The 3 Moments - podcast interviews

Channels for The 3 Moments Podcast downloads

I've just added the Podcasts to  My Podcast Alley feed! having previously registered on iTunes and SpokenWord.org.  We learn as we go along.  Take your choice.

Setting up a blog and podcast

Nearly there.  Even though there’s not much technical work to do, setting up a podcast does take a bit of time.  So far, I’ve had to set up this blog, which instead of WordPress or something, I’ve gone with what I know, and used TypePad from my current blogging account, and adopted a simple template which I can add a banner to at a later stage.

Next, I’ve had to have a think about where to house the mp3 files.  Lots of hosting gives you big storage, but many restrict big bandwidth downloads of several thousand.  You do the numbers.  A 30MB podcast mp3 file, downloaded by 100 subscribers, is 3GB.  That will nearly bust most monthly hosting agreements.  1000 downloads of 30MB file is 30GB, 10,000 downloads is 300GB which are the numbers for a popular podcast.  100,000 downloads is 3TB!! 

And there are 2 issues.  One is download bandwidth by MegaByte, the other is download speed for the all the people downloading at the same time.  I’ve asked around.  Amazon S3 looks interesting and low cost.  Using TypePad’s 10 GB and then their recommended link to Coral and host sites such as Libsyn may work. I’m giving blip.tv a go, because they’re used to hosting and delivering much bigger files than my mp3 podcasts, and it’s free!

I’ve slightly messed up the file naming from Blip, because the file takes the name of the user TonyGoodson, and not the showname the3moments.  Forgive me for the time being!

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the file naming convention, which no-one seems to have standardised on.  I still don’t know the difference between a “–” (hyphen) and a “ _” (underscore) though I suspect that servers like to work with underscores.  Also, there are some who recommend shortening to t3m instead of the3moments and separating the date in year-month-day.  It looks like the file names will be

TonyGoodson-the3moments_20090614_guestname_###

where the ### is 3 numbers which blip.tv randomly adds to the file!!  That’s what you get for free hosting!!

I spent quite a bit of time understanding the mp3 tag editing, and I’ll have to wait and see what it looks like in iTunes.  Talking of iTunes, the iTunes Australia directory for podcast submissions has been displaying “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later.”  This has gone on for 3 days now.  Thanks a lot Apple, unless it’s something not working at my end.  How would I know?  In the 3 days I’ve been waiting, I’ve created an iTunes image for the store, something eye-catching and easy to read when it’s down to 72x72 pixels.  That took a bit of time to design even though it looks so simple.

What I’m submitting is the Feedburner RSS feed, instead of using the TypePad feed.  It’s seems easy to set up and with lots of add-ons to analyse the subscription and download stats.

Thank you Glenn Biclar for your time, advice, and help, with the experience you’ve gained from the website and video podcasts that you’ve set up on nsayn.tv. Together we will conquer the world.

Now for some guests!!

Guest Interviews - The 3 Moments

Ever since I was a kid watching Parky, then Russell Harty, and now Andrew Denton and Larry King, I’ve loved interviews.  Interesting people with interesting things to say.  Inspirations.  I like the Parky interview style.  The guests don’t have to be grilled or caught off their guard, or sensationalised.  Just conversations.  Interest and curiosity in the guest, and what they have to tell and teach us.

And not just the famous and the stars, but some of my favourites were Barbara Castle, Jonathan Miller, Peter Ustinov, Michael Caine, Bette Midler, and latterly, Paul McCartney talking about his ego.  That was Part 1.

Part 2 for me, came just before the start of podcasting, and in fact partly created podcasting.  The Chris Lydon interviews. Wonderful political and technological conversations published as mp3 files to download and listen to.  This coupled with Doug Kaye’s I.T Conversations, led to a world of mp3 downloads for me.  And still to this day, I manually download mp3s to listen to instead of using podcast software to automatically download to my laptop or mp3 player.

Since 2003 I’ve pondered who I’d like to interview.  I’ve never had the platform to interview anyone.  Sure I’ve podcast on The Productivity Show, dabbled, had some great guests, but I realise I want to go beyond productivity.  And I’ve feared and procrastinated for 5 years.  No longer.

It’s simple really. All I have to do is list the 100 people I’d most like to interview in the world, and invite them!!  Yeah sure, most won’t reply, or will say no, or it will become too difficult.  But you know what?  At least 5 will say yes, and it will be magnificent.

So I’m starting with a simple website, a banner, and name…The 3 Moments.  Why “The 3 Moments”?  Well, when I look at the people I’d like to interview, it’s about their journey, their highs, their lows, the ending of something and that “Oh Shit” moment, the Harrison Owen (Open Space Technology) writes about in his book Wave Rider, and how people deal with set-back and grief.  If you ask someone to draw a timeline of their life from birth to now, the chances are there will be two or three peaks/troughs, so let’s hear about those things, The Hero/Heroine’s Journey.

Build it and let them come.  So let’s see what happens.