I recommend that you listen to podcasts while commuting in your car or exercising. You can also pop on headphones while gardening or folding laundry, but the in-car-listening scenario is the most common for podcasts. To listen to podcasts in the car, you’ll need a wireless FM transmitter.  A wireless FM transmitter plugs into your car’s cigarrette lighter and your MP3 player. It then transmits … more »

A strange thing happens when you take an audio file of someone speaking and set it to music — the two separate tracks combine such that the result is greater than the sum of the parts. For example, listen to the 3 minute track below that combines a 1981 speech by Shakespearean English scholar Arthur Henry King with Kiln’s Fyrepond. [Audio clip: view full post … more »

If you’re going to the STC Summit in Philadelphia, check out my presentation on podcasting. The Art of the Podcast Room: 111AB Format: Demonstration Skill Level: All Time: Tuesday, 4:30 -5:30 pm Learn how to capture audio from presentations, in-person interviews, phone conversations, and tutorials and deliver them as professional productions that can build relationships with listeners and strengthen their knowledge. I have a PowerPoint … more »

You can either listen to this post as a mini-podcast or just read it. They’re mostly the same, but not entirely. Download MP3 Duration: 7 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] I listened to a couple of podcasts back to back tonight that, taken alone, might not have had as strong an impact on me as they did together. The first was Mark … more »

I’m trying to gather as many examples as possible about how companies are engaging in web 2.0 activities. Do you know any companies that are using blogs, wikis, social networks, forums, podcasts/videocasts, or interactive online help? If so, let me know by either adding a comment below or by contacting me. (It doesn’t have to be restricted to tech comm examples.) In May I’m giving … more »

Attention podcasters and podcaster wannabes, we’re having a podcast meetup at Doc Train West. If you’re heading to this conference in Vancouver, stay tuned to more details about this meetup. It’ll probably be during one of the evenings of the conference (which takes place May 6-9). The podcaster meetup will involve an informal exchange, possibly at a restaurant or lounge somewhere, where podcasters introduce themselves … more »

My iTunes podcast page is updated (finally). I’m using Feedburner’s iTunes podcasting elements options to meet all the iTunes specifications. I hope this works better than Podpress did. Subscribe to my podcast in iTunes. (I ended up burning a new Feedburner feed and resubmitting it, so if you still see the old one in there, ignore it.) Note also that I have an iTunes subscribe … more »

Tonight I participated on a career panel for technical writing majors at Utah State University. In preparation, I tried to think of answers to questions they might ask. The one question that I was sure some student would ask is this: If you were to do it over again, would you choose technical writing as your career? I started reading through some back posts on … more »

Although the podcasts I listen to are usually tech podcasts, such as the highly entertaining TWIT (by Leo Laporte), I also enjoy a good alien podcast now and then. Mysterious Universe, produced by Benjamin Grundy, is one of the most fun-to-listen-to podcasts I’ve come across. I’m not someone who believes in aliens, but dude, you should hear some of the content Grundy plays on the … more »

Heidi Miller has some excellent tips on interviewing. In a presentation she gave at the Portable Media Media Expo, she explained several techniques that have encouraged me to change my interviewing style. Here are four key points from her presentation: Don’t send the interviewee the questions before the interview. I guess I’m a latecomer to this style, but I’m now totally convinced that it’s best … more »

In a moment of mental relapse, I volunteered to be my chapter’s virtual meeting coordinator. I already do podcasts, which are virtual one-on-one meetings/discussions, and I’ve been wanting to make my podcasts more Web 2.0-ish. So, I thought hey, why not make the last 20 minutes of a podcast open to whoever wants to listen, allowing them to ask questions themselves? How cool, yes, this … more »

Ning (“peace” in Chinese) is a social network application that allows groups to communicate and connect with each other in seamless, convenient ways. Scott Abel just recently started a new social network community called The Content Wrangler Community. Within a couple of weeks, it already attracted 824 868 members. This community on Ning is quickly becoming the social network community for technical writers and others … more »

I watched a couple of interviews this week that spiraled downhill. The first is a Luke Burbank interview with the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. The second is a Sarah Lacy SXSW interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

If you asked me 6 months ago how much I used my Zoom H4 digital recorder, it wasn’t much. I initially got it to record live interviews at conferences, and donations from my podcast listeners paid for the device. (Thanks, once again, guys.) But this past month, I’ve carried the Zoom with me everywhere I go. I use it almost every day at work. I … more »

The 2008 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) festival, currently underway in Austin, Texas, until March 16, is one of the most popular, high-energy tech conferences of the year. This Interactive conference “celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies.” Basically, everyone who is doing anything cool on the Internet ends up speaking there. 37 Signals, Facebook, Wired — they’re all there. Many … more »