First Crack 65. First Crack Turns One Through Rich Tatums Ears

Rich Tatum listened to each of the First Crack podcasts in linear sequential order. I thought he’d be the perfect interview for First Crack’s 1st Birthday. I was right.

After we do a run down of the best and worst of the First Crack Podcast, we talk about:

  • Podcasting’s bandwidth problem (it isn’t what you think)
  • The opportunity podcasting and weblogs offer churches to build communities within their congregations

Rich’s favorite First Crack Podcasts of the past year:

  1. First Crack 61. Building an Airplane at Home with Jeff Coffey
  2. First Crack 60. Shellie Gonzales on Borrowing a Porsche Boxster for the Weekend
  3. First Crack 59. Bill Forsberg Throwing Out the First Pitch
  4. First Crack 50. The Challenges of Comedy Theater at the Brave New Workshop
  5. First Crack 14. RIAARadar.com Creator Ben Tesch
  6. First Crack 18. Blogumentarys Chuck Olsen and the Revamps
  7. First Crack 19. Coffee and Community at the Blue Moon

Special thanks to Steve Borsch from Connecting the Dots for the copy of Podcasting Hacks. I’m sure it will help the continuous improvement of the podcast. Here’s to another year.

Listen to First Crack Turns One Through Rich Tatum’s Ears [38 min]

A Consumer Moratorium

Today, Doc pointed to Tim Jarrett saying (emphasis mine):

“As I’ve mentioned before, I want a moratorium on the word consumer—both because it is disrespectful and because it builds bad thinking habits in companies that sell to ‘consumers'”.

Smart, clued-in companies can signal they respect people by eradicating the word ‘consumer’ from their vocabulary (and the handful of other words on the Buzzword Blacklist).

Tim’s “I am not a consumer, I am a human being” nails the difference between a customer-oriented marketing effort and a consumer-oriented one.

Thanks Tim.

Covering Your Big Black Butt

A couple weeks back, Nina Gordon’s cover of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton got promoted to my ‘Getting Things Done’ smart playlist.

I’m a sucker for a good genre-bending cover tune – Ever since Faith No More covered the Commodores’ Easy (still a classic in my book) and the Vandals’ cover of Summer Lovin’. Then there’s the Gourd’s cover of Gangsta Lean and Gin n Juice.

This evening, I heard Jonathan Coulton cover Baby Got Back. If you haven’t – heard anything by J.C. yet, this is the place to start. It’s a thing of beauty.

Gentle Readers’ Hihoney Review

I picked up the (now defunct) Gentle Readers’ album Hihoney via Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles’ Stuff package. I’ve never been one to listen to an album all the way through. On the rare occassions that I have a CD, I rip it into iTunes and wait for the individual tracks to come up on random. When ‘Nothing You Can Do’ came up this afternoon, I stopped. If every song on the album is like this, I need to hear it. Right now.

As a whole, this is the perfect album for an early autumn day in the upper Midwest. Melancholy, comforting, catchy. Like when the sun is low in a blue sky, and that cool, light breeze through the bare trees means you really should have grabbed a scarf before you left. Just like NE Minneapolis right now.

I can see why Dave likes talking with Lee so much. Her smokey voice must be accompanied by strings and drums in regular conversation. (This comment makes no sense based on Dave’s comment below)

That being said, here’s the song-by-song run down.

  • Nothing You Can Do & Lunchhour
    Two nice honest, unpretentious, alt country tunes. Comfortable and timeless, like a more mature Be Good Tanyas or if Son Volt was fronted by a woman.
  • Last Day at the Office
    This is the theme song to Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles. I’m waiting for Dave break in with “Hello friends and neighbors”. Oh sure, it’s a nice enough song without Dave.
  • Difficult
    A few years back, a colleague of mine commented on turning 31, “I now know how to get what I want and people take me seriously”. This song is that comment put to music.
  • Sweetest Taboo
    My least favorite song on the album. I just don’t think it translated well to a recording. If I was at the Kitty Kat Bar sipping whiskey and the Gentle Readers played this song live, I’d declare it the best song of the set. This song needs a dark, melancholy, spacious atmosphere. The home office is none of these.
  • Center of the Universe & Turn Up the Sound
    These tracks remind me of early Edie Brickell or Natalie Merchant, songs that make you stop and let all those great, long forgotten memories flood over you.
  • California

    “the moral of the story is – there is no moral”

    Ouch. I did have one small sliver of hope left. No longer.

  • California Part 2
    I’m sure there are some happy, sunny songs titled ‘California’ in the world. This is the third in my library that isn’t. Like the others, it’s a catchy tune about loss and regret.
  • Separate & Friction
    Neither of these tracks did anything for me. They’re solid tunes with a decent beat, just feel like they’re missing the clever, honest writing that makes a song more than a solid tune with a decent beat.

Support independent musicians and podcasters, head over to Dave’s site and pick up the album. You’ll make his day and for that, he’ll throw in an EGC t-shirt.

The Sploggy Site of the Street

There are at least 2 different internets. One with popups, popunders, spasm-inducing Flash banner ads, and the actual, unique information squeezed to the size of an IAB standard microbar. The other, without. Until now, this latter internet was filled with RSS feeds from blogs with real people behind them.

Until now. Until Splogs.

Back in August Mark Cuban outlined the splog problem. I didn’t think anything of it until today. While doing research on a vertical market I’m not versed in, the first page of Technorati results were useless, uninformative, non-helpful splogs. Blech.

Perhaps my query terms are being too generic. Asking Google for ‘digital camera’ won’t tell you answer anything more specific than, “What does Google return for ‘digital camera'”. So, I’ll try being more specific.

A tip for business bloggers out there: Running a business blog on blogger.com is the equivalent of running a business off a Hotmail or AOL email address. It doesn’t help build credibility.

UPDATE 16 October 2005: If my standing Technorati searches are any indications, yes as Tim Bray said, we have a splog emergency on our hands. I’m reading FightSplog.com right now to figure out how.

Oh, Did I Mention iTunes Kills Television Advertising

Josh at Splintered Channels ponders traditional ad spots within the new iTunes-delivered TV programs.

The TV I’ve had for the last 10 years has a 30-sec timer button on it. Hit the button, change the channel, and 30 seconds later you’ll automatically return to the previous program. Tivo time-shifted both the program and this ad-skip behavior (though VCR instilled this behavior decades ago, albeit without the sexiness of digital).

Josh is right, ad campaigns have a shorter shelf-life than the programs they interrupt. In all but the biggest of primetime television programs, the ads are also region specific (if not local). So, inserting a conventional 30-second spot in a digital iTunes download wastes at least the same amount of money as one delivered via the air waves.

As I’ve mentioned in the Economics of Podcasting and Podcasting is Closer to Voicemail than Radio, the pains of conventional broadcasting (FCC licensing, antennas, etc) don’t exist in the digital realm. Combine that with customers actually paying per episode and the advertiser/distributor relationship turns from symbiotic to parasitic.

If iTunes starts to include interruption-based ads within the TV programs they offer, 2 things will happen:

  1. An iMovie Applescript will magically appear that automatically slices out the annoyances.
  2. The programs with ads won’t sell….at any price.

Catharine Taylor at AdWeek’s AdFreak concurs.

“…not only is the video iPod a watershed, but, sorry advertisers and agencies, that commercial TV may just be f*cked, and it’s going to hurt advertisers much more than it will hurt the networks.”

I’m glad someone inside the advertising industry said that and cursed while doing so.

Once television advertising goes the way of the Wicked Witch of the West, where does that leave Nielsen Ratings?

ABC affiliates are asking that now.

“The prospect of the new device [video-enabled iPod] distracting Nielsen-measurable eyeballs from its own over-the-air programming is generating some anxiety from stations all over the country…”

Just as I can read the same email in a web-browser, in a desktop application, and through VersaMail on my Treo, all other media will shortly be liberated from it’s exclusive distribution channel.

Quick rhetorical question: What’s a television program that isn’t originally released on television?

I’m pretty sure Chuck, Steve, and Amanda have an answer.