Month: November 2005

Monday, 21 November 2005

Hunting For a Non-HFCS BBQ Sauce

by Garrick van Buren 3 Comments on Hunting For a Non-HFCS BBQ Sauce

Today, Jen slow-cooked some pork loin and when it was fall-apart with a fork tender, we drained it, smothered it in BBQ sauce, and ignored it some more.

After ignoring it good and long, we forked it onto some sesame-topped buns, threw on a scoop of ‘slaw and called it dinner.

Yeah. Tasty goodness. Worth staying in for.

The only thing that could make it better is if the BBQ sauce didn’t have High Fructose Corn Syrup as the second ingredient. I’m pretty sure a sauce exists without HFCS in the ingredient list – let alone first or second. Unfortunately, SuperTarget didn’t have it on their shelves.

Anyone know where I could find it?

The Long Tail of Media Attention

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on The Long Tail of Media Attention

Tonight at 10pm, rumor has it the podcasting segment recorded by Minneapolis NBC affiliate KARE 11 with me and many others within PodcastMN will air. As much as I’m always happy for an opportunity to spread the word on podcasting and PodcastMN.

I get much more excited about being picked up by other bloggers and websites for 2 reasons:

  1. I can link to them easily – meaning I can share them with you.
  2. They get picked up by search engines now and in the future – meaning things have a lifetime past their initial release.

Hugh, as always, is far more eloquent.

“Big Media offers a short-lived spike in blog traffic. High Google rankings offer a perpetual selling virus.” – Hugh MacLeod

Saturday, 19 November 2005

Lawyers That Get Niche Publishing and Podcasting

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Lawyers That Get Niche Publishing and Podcasting

Some of you may remember the 6-part series I did with Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg & Gotlieb P.A. over at the First Crack Podcast. For your convenience, I’ve consolidated all the PKR&G podcast conversations including 2 bonus conversations that didn’t make the original series.

This week PKR&G came out with their annual lifestyle magazine, “Perfectly Legal”. It includes text versions of many of the conversations and – just in time for the holidays – many other recommendations from the firm. There’s also a nice article on how podcasting builds and extends personal relationships written by yours truly.

All the articles in the 32-page issue were written by the someone with a relationship to the firm, all the photos are of people in the firm, and the magazine itself gets sent out to those again – with relationships to the firm.

This isn’t millions of people. It’s the right people. The people that trust and respect PKR&G, the people that will recommend PKR&G to their friends.

You don’t pick a lawyer by scanning a directory, why would you do the same for a podcast?

Thursday, 17 November 2005

eMac Fax Modem Killed My Phone Line

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on eMac Fax Modem Killed My Phone Line

I had to send a couple faxes yesterday. Something I do so infrequently that I just use the OS X’s built-in faxing on these rare occasions.

The modem on my Powerbook hasn’t been working right for a while now – neither has the disc drive. I’m getting a real good idea of how much I need these features when they don’t work right (very little).

Anyway, I was using the fax machine in Jen’s eMac. It wouldn’t go through and it wouldn’t go through, and it wouldn’t go through.

This morning, the faxes still hadn’t gone through – plus the DSL was down and no dial tone on the line.

Two great guys from Qwest came out and took a look this afternoon.

Conclusion: the eMac fax modem freaked itself out, and didn’t hang up correctly on one of the attempts, taking the whole line down with it. DSL and all. Dang.

Tuesday, 15 November 2005

The Business Models of Water

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on The Business Models of Water

As a follow-up to How to Build a Business from Podcasting I thought I’d share this with you:

  • There’s a case of Ice Mountain bottled water in my kitchen (the extra big case from CostCo).
  • There’s also 2 Brita pitchers in my fridge and 4 Nalgene bottles – of different sizes – in the cupboard.
  • The house itself has 6 built-in faucets – 1 each in the kitchen, laundry room, and outside near the garden, 3 in the bathroom (shower, tub, sink)

Only the Ice Mountain bottles have advertising.

Tag It garrickvanburen for My Attention

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Tag It garrickvanburen for My Attention

Erik Haugo has started a for:garrickvanburen tag over at del.icio.us for things he thinks I’ll be interested in.

Thanks Erik.

If you’re reading this right now, feel free to use that tag for the same purpose. I’m also watching garrickvanburen on Flickr and Technorati. Similarily, if there’s a podcast you think I’d enjoy – you can pop it in my Backlog station @ gigadial.

Fellow Minnesotan – jwynia just publicized the for:jwynia tag

On Measuring What Matters

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on On Measuring What Matters

I’ve been itching to see Dave Slusher’s reaction to the Audible Wordcast announcement and he didn’t disappoint.

“What matters to me are the number of sensible comments, the other shows that quote me, the number of people that came up to me and talked to me at PME and told me they enjoyed the show. These are not simple numbers, but the simple numbers are flawed and odd and full of fraud.” – Dave Slusher

Earlier this year, I was asked how I’m measuring the success of the First Crack Podcast. With robots and aggregators hitting the feed, people downloading and not listening immediately (or at all), and so many other factors throwing off the simple numbers – I’ve also decided they weren’t good measures.

Instead, I’ve decided on two factors:

  1. Showing up within the top 10 results in searches for the people I talk to.
  2. The number of comments and ratings for the individual conversations.

Both of these factors are driven by people interested in the conversation and have an indefinite time period associated with them. Two things that map very well to podcasting’s inherent characteristics.

UPDATE: Hugh’s got a great comment on metrics

“Metrics don’t really matter. What matters is your network, your readers, the quality of your writing etc etc. It’s an easy thing to forget, once you first start seeing your traffic exploding and the lucrative consulting offers start landing in your inbox.”

Sunday, 13 November 2005

Apophenia – Seeing Patterns that Don’t Exist

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Apophenia – Seeing Patterns that Don’t Exist

I first heard the word ‘apophenia’ in Moira Gunn’s interview with William Gibson almost a year ago.

Since then, it’s meaning has come to mind more than a couple times – though I had forgotten the word itself. In each instance, I’ve Googled for what bits of the word I could remember – yet came up empty.

Today, skimming my aggregator, I noticed Erik Haugo del.icio.us-ed the apophenia blog.

Confirms my stance that the world will give you want you need – just have to keep an eye out.

Saturday, 12 November 2005

How to Build a Business from Podcasting

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on How to Build a Business from Podcasting

“I spent the better part of last year trying to envision a business built on podcasting, and didn’t come up with anything that I believed in.” – Dave Winer

Like Dave and so many others, I’ve done the same thing and ended up with the same conclusion. Recently on the PodcastMN mailing list the conversation of making money from podcasting came up. Though there’s a big difference between making money and building a business, these are the half dozen off-the-top-of-my-head strategies that make sense to me.

  1. Build better tools and sell them – making podcasting easier.
    This is what software companies like Rogue Amoeba, Odeo, and AudioBlog.com are doing.
  2. Sell implementation of the free, open source tools you build.
    Take a look at the BetDirCaster, it ties together a bunch of open source tools, you can download it and install it yourself for free or you can pay Working Pathways (or your geeky nephew) to do it.
  3. Sell training helping people become podcasters.
    These are classes, tutorials, and other one-on-one interactions helping people use the tools they’re most comfortable with to publish a podcast. This is what we did with MOMbo.org
  4. Sell production services to companies with more money than time.
    Think professional services podcasts – I’m also a big fan of this one. Anyone that’s been podcasting for more than 9 months is an expert enough to produce other podcasts.
  5. Sell filtering services
    Help people find the most relevant podcasts for them. This is huge and yet unanswered. I’ve talked about this before in A Business Model for Abundance. I’ve heard of a couple projects in the works that acknowledge this problem, but I haven’t seen anything that addresses it in a useful way.
  6. Sell other stuff through your show like the CDs from the bands on your podcast where a couple bucks goes to your podcast.
    I’ve praised Dave Slusher for going down this road, also Kris Smith is now offering the Best of the Croncast CD & DVD. I expect more of this.

As you can tell from this list, I prefer the ‘because of…not with’ models, as in “it’s far more important (and interesting) to make money because of our blogs, rather than with them” – Doc Searls.

Advertising might work as product placement, on a one-off basis. Ad networks won’t work for two reasons:

  1. The larger the network, the more generic the ad message, the more inappropriate the ad message
  2. Any commonality across a podcast can be skipped or re-edited programmatically. If listeners know an ad message will last 10 seconds at the beginning of a podcast, a script could be written to splice out that bit upon download. Though, you could probably charge for that splicing app.

Charging to access mp3 podcasts will work once. Customer #1 will buy them, then redistribute them for free. Anything other than an mp3 (m4p, mov, etc) artificially limits reception. And if you want to limit when and where people listen to a podcast – just stream it.