Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com

In Dave Slusher’s session now (www.evilgeniuschronicles.com). He’s talking about having a real personal connection with the people that listen to your podcast, and the value in that. I believe in that.

I said a few posts ago that I don?t care how many listeners I have. I do care about making connections with smart, interesting people. You guys, who read this blog and listen to my podcast.

I?ve been giving lots of thought this weekend to what I want to get out of this blog and the podcast. I’ll probably be making some changes soon, for the better.

What would you guys think about dropping ads on the site in favor of a completely voluntary “tip jar” donation system? My goal is not and never will be to make a profit from TinyScreenfuls. I promise you that I will never sell out the people with whom I have connections because of this site, because you are what I most value about all this. But it’s nice to pay for hosting, and to buy a new gadget to talk about once in a while. I can?t afford to keep spending money from the family budget on gadgets and toys. I?ve separated my “discetionary” spending from the rest.

So what do you think? Would you PayPal two dollars a month or something because you enjoy listening to me geek out? Do I give that much value to you, through information or entertainment? I’ll never restrict access to anything based on payment. But the tip jar has worked well for Doug Kaye and IT Conversations so far.

Let me know what you think.

Sent wirelessly from my
Windows Mobile device.

This morning in his session on advanced recording techniques was great. He announced a free tool that IT Conversations is working on called CNUploader (for their upcoming Conversations Network). You can drop any audio on it, and it will perform levelling, compression, and RMS normalization. It’s extremely hard to do this in software - RMS normalization especially. The last step is encoding to MP2 (not MP3, Doug explained why) and uploading to IT Conversations, but you can skip the upload step. Mac, Windows, and Linux. Free (not sure about open source). Can?t wait!

Leo Laporte just mentioned that his partner Steve is working on a tool that lets you get a perfect recording of a Skype or Google Talk call by using a 30 second buffer. Drop outs and artifacts still happen on the live call, but get fixed in the buffer by re-requesting the dropped packets. Will be free, Windows only at first. Sweet - can?t wait for that either.

Sent wirelessly from my
Windows Mobile device.

Holy crap. “Podcasts” was a category on Jeopardy tonight!

I?m watching right now. Dave Winer has the audio of the $1000 question about Adam Curry and Sirius.

A shame that the AC question was the only “indie”-related question. The rest were about BigCorps. Feh.

Sent wirelessly from my
Windows Mobile device.

Sessions have gone great so far. My session was first, and went OK. I?m the only one that hasn?t used PowerPoint or Keynote so far. Heh.

The other instructors and attendees here are freaking smart. That’s why I love reading blogs and listening to podcasts - they bring me smart people’s ideas.

I had kind of a revelation during some of the business sessions today. I don?t podcast because I want to turn my shows into financial gain. I don?t really care how many listeners I have. What I really want is to have the smartest listeners in the world, and I think I do. I want to hear your ideas, find out about the cool stuff you know, and to hopefully make the things I say interesting and helpful.

The readers of TinyScreenfuls.com are a unique, geeky lot. I try to make the stuff I write for other sites like BloggingAcademy.com basic and accessible to everyone. But on TSF, I let my geekiness all hang out. Because you all know that geeking out with other geeks is just plain fun.

Anyway, more blogging later. Check out my presentation materials on the wiki (link on previous post), and add any comments or notes you want. (Oh. I need to unprotect the page first). A special shout out to anyone visiting here from Podcast Academy!

Sent wirelessly from my
Windows Mobile device.

I have a flight in a few hours to Ontario, California. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’m presenting my session on “Podcasting from Mobile Devices” at Podcast Academy, presented by Doug Kaye and IT Conversations. Doug was announced as the “Podacasting Person of the Year”, and I’m exciting and honored to have been asked to present at the Academy.

I’m also very excited for the keynotes, sessions, and elbow-rubbing that’s sure to go on at the Portable Media Expo and Podcast Conference. Lots of my podcasting friends are going to be there, though I’m bummed that I’m going to miss the Portland Podcasting monthly meetup for the third month in a row. Wired is calling it “the Woodstock of Podcasting”. Some interesting drama between Adam Curry’s PodShow and the expo organizers in that article. Seems that there’s always some drama or other surrounding Adam.

If any TinyScreenfuls readers are going to be at the conference, look me up and say Hi! My cell number is on this blog (503-810-5365), and my email goes straight to my phone (jabancroft@gmail.com). Of course, most of the proceedings will be made available as podcasts sooner or later, so keep an eye out for those. I’ll be blogging anything cool and interesting that I come across. See you there!