Listen to the entire interview (30 Mins)

Download audio file (113-WordPress-Service-Comaprison.mp3)

Wordpress.org Vs Wordpress.com With Douglas Welch

On this episode I talk with Douglas Welch about the differences between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org and when you might want to use WordPress.org vs Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com is hosted and managed by automattic (the company behing wordpress). If you choose WordPress.com you don’t install or control the software. WordPress.org is the home of the open source wordpress software. [...]

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Audio: Douglas talks Wordpress on Small Business Hosting podcast

iPod Ready Video

Recorded live at the Writers Guild of America, West on May 27, 2009. Speakers included Elisabeth Flack of the WGA, Rosanne Welch, Douglas Welch and Michael Lawshe. For more information on New Media, visit http://newmediainterchange.com

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Video: From Camera to YouTube – Part 3

iPod Ready Video

Recorded live at the Writers Guild of America, West on May 27, 2009. Speakers included Elisabeth Flack of the WGA, Rosanne Welch, Douglas Welch and Michael Lawshe. For more information on New Media, visit http://newmediainterchange.com

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Video: From Camera to YouTube – Part 2

iPod Ready Video

Recorded live at the Writers Guild of America, West on May 27, 2009. Speakers included Elisabeth Flack of the WGA, Rosanne Welch, Douglas Welch and Michael Lawshe. For more information on New Media, visit http://newmediainterchange.com

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Video: From Camera to YouTube – Part 1

Douglas E. Welch talks New Media to the listeners of the Handbell Podcast, hosted by Dean Jensen and Paul Weller.

Listen (54 minutes)

Download audio file (HandbellPodcast4-30--4-28-2009.mp3)

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Audio: Douglas talks New Media on the Handbell Podcast

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Webinar: New Media: So many options to try for the eLearning Guild

This talk was recorded April 17, 2009 in a presentation to the Institute of Management Consultants, Southern California Chapter.

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• Audio: Spreading the Word – A presentation to the OC Podcasters (welchwrite.com)

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Video: The What, Why and How of Blogging

Douglas E. Welch presents a talk on the What, Why and How of Blogging, or Blogging 101.

Listen (54 minutes)

Download audio file (cinm-blogging101.mp3)

This talk was recorded April 17, 2009 in a presentation to the Institute of Management Consultants, Southern California Chapter.

Outline of this talk:

* Introduction
o Question – How many of you update your web site daily? weekly? monthly?
+ Most people find it too difficult
* What?
o A web site like all the others
o Blogging provides easy methods of updating your web site
+ Latest information
+ Automatic archives
+ Attractive to search engines
+ Concentrate on putting up new content, not fiddling with design
+ Can be easy and free or complicated and not free
* Why?
o Visibility
+ Telling people what you do and how well you do it
+ Getting your message to those who truly want to hear it
+ Traditional advertising less and less effect or wrong tool for some companies or professions.
+ Give people an opportunity to “stumble upon” your work
+ Provides “A Place for your stuff”, as George Carlin said
# A place to refer people for more info
# An online brochure or business card
# A home base to direct people to when placing content on other sites
* YouTube, Facebook, etc
+ Easy release of all sorts of content – text, photos, audio, video and even live video streams
o NOT more work
+ Make it easier to capture and present information/content
# You are already creating it every day
# Just need to capture it
+ Should be part or whole of every web site
# In some cases, it IS the web site
* IslandFox.org
* How?
o Buy a domain name, if you don’t already have one
o Free blogging services
+ Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Vox.com, and many more
+ Doesn’t even require a web site, but you should probably have one anyway
+ Use re-direct to point from existing web site
o Free Self-hosted
+ Use in combination with your existing web site
* Questions?

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Audio: The What, Why and How of Blogging

Download audio file (cinm-audience.mp3)

One of the most important lessons for New Media creators is the fact that when you start, you often have absolutely no idea who your audience might be. You can survey, you can review, you can correlate, but until you put something out there, you will never truly know. More importantly, this uncertainty is often what stops people from creating New Media at all.

Today over lunch I was watching some podcasts on my televison (There are a bunch of ways to do that) and I caught a TedTalk with Malcom Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce — “Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.” Gladwell tells the story of Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz who revolutionized the food industry with his concept that there is no one, perfect item, but rather a horizontal continuum of perfect products based on what groups of people desire. More importantly, he discovered that asking people what they want was often the worst way of discovering their preference.

The same applies to New Media. If you asked someone what they want in New Media, most will tell you they want it to look and feel like mainstream television. In fact, though, tens of thousands of people are already enjoying New Media shows that look nothing like television. Witness “Fred”, Make Magazine’s podcasts and shows, Diggnation, Ask a Ninja and more. Even more, television these days is starting to look more and more like New Media, not the other way round. Shows like “Destroyed in Seconds”, “How It’s Made” and others owe much to the success of YouTube. It seems mad, but the audience doesn’t honestly know how to indicate what they really want in media except by voting with their eyeballs.

This fact is why it is so important to start producing content — whether individual episodes or complete series of shows — and then see what attracts the most attention. This may seem madness after all these years of focus groups, private screenings, in-depth analysis and such, but I think it is the only true way to discover your audience.

Of course, “throwing something against the wall” is so much easier in New Media, even it is a bit scary. You can start producing shows on a shoestring and then increase the time and budget as you start to discover your core audience. Unlike mainstream television, you aren’t spending millions of dollars on a pilot, only to have the show be cancelled after one episode.

New Media gives you the freedom to try many things, in many mays, and pick the best. You should take this freedom and run with it as this is the first time in the history of modern media where, not only can you create something, you can easily distribute it directly to your audience. Don’t squander this great advantage.

You may have some idea who your audience is, but I can guarantee you that there will always be surprises. There will be a demographic that you had no idea you would reach. You could be successful in a far flung country. You could end up with a huge following across the globe, but you won’t know until you do it! You have no idea who your audience is, but it is very likely they will find you anyway.

From Careers in New Media and Podcasting Get more great content on Podcasting, New Media, Gardening, Los Angeles Events and Technology at WelchWrite.com

Audio: You don’t know who your audience is

Most of these conversations started with the phrase, “tell him/her how they could use New Media to do X, Y, Z.” This is always doomed to failure, of course, as they have most likely made up their mind already that New Media is not for them. Hence, the conversation goes nowhere.

These conversations have taken me back to the days of the old PC vs. Mac wars. I realized a long time ago that this and many similar discussions, are fruitless exercises and don’t warrant the breath expended on them. As they say, “Never teach a pig to sing, It doesn’t work and it annoys the pig.”

So, in this way I say that I will be a New Media apologist no more! My job is to teach people how to use New Media to improve their businesses, their careers and their lives. If they haven’t figured out that New Media can help them, it is not my job to convince them. That is simply “teaching the pig to sing.” In fact, some might say that it is impossible to convince someone out of a strongly held opinion, They have to come to that understanding on their own. Only then can I help them.

So now, I will wait for the “When you are ready, the teacher will appear” moment and save my energy for more important battles.

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No longer a New Media Apologist

Victor is collecting some great interviews, tips, hints and advice from professional like Michael Freeman, author of The Photographer’s Eye and amateurs like himself and his fellow listeners.

It is great to have a new source of inspiration to go out an shoot, even if it is only with the iPhone or point-and-shoot cameras. You don’t need an expensive camera to think about composition, framing, exposure and more. These can be practiced with any equipment, even your own eye.

Figs in the Sun

Figs in the Sun 2

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A new Podcast on my iPod – Typical Shutterbug

Not enough podcasting at podcamp?

from Bob Goyetche – Community, Technology and Content by Bob

This was my third time at Podcamp Toronto, and I want to congratulate the organizers and volunteers on putting on a great event! I have an intimate appreciation of what it takes to put an event like this together, and you guys did an amazing job all around.

There were so many things right about this event, the sessions, the perfect facilities, the free coffee!, the great support organization. I almost feel guilty saying the following…

An interesting thing happened to me Saturday. It was towards the end of the day, just before the Audacity audio editing session Sean McGauhey and I were doing, someone came up to me and asked ”

‘Will this session have anything to do with podcasting?”

“wha…?” came my carefully-formulated reply.

“It’s just that it seems it’s all about measurement and metrics and stuff, but I’m trying to find out how to podcast “

It was at this moment I started wondering if the Podcamp model had jumped the shark.

Read the entire article

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Opinion: Not enough podcasting at Podcamp Toronto?

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Photos from the State of the Industry Panel Discussion for the Cosmo Coalition

Having a social media presence is an important part of every podcasters marketing strategy, but how do you do it without spending more time marketing than producing your shows. Douglas E. Welch shows you how to hook all the parts together so that an action on one social media service can easily propagate to many others — spreading the word, without wearing you out.

Listen to Spreading the Word (90 mins)

Download audio file (cinm-ocpodcasters-20090211.mp3)

Link: OCPodcasters.com

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Audio: Spreading the Word – A presentation to the OC Podcasters

Here is the press release with all the information.

Douglas

SpokenWord.org Web Site Goes Live

Marin County, California – February 12, 2009 – There are perhaps millions of audio and video spoken-word recordings on the Internet. Think of all those lectures, interviews, speeches, conferences, meetings, radio and TV programs and podcasts. No matter how obscure the topic, it’s been recorded and published on line.

But how do you find it?

SpokenWord.org is a new free on-line service that helps you find, manage and share audio and video spoken-word recordings, regardless of who produced them or where they’re published.

All of the recordings in the SpokenWord.org database are discovered on the Internet and submitted to our database by members like you. SpokenWord.org doesn’t store media files, but rather the metadata such as titles, descriptions, categories and locations, which is why SpokenWord.org can accept submissions from anyone and anywhere.

SpokenWord.org is particularly useful for those with an iPod, iTunes or other media player. SpokenWord.org’s collections are a terrific way to manage all of your spoken-word programs and subscriptions, which can then be downloaded to your media player as a single feed.

SpokenWord.org is a project of The Conversations Network, a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit best known for its own podcast channels such as IT Conversations (the longest continuously running podcast on the planet) and The Levelator software for podcast, radio and TV audio post-production.

Contact:

Doug Kaye
doug@rds.com
The Conversations Network

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News: SpokenWord.org Web Site Goes Live

A “State of the Industry” panel proceeded the “Pitch-A-Song™”, moderated by Steve Scott, Pres. of COSMO (Coalition of Socal Music Organizations) with industry guests including writer/podcaster/new media consultant Douglas E. Welch, producer Mandi Martin and film/tv professional WinJow speaking on hot topics covering the music industry.

From Careers in New Media and Podcasting Get more great content on Podcasting, New Media, Gardening, Los Angeles Events and Technology at WelchWrite.com

Video: State of the Music Industry Panel Discussion – Feb 9, 2009

A “State of the Industry” panel proceeded the “Pitch-A-Song™”, moderated by Steve Scott, Pres. of COSMO (Coalition of Socal Music Organizations) with industry guests including writer/podcaster/new media consultant Douglas E. Welch, producer Mandi Martin and film/tv professional WinJow speaking on hot topics covering the music industry.

Listen: State of the Music Industry Panel Discussion

Download audio file (cinm-cosmo-industry.mp3 )

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Audio: State of the Music Industry Panel Discussion – Feb 9, 2009

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Workshop: Podcasting and New Media for Writers: One-Day Seminar – June 6, 2009

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Douglas’ Upcoming Events

More and more I am inclined to ask, “What are you waiting for?” In that regard, I offer some typical excuses for not using new media and, hopefully, a few good answers that might give people a reason to adopt new media as one of their tools.

I don’t have anything to say

If you truly don’t have anything to say about your business, your career or your life, then you have larger problems than simply ignoring new media. Regardless of what you do, life is about sales — selling your products, your services or yourself. If you can’t articulate what makes you and your work special, then no one can. We all have a unique set of skills and experience that make us special. Communicating that uniqueness should be of the utmost importance and new media is the best tool we have to it with the world.

It’s too hard — and too expensive

Several years ago, new media was too hard. It required expensive computers and lots of time. Before sites such as YouTube, you needed to be quite knowledgeable to distribute your audio and video. Today, though, creating your own video and audio and distributing it online is easy and cheap. Using a free online service like YouTube or Blip.tv, you can create your own channel today for no more cost than that of you existing Internet connection. If you are producing short pieces and can shoot them in one or two pieces, there is little editing to be done. You can even record directly into YouTube or Seesmic and your video goes live almost immediately. Even more, most sites allow you to easily embed your newly created video in any web site or blog, merely by cutting and pasting a few lines of text.

Even more, you can learn all you need to know through online sources, as part of a free user group, like my own New Media Interchange (http://newmediainterchange.com) or through relatively inexpensive training at community colleges and universities.

I don’t have time

Whenever someone tells me they don’t have time for new media, I tell them they will have plenty of time after their business fails or they start losing their biggest clients. While traditional advertising methods might still work for a few very traditional businesses, their overall power is rapidly diminishing. When was the last time you used a traditional Yellow Pages?” When did you last make a purchasing decision based on a television or newspaper ad. Instead, you probably looked to the Internet for more information and reviews. You might have asked your online friends for recommendations. In many cases you are already using new media in your own life, why not use it in your business?

I can’t make money?

First, you don’t typically make money on new media directly. You use it to sell products and services. You give away some information for free — educate people — so they come to trust your skills and knowledge. Sure, some people might make money on their new media shows, but even that typically comes from sponsorship and advertising sales, not direct viewer payments. The first use of new media is to build your existing business and reputation.

No one will watch it

The fact is, most of us have no idea who the audience is for something we might produce. You can never tell what might catch the world’s attention. This is why you must create something, put it out there and see who watches. You can never tell where you next big business deal, your next big client or your next great job might come from. Your goal should be to make yourself and your company as visible as possible so that people can “stumble across” you. The chances of you being discovered is nearly zero, if you don’t produce new media. Producing something and distributing it via the Internet raises your chances above zero, sometimes to an amazing level. Don’t pre-suppose that you have no audience. You won’t know until you actually do something.

What are you waiting for?

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New Media: What are you waiting for?