlogTalkRadio first started producing podcast feeds, they didn’t have any non-iTunes ID3 tags at all. I talked to someone I knew who worked there, and they fixed that, or at least, they fixed it part way. (BlogTalkRadio should really come under “compilation” rather than “album” in the tags, the way Podiobooks.com does with their shows.)

TalkShoe’s podcasts still have no ID3 tags at all, and they’ve been around longer than BlogTalkRadio. Anytime I download an episode of WordPress Weekly, I have to fill in a whole lot more than just the track number, and I’m not even sure yet whether I like the show enough to take that much trouble.

And then there’s AudioBoo, the new kid on the easy-record podcast block. Not only “boos” short on ID3 tags (I’ve only seen title filled out), every single AudioBoo from every single user has the same file name: “recording.mp3.” Yeah, that’s really going to help me keep track of which one is which, or encourage me to subscribe.

And then there are all those free conference call services that offer to record your teleseminars, many of which will now produce a podcast feed for you. These often have gibberish file names and, at best, a title tag that says “Recorded call.” Really useful branding, that.

Since I don’t use iTunes, not having an iPod, I don’t know whether the tags are any better in iTunes. Perhaps I should try subscribing to some of those shows there, and find out. It might almost be worth it.

No. It couldn’t possibly be worth it. (Am I the only person in podcasting who thinks iTunes is an unbearable pain in the anatomy?)

The Solution?

Someone (uh, that would probably be you, ”˜Professor’ Goetsch, since you’re so passionate about it) needs to lobby these services to offer and encourage ID3 tag editing for the MP3 files they produce.

And someone—which would also be me, and which I’m trying to do by writing this when I should be engaged in something billable—needs to educate podcasters and others who want to use audio in their marketing and consulting about why ID3 tags are so freakin’ important. Hmm. I feel a “top 10” article coming on. Or at least a “top 5.”

Podcasting links for July 29th through August 14th:

• PodStrike!™ Podcast Manager & FREE / Cheap Podcast Hosting –
• Podcasting: Into the Mainstream – Market Research Reports – Research and Markets –
• O’Brien: Podcasting patent reveals problems in system – SiliconValley.com –
• Quit Panicking About the Volo ‘Podcasting’ Patent | Reports from the Asylum –
• When Was Podcasting Invented? Company’s Curious Patent Says 2003 –

In her report for FIR 471, ”˜Professor’ Goetsch shares her thoughts about VoloMedia’s so-called ”˜podcasting patent.’

• The patent appears to focus on retrieving rather than producing podcasts
• The company states through its PR agency that it has no intention of interfering with independent podcasters
• For some reason, Volo seems incapable of getting that message out to the public, and uninterested in responding to the blog storm

Links: Quit Panicking About the Volo Podcasting Patent

This Report from the Asylum is brought to you by Locus Confusus.

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