Thanksgiving Day After: Introspection

How did your Thanksgiving go?

I attended a very nice family gathering, replete with turkey, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and a bottle of Sierra Cantabria 2005 Rioja. Conversation was congenial, food was well prepared and plentiful, Lego figurines stayed off the table until the restless 6-yr-old elements couldn't take it anymore, and a viewing of BeetleJuice rounded out the evening.

Today, Friday, I'm taking a minor break from producing the podcast. It's a holiday, or the day after a holiday, so I'll kick back, relax and type up a non-episode blog post. I'm researching some info on ancient cultures in Africa - Africa is the world's stealth continent - we all came from there and we don't want to admit it. Let's admit it and help Africa to become the world's happening place.

Good conversations yesterday included comments from my twin bro' who suggested that the 10 minutes of Minute Tech #36 was rambling and didn't say anything until 5 minutes into the podcast. I'm seeking your input, but also reviewing other podcasts to see how they handle these things: perhaps, similar to Christopher S. Penn's Financial Aid podcast, and Alex Lindsay's This Week in Media, I'll put in an intro "table of contents" so that people know the structure of the show.

My brother suggested that nobody would know that the primary topic of my podcast comes in the middle of the show. My response is that anyone who listens to podcasts knows to listen to several podcasts to pick up the "structure" of the subject podcast. Perhaps I'm different...but when I find a new podcast, I go back and listen to many if not all of the previous episodes. Do you too? Perhaps putting in the TOC will assist first time (and impatient) listeners. :-)

Just watched @cspenn's Financial Aid Podcast FAP667 video: "Podcasting 101session from MASFAA" :
Two important points:
On branding: ze frank-"brand is emotional aftertaste";
The components of a podcast: (1) Content production, (2) Distribution, (3) Marketing, & (4) The Conversation

Chris also mentions Mitch Joel's Twistimage.com blog, fronting his "Six Pixels of Separation" podcast...just listening to episode #78, which includes an interview with Avinash Kaushik, author of "Web Analytics: an hour a day". I'd first heard of him when reviewing Lunametrics.com - Lunametrics had advertised for a web analyst position - reviewing that job description lured me into the world of Google Analytics, which is a wondrous world indeed!

Avinash says: crime against humanity to not measure bounce rate! Uh...what does that mean? Oh...this allows you to fix the content of your web pages to alter why people are bouncing. "Every person who comes to your website is a potential purchaser/subscriber", as long as you're capturing them for the correct products.

Yesterday, before traveling to Cleveland, I remembered that some of my relatives aren't as computer oriented as I, so burned my 36 episodes to audio format on CD's. This is the listing of how the tracks fit on the CD's...unfortunately, the audio tracks leap from CD to CD, and I hadn't configured iTunes to name the tracks with the names of the individual epidodes, Track 01, etc.:

disc1: episodes 002-014
disc2: 014-026
disc3: 026-036
disc4: 036, 001 (not named like the others) & The Halloween special.

I know I rambled here: guilty. People are hovering as I type! :-)

..alex.