So, for the past several years, Chris (@Yeti_detective ) and I have been working on creating a podcast. We’ve recorded one before, but it has been a long time ago, over a year. We thought we’d give it another shot tonight and things went… well… not well.
Being as we’re the type of people that just jump into things with both feet, we sat down, hit record and started talking to each other. It wasn’t long before we got sidetracked, and since we were completely unprepared, we got off track badly. We did come up with a name for the new podcast, though, “Poorly Prepared Podcast.” We did however, learn a few lessons tonight that we can apply to future podcasts (we will still post the one we did tonight as soon as it is edited).
1) Decide in Advance if You’re going to try and UStream Something
So, about a half hour into podcasting and live tweeting about podcasting, we got a request to do a live stream while we recorded. We decided (and when we get it up on the internet, you’ll hear us deciding randomly) to go ahead and try, so we paused the recording and got to work getting ustream up and running.
Unsuccessfully.
We actually spent more time trying that than we did recording, and it probably killed our momentum more than anything else. It was decided that from now on I’d make sure to bring my webcam so we can use it to live stream and we’d record on Chris’s laptop for the actual podcast.
Seems like a solution we should have come up with from the beginning.
2) Don’t Take Breaks to Take Horrible Videos
It isn’t uncommon for me to take pictures of things while I’m doing other things, especially now that I pretty much carry my camera anywhere I go. For some reason, it has also become a Taco Tuesday tradition for me to post embarrassing videos of Chris on twitter. I mean really embarrassing, and not entirely safe for work, so I won’t post them here.
Actually I feel a little dirty being party of their existence at all.
Taking the horrible video though pretty much ended our evening of podcasting. It was, too terrible to continue to expose the world to our strange behavior. We tried, though, by god, we tried.
3) Record in a sans baby location
I love Gilbert, and I’m really happy for our friends that they have a beautiful baby boy, however, screaming child does not make an excellent soundtrack for a podcast.
4) Follow your list of Topics
We made a list of topics to talk about. We didn’t stick to it and our conversations kept jumping back and forth. That’s something we’re going to have to work on.
5) Poorly Planned Podcast is Hard Work
Blogging comes naturally to me. Really, I’ve kept a journal for years, so it seems like a pretty natural transition from one to the other. Podcasting seemed like it would come naturally to me because I started talking 28 years ago and never really stopped. It is very different though, and something I’m going to have to get used to.
6) Avoid Twitter
Seriously, you guys are crazy.
7) Theme Music is easy to find if your not picky, but we’re picky
There is a ton of Creative Commons Music out there, and even more public domain music. We decided we’d like to ask our twitter friends to pick some music for us. We’ve gotten a few good suggestions. We just need to do some finagling to get it all worked out.
8) This Might Be A Bad Idea
But, clearly, I make bad decisions.