Charles Stricklin

I had occasion to listen to all of the current segments (they’re not really “episodes” if they follow several different formats, right?) of the podcast version of Blogger and Podcaster magazine. Although I enjoyed the panel discussions with Chris Pirillo, David Sifry of Technorati and Tim Bourquin of TNC New Media and the Podcast Brothers; the interviews with Robert Scoble and Mignon Fogarty; and Rob Walch’s rant on inexperienced people attempting to become podcasting consultants, I found certain aspects of the podcast to be sometimes grating, sometimes hilarious in their production value (or lack thereof.)

The intro and exit music is pathetic. It’s some lame, psuedo-techno music the producers bought off a audio clip directory somewhere. It just lays there. Then, when your ears are suitably dulled by the mundaneness, a woman’s voice is heard speaking in a somewhat tone-deaf fashion, “Blogger… and Podcaster”. I found myself fast forwarding on my iPod just so I wasn’t subjected to it.

Then, everything got funny. In Jonathon Cobb’s Ready to Make Some Money?, the paid voice talent (they couldn’t get Cobb?) make a reference to a sidebar article by page number. (At 8:02, he actually says, “See Going It Alone, page 35.”)

In reading the excerpt from Glenn Fleishman’s Take Control of Your Domain Names, the announcer spells out GB instead of saying “gigabyte” three times (2:05 and 2:25), again makes reference to a sidebar (”See Warning, page 41″ - 3:13), then to a table (”Page 41″ - 4:06), a figure, a gaff that clearly should have been left on the edit room floor (”While DNS lets you set multiple addresses for a given subdomain, few D… few DNS programs and no popular browsers have a mechanism for failover.” - 5:50), finally culminating in a repeated phrase that also should have been excised (”If you’re hosting your own web site or using a smaller firm, it’s not uncommon for a web host to have a lacuna in operating web sites… it’s not uncommon for a web host to have a lacuna in operating web sites.” - 6:14)

As far as that last goof, no one I’ve talked to knows what a lacuna is in relation to web hosting. Maybe he’s talking about a EULA? Beats me.

That last article should have never been repurposed for a podcast, anyway.

Overall, it’s not a bad podcast to listen to if you’re a blogger or podcaster and would like to keep up with things, but the producer of the podcast version of the magazine needs to wake up and raise the production values a bit.

It’s WordPress! Not Wordpress! Not Word Press! WordPress!

One word… Capitalize the W and the P… it’s a registered trademark, for Matt’s sake!

You people drive me buggy!

I’ve substantively cut down on the television I watch by eliminating my cable television service entirely and only watching those show available via broadband on the major network’s web sites.Tonight, I surfed around looking for something to watch, and found that NBC is previewing their upcoming Fall season shows. One caught my eye, if only because it uses one of my nicknames as its title.

Chuck Bartowski is a computer nerd working for the “Nerd Herd” at Buy-More. (Oh c’mon guys! If you’d been smart, you’d have locked-in Best Buy for a sponsorship deal!) One day, one of his friends who works for the CIA sends him all the agency’s spy secrets in an encoded e-mail, and now they’re all in Chuck’s head. Ostensively, he ends up being recruited by the CIA and ends up leading a double-life: nerd by day, secret agent by night.

It actually looks funny, but that might just be because I’m a geek myself and I can appreciate the good-natured jabbing. Either way, I’ll Bittorrent it or whatever when it comes out, and it might just end up being a regular thing.