Stilgherrian Live Alpha: a program brief

Photograph of Sennheiser S825 microphone

Decided! The first episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha will be “recorded live” on the Internet this Thursday 8 May at 9.30pm Sydney time. Oh shit! That’s tomorrow!

I won’t repeat what I’ve already written about my plans [1, 2]. This post presents a Program Brief — so I can clarify my thinking as much as anything else — and gathers a few recent thoughts. I’m intending to make the entire process transparent in the immodest hope that someone might find it useful.

Aims

  1. Continue my process of moving from doing hands-on technical work to media production, executive production and consulting.
  2. Build upon the “Stilgherrian as a blogger” brand to establish the core personal media global microbrand of “Stilgherrian as a presenter”, around which I can gather other projects.
  3. Establish a regular audience who can become the core of my 1000 True Fans.
  4. Develop and document production workflows so that we can produce similar programs quickly and cheaply.
  5. Experiment with and settle upon a suite of hardware, software and services which works for me in this context.

See, there is method to my madness!

Continue reading “Stilgherrian Live Alpha: a program brief”

Creating podcasts on a Mac, Part 1

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.

Continue reading “Creating podcasts on a Mac, Part 1”

2 Web Crew podcast finally online

The episode of the 2 Web Crew podcast we recorded last Wednesday is finally online. The Podcast Network‘s Cameron Reilly, Laurel Papworth, TechCrunch‘s Duncan Riley and I chat about Underbelly, P2P networks, BitTorrent and distribution, telcos and innovation, Crikey and media impartiality. The audio quality’s a bit dodgy, but hey. I’ll also be on the episode being “recorded live” tomorrow at 1300 Sydney time on Ustream.