Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] David Hornik
Welcome to VentureCast. Wow. You know, I’m telling you that that is an impressive use of my music degree right there. Anyway, well, welcome as. As the jingle says, welcome to venturecast, the inaugural podcast for Venture Blog. This is David Hornik, and I’m biting the bullet, and I’m finally gonna do a podcast. I’ve talked a lot on other people’s podcasts, podcasts, and I’ve thought a lot about it, but I haven’t gotten around to doing it. But. But the time has come. I was at the demo conference this past week and had the chance to talk with both John Furrier, who’s over at PodTech, and Greg Gallant at Venture Voice. And it became pretty clear to me that this. This podcasting stuff is actually here to stay, that the voice is just another channel, and that it was time to add my voice to the. To the podcast. Fun. So, as the jingle says, welcome to Venture Cast. Okay, I swear that’s the last time I’m gonna play that. So what? You know, as I. As I sat down thinking about finally getting around to podcasting, other than thinking about how annoyingly nasally my voice is and therefore incredibly unappealing for the radio or for podcast or for, you know, any audio experience. Once I got beyond that, and hopefully you all will as well, the next obvious question is sort of, how do you go about creating the podcast? And I think it’s no small impediment to a lot of people doing this. There are tools available. I think that the tool of choice seems to be Audio hijack Pro, which you can download for free and give it a try. It lets you take audio, rip it to. To an MP3 in a relatively easy fashion. And I did that. I downloaded Audio Hijack Pro from probably Download.com and I’ve got to tell you, it’s not actually that easy. It’s kind of a messy application. It gives you a lot of controls, but at the same time, what you really need, which is a simple way to begin recording and start and stop and edit, and those sorts of things just doesn’t exist within that platform. So as I’ve recorded podcasts with folks like Furrier and Steve Gilmore, I’ve tried to figure out what it is they were using. Actually, John Furrier’s setup is really just a couple of microphones and a mixing board mixing straight to an MP3 in a team, a little MP3 player. And that’s pretty simple, but it still involves some cumbersome hardware. If you get the mix wrong, then you’re out of luck. Once it’s done, it’s done. Gilmour. It was funny. I mean, he had a whole bag full of spaghetti wires and microphones, and he was using Audio Hijack Pro, and it was giving him some fits, not, you know, just getting it to monitor and record and all of that business. So as I, as I sat down, I figured those weren’t the right platforms. But I was reminded actually of. Of the announcement at the Wall Street Journal conference. I guess it’s back in May when Steve Jobs stood up and talked about how he was now going to support podcasts on itunes. And I assumed that there was going to be a companion announcement about how he had created some sort of creation tool for podcasting as well, which, you know, frankly, would be a pretty easy modification of GarageBand, which is a really great application, which I’ve been playing with for a long time for music creation, but not really for voice. But he didn’t announce it. I still think that there’s a huge opportunity there, and hopefully the next rev of GarageBand will have that sort of a podcast skin that’ll make it simple. But I decided, hey, it’s probably pretty easy to do it nonetheless using the GarageBand application, and started messing around with it this week. And sure enough, really, really simple. You can throw down audio tracks, you can create effects if you want, you can add music and sound, you can pan, you can fade, you can do everything you’d want to do. And when all is said and done, then you just mix it down, you export it to itunes, and you’ve got an audio file that is good to go. And in fact, this podcast was made particularly simple because once I’d. Once I’d mixed it into an itunes, into itunes, in an audio file, then all I had to do was upload that file to TypePad, which is the SixApart hosted service. And, you know, full disclosure, those of you who don’t know, I am on the board of SixApart, big fan, a user. And so I don’t intend this to be a shameless plug, although it’s become that. But because of the way that the TypePad service is set up, by simply uploading the audio file, it recognizes it as an audio file, it creates it as a podcast stream, and then when you click on it on the webpage, it will play as a QuickTime file, and it will also export as an audio file, as a podcast. So, super simple. And so I’m good to go up and running. And now all I have to do is figure out what it Is, I want to say, and that may actually be the biggest problem of all, I guess I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time talking with folks about podcasts and about the advent of audio on the web and increased use of video. And I seem to get this question a lot. Oh, gee, do you think this is an interesting opportunity? And is this something you’re going to invest in that sort of thing? The truth of the matter is, I think that each of these channels is an interesting opportunity for folks to create technology that’ll make it easier to communicate. But the thing that strikes me is that each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses. And so frankly, something that you would write in a blog won’t necessarily be as effective in a podcast or something that you’re going to video blog won’t necessarily be as effective in a podcast. But at the same time, there may be circumstances where the podcast is the right medium for. For things you want to say. So. So I’ve been thinking about the question of what is that, you know, what, what is it that makes something podcastable as opposed to bloggable? And the one thing that’s certainly clear to me is that as someone who is a little bit on the sarcastic side, I have been known to make a poster too, that came across to people who weren’t appreciating the sarcasm of it as sort of either snide or inappropriate or whatever. And so there’s no question in the spoken word. It’s a little easier to make clear when you’re being sarcastic. It’s certainly the case that my children understand when I’m being sarcastic or not, but I think if they were reading, it wouldn’t be as. Wouldn’t be as obvious. It sort of reminds me of that old Saturday Night Live sketch. There was a guy, and he was put in charge of the nuclear reactor for the first time, and his boss is leaving. And as his boss leaves, he says, you can never use too much water. And then he leaves. And so the weekend that something’s. Something’s happening, the nuclear reactor is going into meltdown, and he remembers back to what the guy said. And the only problem is he couldn’t remember whether he said you could never use too much water or you can never use too much water. And so again, I mean, in print, not. Not a very useful statement. Who knows which it is? Whereas if, if he had paid attention to the inflection of his boss, that then he would have known that you could never use too much water, or is it never use too Much water Anyway, so I guess if I want to be sarcastic or I want to write a comedy sketch, then I can podcast. But hopefully I won’t be doing too much of either of those, I guess. Of course there’s always if I have the need to sing that, that’s much more effective in the podcast than in my adventure blog. Welcome to Venture Cast. Okay, well, I guess I couldn’t help myself one more time. But that’s it. No more. No more venturecast jingle.

[00:08:27] David Hornik
I swear.

[00:08:28] David Hornik
So. But I think I’m being a little unfair, frankly to podcasting. I mean, obviously it’s incredibly powerful for folks who want to create self programmed radio and I think that’s gonna be powerful. And frankly, I think, you know, there are those who would rather listen to something than to read it.

[00:08:47] David Hornik
After all, I mean, you know, there.

[00:08:48] David Hornik
Are plenty of circumstances in which it’s.

[00:08:51] David Hornik
Not particularly practical to read. I used to have a very long commute and lived out in the East Bay in the San Francisco area. Drove to Sandhill Road. It took about an hour and a half each direction. And while I would read a few emails here and there, it wasn’t very safe and certainly wasn’t going to be reading through a whole lot of blog posts. So. And I certainly would have very much welcomed the opportunity to have more interesting radio to listen to. I would spend the morning kind of flipping between NPR and Howard Stern, and after a while you get a little sick of both the endangered tree frog and Howard’s exploits at Hooters. So it frankly would have been pretty great to have podcasts back then. I recently also had a sort of failed attempt at becoming a runner. It ended quickly when I managed to injure my legs, because it turns out that it’s actually pretty hard on your legs to run when you’re really fat, which is exactly why you’re trying to run, to get skinnier. And yet it’s too hard on your legs. But that’s, you know, an irony that I, that I can’t solve. But in any event, while I was running for those two fateful weeks, I did listen to a bunch of stuff on my ipod. And it was great to have that ability to take the time that you’re running to do something more than simply ponder your existence or obsess over the incredible pain that you’re in running. Anyway, definitely a great opportunity for podcasts to make some periods of time that would otherwise be unproductive, a lot more productive or a lot more entertaining or a lot more otherwise engaging. So that’s exciting. And I actually am quite optimistic that this podcasting stuff, this podcasting business, is going to be really transformative of the way in which we experience audio. No longer is it programmed and over the airwaves, it’s to your desktop and then consumed in any way, in any place that you want. And that’s pretty powerful stuff. So, anyway, I’m excited to be part of the podcast world now.

[00:11:19] David Hornik
And I guess, hopefully, in the next.

[00:11:23] David Hornik
Podcast that I put out there, I’ll have more to say than just my, you know, internal gazings about trying to podcast in the first instance. Not that it’s, you know, not that it’s particularly unprecedented. There’s a whole lot of blogging about blogging, so there’s probably going to be a whole lot of podcasting about podcasting, too. But in any event, thanks for listening and look forward to podcasting again soon.