* Podcast recommendation I: Episode 20 of John C. Havens’s About.com Guide to Podcasting, featuring an interview with Nic Wolff of Foneshow. It doesn’t take much a leap to work out that audio content for your mobile phone is an area with huge potential, and Foneshow is making a big play to get into the game. Watch this space for some experimentation of my own with Foneshow.

* Grammar Girl is an outstanding example of why podcasts need accompanying blogs to build community. The Grammar Girl blogsite has 10-50 comments to each post, polls with hundreds of votes, and full transcripts to each show. Mignon Fogarty’s audience after just five and a half months? 60,000 downloads per episode. Want to hear more about her success? Take a listen to my interview with Mignon on Episode 23 of New Comm Road.

* Want to hit the theatre, Second Life style? At 5pm Linden Time (8pm for us East Coasters) tomorrow, Tuesday, January 9, the independent film Four Eyed Monsters will make its debut … and it will happen in in the Sundance Channel screening room, in Second Life. The film will also screen in several other locations throughout SL, including Crayonville.

* Paul Colligan has started an interesting project. For the whole of 2007, he and his family will only consume media via the Internet. No watching broadcast or cable TV. No reading print newspapers or magazines. No buying CDs from the local retailer (though via Amazon is just fine). Indeed, 2007 will be Paul’s “year of living digitally.”

* Who wins this Long Bet?

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site

Dave Winer is banking on blogs. Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, naturally, is still betting on mainstream media. Check out Michael O’Connor Clarke’s take as you stew this one over.

* I’m a podcaster, and I don’t yet own an iPod. My 18-month-old iRiver is wearing down, but still gets the job done — both for listening and recording.

* Podcast recommendation II: BizIII. A daily three-minute podcast chock-a-block full of new-media resources and tips. Now, if the site could only enable comments …

* Joseph Jaffe asked these two questions on his Episode 67 of Across the Sound: 1) Would we be willing pay for a 10-minute condensed version of the show? 2) Would we be willing to pay for a transcript of the show and/or executive summary?

My short answers: 1) No 2) No. My longer retort to the second question: If I want a summary of the show, I’ll look at the show notes. Transcripts are just as beneficial to the podcaster as they are to the listener, because they build Google juice.

* My baby boy turned 12 weeks old yesterday!

Happy Monday.

Technorati Tags: John C. Havens, Foneshow, Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty, Four Eyed Monsters, Paul Colligan, Long Bets, Sundance Channel, Crayonville, Dave Winer, Michael O’Connor Clarke, Martin Nisenholtz, iPod, iRiver, Across the Sound, Joseph Jaffe, bizIII, Amani

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A good video interview here by JD Lasica at last weekend’s PodCamp West with Michael Geoghegan that’s all about the business of podcasting.

Michael certainly knows of what he speaks, having created the popular — and lucrative — Grape Radio podcast. He’s also the CEO of GigaVox Media network and author of Podcast solutions.

Technorati Tags: JD Lasica, PodCamp West, Michael Geoghegan, business of podcasting

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On Friday morning, like every other weekday morning, Christopher Penn produced and published an episode of the Financial Aid Podcast. There was financial aid news, a mailbag, scholarship information, and podsafe music.

Not much newsworthiness to this post so far. But wait: I’m getting there.

The reason I’m blogging about Friday’s episode of the Financial Aid Podcast is that it was episode No. 400!

Chris is an absolute podcasting madman, producing five or six podcasts every single week. By way of comparion … since May 31, 2006, when I launched the New Comm Road Podcast, I’ve published 18 episodes. Chris, by contrast, has podcasted 135 times (!).

The Financial Aid Podcast is an excellent example of how an organization can use a podcast to:

1. connect in a powerful way with its target audience — in this case, high school students/college students/recent grads with an interest in or need for student loans
2. generate some serious revenue — as in, several million dollars

So congratulations on reaching No. 400, Chris! It’s no small feat.

Technorati Tags: Financial Aid Podcast, Christopher Penn

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Seems like a big announcement on a new-marketing company is coming on Monday.

Can’t wait to hear more.

Technorati Tags: For Immediate Release, Across the Sound, Managing the Gray, new marketing

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In the meantime, there’s plenty of good PodCamp talk in episode No. 171 of For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report.

With Shel Holtz unavailable, Neville was gracious enough to have me on for a chat about PodCamp, the role of new-media/podcast consultants, and memories of September 11, 2001.

There’s also a segment recorded live from PodCamp with Mitch Joel, John Wall, and me.

Here are the show notes:

Content summary: In conversation with Bryan Person: the role of a podcast or new-media consultant, Podcamp Boston, remembering 9/11; CAPOW report from Podcamp Boston; Shel on employee communication; follow-up on the Adam Curry/Joseph Jaffe kerfuffle; listeners’ comments discussion; the music; and more.

Show notes for September 11, 2006

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, an 80-minute podcast recorded live from Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and from Boston, Massachusetts, and Concord, California, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 37MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In This Edition:

• #171 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute – see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Technorati tags: PodCamp, PodCampBoston 2006, For Immediate Release, Neville Hobson, September 11, Mitch Joel, John Wall.

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Following last month’s launch — and notoriety — of monthlydollar.com, copycat sites were sure to follow.

First came nozda.com (I’ll admit, I deleted his/her comment to my initial post on monthlydollar, although perhaps I did so hastily), which purports to be raising money for a “professional internet portal” for Afghanistan. No takers as of yet.

Now, monthlyeuro.com joins the fray.

I smell a rash of imitators coming on, and my limit of hiring “Internet employees” stopped at one.

Still, German Christian Fenner is hoping monthlyeuro will make at least a bit of a splash.

Here’s a brief e-mail exchange I had with Christian this morning.

Q&A
Bryper: Why did you start monthlyeuro.com?
Monthlyeuro: Because the idea of monthlydollar seemed intriguing: get paid little amounts by many people, send them traffic back and have an income.

Bryper: Are you more than just a copycat monthlydollar.com? Is there room for both of you?
Monthlyeuro: Monthlydollar wants to foward ideas he has to his “bosses”. My aim is to use the money from my bosses to do good (in means of publicity) for projects like fair trade or others … and yes, I think the world is big enough for two, and many other, web employees

Bryper: Do you really think these sites will catch on?
Monthlyeuro: Yes I do! It´s a good concept!

Bryper: How many “bosses” are you shooting for, and what’s your plan for finding more of them?
Monthlyeuro: Good question! To quit what else I do will take a lot of bosses, though What do YOU think – how many bosses will there be?

As a “boss” at monthlydollar, I’m admittedly concerned about slower-than-expected growth, so I’m even more skeptical when I see that the concept is being watered down with copycat sites.

“When that happens,” Shel Israel writes, “the act become passé very quickly.”

I’m inclined to agree.

But as Christian also wrote to me, he has a “super-sweet wife and two really young and really super-sweet kids.” He comes across as genuine, and I really do wish him well. He’s just not going to get a monthly euro from my pocket.

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• The recently concluded Podcast Academy has published a podcast archive, which, as of this writing, already includes links to most of the presentations. Worth checking out.
• Podcast Academy photos on Flickr.
• A podcasting legal guide.
• An article in Business Week (registration required) on Sister Judith Zoebelein, the Vatican nun who’s planning the fall launch of a MySpace-type website for Catholics.
• A post and reader comments on the question, “Are print newspapers going to die?” My answer: not in my lifetime.
• Would you wear a T-shirt promoting someone else’s website for $15 a day for the next 240 days? After an eBay auction, Stowe Boyd will be doing just that.

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]]> http://www.bryper.com/2006/04/30/sunday-best/feed/ 2 http://www.bryper.com/2006/04/26/i-have-a-new-employee/ http://www.bryper.com/2006/04/26/i-have-a-new-employee/#comments Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:57:52 +0000 Bryan http://www.bryper.com/2006/04/26/i-have-a-new-employee/ … or I will, within the next 24 hours.

For $1.00 a month, I’ll be “employing” the person behind monthlydollar.com to post my name on his/her site, along with the URL for Bryper.com.

Mr./Ms. Monthlydollar already has 47 bosses as of this writing, and with a little publicity from places like the Naked Conversations blog, that number is sure to rise.

The idea is so goofy that it might just work — remember The Million Dollar Homepage? And I figure it’s worth $1 a month from my pocket for at least a few months to see if it does.

Update: Within two hours of this original post — and it may have been quicker, as I was commuting home and not online — my name and a link to this site were added at monthlydollar.com. I am one of the five newest “bosses” to employ Mr(s). Monthlydollar. We currently number 52.

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