I previously posted a screencast Managing Podcasts with Smart Playlists in iTunes about how you can better manage listening to multiple podcasts using the smart playlist feature in iTunes. In short I create a smart playlist that lists all podcasts that I have not yet played (to the end). I can then sort that playlist by size, title or date before I sync to my iPhone.

This great feature got even better in the iPhone 3.0 software because now this playlist is getting updated on the iPhone. Each time I go into this playlist it removes shows that I have listened to already on my iPhone.

Double Time

I subscribe to 60 podcasts (yes that is not a typo) but now with the new 3.0 software I am running out of content because I am using the new feature that lets me play back podcasts in twice the time. I find most (non-music) podcasts to be very listenable and some hosts to actually sound better at twice the speed. The software speeds the rate without making the speakers sound like chipmunks.

What was that again?

When that motorcycle drives by or the host gives some phone number of URL you can now quickly go back 30 seconds to hear that again. That is a big improvement over trying to scrub back to the right spot.

Sharing is Good

When you are listening to a podcast (like the Amateur Traveler podcast which was recently one of the hot podcasts according to my iPhone) and you want to share it with a friend you can now click the email icon to send a friend an email.

All of these features combine to make what was a good listening experience even better.

The Shower

I stumble from bed
Like a zombie, half-dead
Groping my way to the shower
I stay there it seems
Under life giving streams
For the better part of an hour

I rinse and I scrub
In a shower not a tub
But it’s not just for hygiene I came
I lather with hope
As I cling to my soap
That I might soon remember my name

With gusto I sing
But the dreams they still cling
Inside my somnambulant head
I shower for long
‘Til the danger’s all gone
That I’ll wander right back to my bed

Wasteful you say
How I stay there all day
Draining some reservoir deep
While others abound
It’s water I’ve found
The only true solvent for sleep

the problem

As many of you know my podcast the Amateur Traveler was in the running for a Lonely Planet Blog Award. This competition had two phases. The first phase was a popularity vote and the second phase was a vote of the judges. I was confident I would do well with the judges but I have always hated the popularity vote. In high school I was neither a social pariah nor was I class president. As a shy person by nature I hate shilling for votes. But this was a contest I wanted to win. When the contest started I was about 500 votes down before I even knew I was in the running. I sent emails to my small email list, twittered, got my friends to twitter for me, brought it up at work, mentioned the contest on my podcast and I closed the gap some but I was still way behind.

the power of mailing lists

But then my friend Craig Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast sent an email to his mailing list and rocketed into first place. So I went to my email box and found the emails for people who had written me about the show and ask them to vote for the show. A funny thing happened. They voted and in great numbers. When I send a twitter message my typical response rate is around one click for every 50 people who follow me. This was more like one response for every 3 emails. That was amazing enough but the next part is what really surprised me.

my tribe

No one wrote me and said to stop bothering them. Instead many people wrote emails like these:

I voted for you. I love your show, although I don’t get a chance to listen to it quite as often since my daughter Chloe was born in August. The first time I did listen to Amateur Traveler after she was born the topic was Acadia National Park. That was a great surprise because we live in Maine (about 4 hours south of the park), and although I’ve done a lot of traveling around the country and in Europe, I haven’t been to Acadia since I was 8 years old.

It was a nice reminder that even though our travel experiences will be different now, there are some great places to explore right in our own state. I also purchased a state park pass recently, and can’t wait for summer! Now if only this snow would go away…

Thanks for taking the time to put out the show. It is appreciated.

Nicole

I voted for you and I really enjoy the show. Best of luck.

Thelma in Missouri

Done. It´s a pleasure to help you and give something in return for your great podcast

Jose

Good luck Chris! Thanks for all the great shows and all the time and effort you devote to them.

Lottie

Thanks for the email. Already voted for you - both from home and at work, so the site won’t accept another email from me.

Good luck, and thanks for your continued dedication to the podcast. I thoroughly enjoy it. You continue to open up small pieces of the world to those of us who have an interest in travel but limited opportunity. It truly is appreciated.

Thanks, again, and keep up the good work. Blessings,

Gerry

Thanks for the email? People were thanking me for asking them to do me a favor. People were actually glad to help. Oh, that’s what Seth Godin meant!

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Building a tribe is about providing value. When people appreciate what you have been doing for them they are glad to return the favor.

postscript

Ironically, I won the vote handily and then lost the judging. The judges were not in my tribe. I can live with that.

1. By day I work as the EVP of Engineering and Operations for LiveWorld which runs online communities, social networks for the likes of HBO, eBay, A&E, History Channel, NBA, Mini Cooper, J&J, Kimberly Clark, etc. I have been there 12+ years. We used to be TalkCity.com.

2. By night I podcast and blog at the Amateur Traveler (and also The Bible Study Podcast).

3. I started programming just after Christmas of 1979 when my best friend’s rich aunt gave him an Apple ][ computer. If not for that I might have gone to Berkeley as a Physics major.

4. My wife and I met at college (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in beautiful (sarcasm) Troy New York. We have been married for 27 years and have two kids: Mike and Liz who are in college as a film major and marketing major respectively.

5. The hardest physical job I have had was the one week I spent after freshman year of college making 20,000 gallon wooden wine tanks at Monterey Vineyards in Gilroy. This is the only job I every worked on with my brother Eric. I do, strangely enough, volunteer building concrete houses in Mexico annually (13 trips), carrying tons of cement by hand in buckets. Normally the most aerobic part of my job is fast typing.

6. I have just the one older brother. My parents are still living in the house I moved into at 3 years of age in Salinas, California.

7. I was born in Wadsworth, Ohio and my best friend from elementary school in California (David McCray) was coincidentally also born there and delivered by the same doctor.

8. I used to be a ventriloquist although the last time I remember performing was elementary school. My cousins were still talking about it when I saw them recently.

9. I have (or rather had) 42 first cousins. My dad came from a family of 6 kids in Colorado and my mom came from a family of 7 kids in Wisconsin. My most distant cousins geographically are from Australia. Two of my three Aussie cousins have lived with us. One for 1 month and one for 2 years.

10. My mom’s family tree is confusing because a) her mother was one of 16 b) she married a widower with 5 kids c) one of her younger brother’s married the widower’s daughter (my mom’s half sister and now her aunt) d) another brother and sister married into the family and the sister married the son of my mom’s sister/aunt. We figured out at one family reunion that these cousins were first cousins, first cousins once removed and second cousins all at the same time.

11. If you watch an old episode of Rick Steve’s travel show called “Royal London” you will see me explain how the whispering gallery works in St Paul’s London. We ran into he and his two person crew while we were there. Coincidently the last time we were at St Pauls we were interviewed for a series on Discovery Channel about the human body, but I have not seen that series air.

12. One of the ways that my wife and I got to know each other was doing a late night (1-4am Sunday morning) radio show on WRPI with the Christian group we were members of. It is the only radio host experience I have.

13. I have been on 5 continents. I have seen the coast of South America from the Caribbean. I have not seen Antarctica.

14. I worked on Apple’s Newton although I was not on the Newton team per say. I wrote the email application and one had business cards (ok I still have most of them) that say “Newton Mailman”. I worked for Apple’s Online Services which also created AppleLink (before my time) and eWorld (I managed the Mac and Windows clients also).

15. I have worked in two startup companies. The first was Momenta and it failed in spectacular fashion. We put a product (a pen based computer with a Smalltalk operating environment) on the cover of Byte magazine, PC Magazine in Germany, Personal Computing, etc and then ran out of money. My second startup is still alive after 12+ years but went from 4 employees to 256 to 15 to around 70-80. It was a dot com that managed not to die.

16. I have performed in musicals in community theatre (at our church) in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Littlest Angel (The Gatekeeper), Beauty and the Beast (Lumiere), Fiddler on the Roof, Anne of Green Gables (Mathew), You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown (shaved my beard to play Linus), Cinderella (the King), Children of Eden (Father) and Mashuganas. My favorite review was when the local paper described my 40ish self as “30ish”. I think they may have said nice things about my performance as well.

17. I also write songs, mostly about my faith. I do play guitar but I am not really a musician.

18. I love photography, mostly travel photography. I don’t usually buy souvenirs, but I do drive my family and travel companions crazy taking pictures. Some of my photos I have made into travel posters in my online store.

19. I am a TV addict. If it is on in the room I will watch it. At least with Tivo I am not just watching what is on. To get things done I leave the room.

20. I hate not knowing things and I have a good memory. I love history, science, technology, etc. I am a font of useless knowledge. My wife assures me that “I heard that” and “I learned that” are not synonymous for most people. Names I have a harder time remembering.

21. I like studying languages and have studied German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Mandarin, Swahili and Turkish. I only speak English fluently (when sufficiently caffeinated), but can get by in Spanish. In most of the other languages I can still remember how to say “I don’t speak your language very well”. You would be surprised how far that gets you. I can spell better in a few other languages than I can in English, but I swear this language was broken when I found it.

22. I grew up being told I was a picky eater and then found later on that I like a lot more things than my parents do, but I like more spicy and bold flavors than they do. I love Indian, Mexican, Greek, Turkish, Italian and French food in particular. I did grow up eating fish 3 times a week. Fish I don’t care for. I don’t like bitter tastes so I have never developed a taste for either coffee or beer. I do enjoy wine and as a programmer I get my caffeination from tea and Diet Coke.

23. Perhaps not coincidentally according to my doctor’s height vs weight chart I am, at 6 foot 3 inches, too short, but I am working on it.

24. I volunteer with Correctional Institute Chaplancy teaching a bible study on Tuesday nights in San Jose’s juvenile hall in a lock down unit for violent offenders. I know more gang members and murders than the average person.

25. I can clap with one hand.

I have a 30 year high school reunion coming up next year. For now I will skip over the shock and awe generated by that fact to how my class is reconnecting on the web. It used to be that my class used Classmates to reconnect but as this reunion approaches we are more and more using facebook.

The main reason for the shift is that classmates has put a meter on so many basic functions that more and more people are finding it unacceptable. As someone who works building internet communities and social networks I think that communities have a value and that companies that build them do need to find an economic model. But classmates is starting to feel like the last bank we had. That bank (Wells Fargo) charged us to talk to a teller, to bank by phone and then started to charge us if we used the ATM machine too many times. We would have complained to them but I am sure there was a fee for that as well. So we left. That is the same risk that Classmates is running.

Just for context, on the show I am known as Chris the Podcaster. There is a mention made on the show about how I will trick them into plugging the Amateur Traveler next time. I had contributed to the show a few times before mention was made of what podcast I actual made. A funny series of events lead to the first time they mentioned the Amateur Traveler on the show.

• I had met Tom, Jason and Molly at last years Podcast and New Media Expo. Specifically since Molly left a day earlier I had a chance to hang out with Tom and Jason and to introduce them to other podcasters. We also had lunch on the last day and I took them to the airport.
• Shortly thereafter I called into the show to make another contribution and completely biffed the call. You know how it is when you are trying to leave a voicemail sometimes. I called again and left a coherent message but I was quite sure they would mock me and play the first call which they did. I think after that they felt a little guilty so they mentioned what my show was.
• After they mentioned the show I sent this email:
  

  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is to have a thankless technology podcaster triumvirate.

  I bet you think you are so smart. But as you sit there in your smug smugliness drinking your half-caf-mocha-latte-frapa-chino and thinking how you have powned me, know this.

  It was in fact I who did the powning.

  And now is the time to reveal my sinister plan.

  Clearly the Buzz Out Loud show has an enviably larger audience than the Amateur Traveler. So how to get the Amateur Traveler promoted on the air. Clearly this was against BOL policy so the plan must be intricate, ingenious, diabolical.

  1. Invent the character of “Chris the podcaster” and establish it with some familiar regular contributions to the show.
  2. Convince the CNET management to send the cast of Buzz Out Loud to the Podcast and New Media Episode. This was accomplished through a series of incriminating photos taken at last year’s company Christmas party. Eggnog? I think not.
  3. Send a brilliant piece of audio feedback the week of the show so that “Chris the podcaster” is fresh in everyone’s memory.
  4. Arrange for a speaker at the show to have an untimely accident so that Tom gets a speaking slot.
  5. Hand deliver fake schedules to almost all the conference attendants that mislabels Tom’s talk as “A Case for Cooperating with the RIAA… with root kits” so that most of the attendees are dissuaded from attending Tom’s talk.
  6. Offer “helpful” comments during the talk to establish a rapport.
  7. Casually use hypnosis so that Tom and Jason invite me to lunch and think it is their idea and that they are simply “hungry”.
  8. Cement the relationship with casual banter and a ride to the airport.
  9. Wait
  10. Submit a very badly done audio clip for the show that is too painfully funny not to use but will instill enough guilt that Tom will feel the need to plug the Amateur Traveler in return.

  Pownage

  I cannot believe you could fall for such a simple plot. And now the next time someone is craving the voice of a well spoken, erudite, prepared podcaster they will… oh wait! … oh no! Oh crap. Back to the drawing board.

  P.S. Thanks for the plug

I loved this video of comedian Louis C.K. on Conan O’Brian’s show. He talks about the technology that I grew up with (you had to dial the phone and you had to stand right next to it) and how much cooler the new technology is. But, as he points out, people seem less happy now than they were then. You are holding a phone that is talking to space but you are impatient with how long it takes to get a signal.

Are we becoming less patient? Sure this is comedy but it does seem like there is some truth to it.

My friends over at The Bigg Success Show (yes, who spell worse than I do) talked today about a study on happiness that came out recently. This study looked at the effect on your happiness of being around people who are happy, of having money, etc. One of the interesting quotes in the study was that “A happy friend is worth about $20,000″. That is you will get as much happiness from having a happy friend as you will from someone giving you $20,000.

This reminded me of a discussion I had with some friends who have been trying to to setup up an online business. They have spent 10s of thousands of dollars on getting a site created but the site which was due last June still has not been delivered. As you might expect, this has effected their stress levels and therefore their happiness. I offered to help by taking a look at the site. They want to pay me for the work but I could not articulate why that was not what I wanted. This study should help me articulate it.

What friend do you have who you could make happy? How much more likely is it that you could make a friend happy than it is that someone will mail you a check for $20,000 today?

I can google with the best of them… at least that’s what I thought before I saw this interview by Patrick Norton of Google’s Matt Cutts.

I knew how to:

• do a phrase match - use quotes
• exclude specific words - use minus
• do spell checking
• get around spell check - use plus
• do currency conversion - convert 20 dollars to yen
• limit the search to a single site - paris site:amateurtraveler.com

I did not know how to:

• use a fill in the blank type search - mt everest is * feet high
• search only in the .gov domain - site:gov
• do a search for a number in a range between two numbers - 12..30
• get flight numbers
• get the time in zurich
• look up words in a dictionary - define:
• look for specific file types - filetype:
• look up local movies - movies 95129

So if you already have your bachelor’s degree in google search but you want to earn your master’s degree check out this video.

Thanks to Jim Karter at Earn Money Online who brought this to my attention.

The article I was writing yesterday was “7 Things You Should Pack/Bring When You Travel To San Francisco“. Once you have mentioned to take warm clothing and a camera, what’s left? So I sent out a tweat:

I am writing a blog post on “7 things you should pack when you travel to San Francisco”. I am a few short. Ideas?

Within about a half an hour I had five good responses from slightly over 1000 followers. That is about a .5% response rate, but I only needed two ideas and I had at least one I would not have thought of.

MikeTRose @chris2x Allergy medications. For some reason, East Coasters like me get the sniffles in SF.

That made perfect sense to me with the dampness of San Francisco, but it was outside my experience so it would not have occurred to me.

I think there are takeaways from this experience:

• I might do this in the future even if I can come up with 7 things on my own. Why not write a list of 9 things instead.
• People helped me out so I gave them credit because fair is fair.
• I had a 3rd takeaway a minute ago, what am I missing?

Seriously, are we fooling anyone? I wonder if the call would go any worse even if the support answered with “my name is Nandakumar but you can call me Tim”.

As we come out of a presidential election season the topic of authenticity is near and dear to me. The classic joke is “how can you tell when a politician is lying… his lips are moving”. In many ways the election became referendum against an unpopular president, a war and a financial meltdown. But I also wonder if authenticity played a part. Sometimes when I listen to a candidate I am not even convinced that he or she believes what they are saying. My young college age kids are particularly cynical to what they see and hear. They heard in Obama someone who they could believe. In part, because they believed he at least believed what he was saying.

Authenticity is unfortunately and unnecessarily rare both in politics and corporate messages. Who do you believe?

When I finally got around to trying out the phone I was also surprised that the music library contained some surprising choices. Am I a prude? Yes, probably I am. I was not expecting that their list of music genres would include a very Anglo-Saxon word for the sex act. I was expecting to see words like rock, pop, or blues. When you are sending a phone to someone to review who also happens to produce a bible study podcast I also wonder about the wisdom of songs with artist labels like “Anti-Christ”.

I don’t feel the need to slam the phone or the phone’s maker because I think this mismatch was partly my fault for not asking more questions. I also feel no need to endorse the phone as I think this is a product that might be a bit “off-brand” for me. A little more homework on my part or theirs might have prevented what was a waste of time and what could have been a PR disaster.

Esperanza says that what they are actually trying to build is community, houses are just the byproduct. They put in credit unions and teach people how to save money, help people help their neighbors as they build sweat equity in the program, and teach people how to build cement bricks. The family and their neighbors must construct every brick for their house before a volunteer crew like ours will help dig trenches, pour a foundation, pour a floor, stack walls or pour a roof.

In our last trip we moved 85 cement mixers full of concrete (about 500 pounds per load) by hand using a bucket brigade. We also moved 3 dump trucks full of dirt. You end up with very sore muscles a few scrapes and very very dirty. You also end up with friends South of the border. One of the neighbors who we worked along side on this trip was a woman whose house we had helped build on a previous trip. Nothing cements a friendship like… well like cement.

Oh yeah, and the food is great also. For more information check out an early episode of the Amateur Traveler on Building Houses in Mexico.

Ed

Tags: WarrenBuffet, Ed Dale, Internet Marketing, Economy

Who cares who becomes president. I am ready to vote for Warren Buffet for Secretary of the Treasury. Buffet has been warning for some time about some of the problems that we are now dealing with in the financial sector. He will make money in this crisis because he is a smart guy. This is kind of guy we need to listen to.

This was a beautiful piece of cloth but now it has a spot on it.

Are you kidding? I was listening to a song about laundry. I set aside the translation sheet because I decided that giggling might be considered rude. Of course when one of the later songs was very sad I could only think “wow, she really liked that cloth”. When another song became fierce I was convinced “she is really mad that someone sold her cloth with a spot”.

I was reminded by this experience that perhaps we sometimes put more effort into promoting a message than the message deserves. Perhaps when you get a spot on your clothes a short note to your dry cleaner would be a more appropriate mechanism for communicating your displeasure than an opera. I wonder what sort of an opus would have been created if the waiter forgot to serve the salad dressing on the side.

I think as companies or individuals we should evaluate the message we have before we determine the means of communication. Sometimes when people are not responding it is not the communication mechanism that is the problem.

As a footnote i thought is somehow cruel that one of only three pieces in English was a lullaby. Now that’s just mean.

The funny thing about LiveBar we wanted to show this to everyone months ago but we liked it too much. LiveBar did not start as a product, it started as a demo for our new LiveAPI Suite which we announced last month. To sell the LiveAPI suite we wanted to have a demo application that would show off what we could create with it. So we had one of our clever engineers start working on a demo. Our problem was that when he showed it to us we liked it so much that we did not want to show it to anyone, which as you may have figured out is OK for an application but really bad for a demo.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Arthur C Clarke

Watching this video of trick pool shots left me saying things like “I can’t believe it” and “how did he do that?”. We all learned in the Empire Strikes back with Luke Skywalker that if we don’t believe that something can be accomplished then we won’t be able to do it. I wonder how many times I let my imperfect understanding of what can be accomplished limit what I will accomplish.

“Amateur Traveler - The Amateur Traveler is a travel show that helps you find the best places to travel to. It includes both a weekly audio podcast and a twice monthly video podcast. It also includes travel news and resources.”

This is an ongoing effort to refine the description of the site.

When I created the Amateur Traveler site I made what I think is a classic error. The tag line I used at the time was “travel for the love of it”. I was trying to explain why I had chosen the name Amateur Traveler. But what I did not do is explain to someone why they would want to come to this site at all. It is difficult when you are familiar with a website to see if with the same eyes as someone who has never been there.

How many seconds do you have before someone forms an impression of your site?

Try showing your site to someone who has not seen it before and ask them what this site is about and why someone would want to go there. If they can’t tell you, you have a problem.

What is a visitors first impression?

Since a visitor may not stay long on your site their first impression may be their only impression.

What draws the eye of a new visitor?

Show your site to someone and ask them before you show it to point to the first thing that gets their attention. It may not be as accurate as eye tracking software but it is a lot cheaper.