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Podcasting is now far, far easier and cheaper even than I’d imagined — even for complex productions. I’ve been experimenting. Here’s a very quick summary of what I’ve learned so far about doing this on a Mac, my platform of choice.

Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.

However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2 Web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.

The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.

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I’ve finally launched the website for my adventures to the Australia 2020 Summit and beyond: Topic 9 at topic9.com.au.

It’s pretty sparse to begin with, and I’m not quite sure exactly what I’ll be doing there — so suggestions are more than welcome. Some thoughts so far are:

• Gathering links to everyone else’s writing about this topic area for the Summit.
• Articles on people or ideas on how government could work in the future.
• Interviews with the delegates before they hit Canberra.
• Act as a central point of contact for whatever media coverage we can generate out of the summit, whether I go or not.

I certainly need to spice up the design a bit. I’ve kept the Tarski theme as used on this website and Skank Media for consistency, but it needs a tad more differentiation. soon, my precious ones, soon…

Any other ideas?

I’m starting to think that my “here’s what I’ve found” items should move from Twitter to Del.icio.us or maybe even Tumblr [no account there yet, will explore soon] and just be summarised here daily. Then Twitter can be just the day-to-day status stuff — which needn’t be archived here at all, but maybe elsewhere.

Are you OK with that one, Mat F?

There seems to be a surge in “RSS aggregator” products like FriendFeed to create a unified “life stream”. But the more I think about it, the more I think “one stream that contains everything” is wrong. It might be fine for archiving — for your needs. But what about those following you? Dumping everything into a single sewer of undifferentiated crap seems to throw the burden of understanding you onto you audience. And all successful media creation is about what the audience wants — no matter what the scale.

It’s better, I think, to separate out the threads into different streams. People can subscribe to the combination they want. And they can choose to view them in the aggregator of their choice.

Business contacts get your business posts. Family and friends get the status reports about your lunch. A select few choose to view the reports of your illicit camel sex. where they want them, when they want them.

Well, that’s what I think today, anyway. What do you think?

I’ve been working on the tag cloud page, and one of my attempts to clarify things has revealed a disturbing fact.

I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.

Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!

Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.

My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.

Is that right?

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