MWGblog

I have had a lot of requests for the slides from my presentation at this last year’s Podcast and New Media Expo. Particularly, folks wanted to know whatever happened with Kiptronic. I have updated the slides with all the details. For those that are impatient, long story short: they made us work to get paid. It was an ordeal, with many missed promises and interestingly enough, by their own choice, they ended up being the company that took the longest to pay someone who ran their ads – 169 days. There is nothing worse than making your client have to work to get paid! I like the folks at Kiptronic, but I must admit, the whole experience sucked. I hope they fix it. I want them to succeed – we’ll see what happens. I’m curious, either they will attack me for saying this (like they did at PNME which they had to retract) – or attack their problem. I’m optimistic.

(As a disclaimer, these are just our personal experiences with the referenced companies when running ads placed by them on IT Conversations.)

I have no idea why this caught my attention but it did. Like most, if I am thirsty – sure I’ll pay $2.00 for an ice cold litre of water… cost of doing business. However, it never occurred to me that people would buy this stuff like a six pack of beer. I walked into the local market yesterday and saw this “Extraordinary” deal. Who spends $14.00 to have water in the refrigerator?

This morning I saw this post from Todd Cochrane about his coverage of last year’s CES. Like last year, I’ll be speaking again at CES and look forward to seeing both Todd and Andy. We bump into each other a lot at the Bloghaus and always have productive conversations.

What caught my attention was this [emphasis added]:

While we reached over 13 million viewers from our CES coverage last year, the opportunity remains for a company or companies to get some major exposure by being a dedicated sponsor for the event.

Wow! “…13 million viewers…!” Unique individual viewers? Todd, CEO of RawVoice, has been a champion of podcasters using accurate numbers, statistics and download reporting, so like many others I hold him to a high standard – one which he has embraced. But 13 Million viewers? Where does that number come from? We all know you can’t count viewers. Letting that slide, let’s just assume he means potential viewers. To put it in perspective, assuming all those pulling his content own computers (not a stretch) and probably also own TVs (also not a stretch) that would give Todd and crew a Nielsen score of roughly 13! Using last week as a reference that would have sandwiched him between 60 Minutes, Deal or No Deal and the Survivor China Reunion. I don’t need to tell you but that should return gargantuan advertising revenues! I have to admit, I have questions…

• Todd sells ads for podcasters as a business. At any reasonable CPM he can take Andy and a whole lot of other folks to CES and tear up the whole town Sinatra style! What is the problem?
• Are advertisers/sponsors not interested in buying 13 million unique tech savvy “new media” video impressions?
• Why hasn’t he sold the inventory yet? If the numbers are right it should be a slam dunk and I assume, the crown jewel of his Blubrry Network.
• 13 million viewers – why is Todd asking for “CES Fund” donations for his trip?

I’m not one for controversy but something about “13 million viewers” just caught my eye. Why? Because as a consultant to Fortune 100 companies on podcasting and new media I sit in conference rooms and have to answer questions like, “This guy says he has 13 million viewers, why don’t we?” I’ll let you infer what my answer is, but frankly, it is not one I like to have to give.

UPDATE: Todd has edited his original post to clarify what he meant as explained in his comments below. To keep my post relevant, here is a copy of Todd’s original post to which I refer.

UPDATE: - Solved, thanks to Ryan Irelan!

If you are knowledgeable about .htaccess files I could use some quick help.

Basically, I just need to do what I perceive as a simple (permanent) redirect/rewrite. We are moving some archives and I need requests coming in for:

http://pa.gigavox.com/shows/detailXXXX.html

to go to

http://podcastacademy.com/shows/detailXXXX

The XXXX represents a 4 number sequence.

I have this in the subdomain’s (pa.gigavox.com) root but it is not working.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} pa.gigavox.com
RewriteRule ^/shows/detail(.*).html http://podcastacademy.com/shows/detail$1 [R=301,L]

Any ideas? Post a comment or I can be contacted at: michael AT mwgblog.com

Thanks!

Here is the solution via Ryan:
# Redirects for old posts
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^shows/detail(.*).html http://podcastacademy.com/shows/detail$1 [R=301,L]

Apparently there was an extra “/” in there. Thanks Ryan!

My partners at Grape Radio have put together their first short form documentary. They chose to focus on the Russian River Valley wine region and so far, everyone I have shown it to has been blown away. Podcasting has certainly evolved. One friend commented that content like this is proof that independent “new media” can compete with anything on traditional TV. Even if you are not an oenophile (wine lover) take a look and let me know what you think. (Just click the image below.)

As a parent, and as an Eagle Scout, this is a day I have been waiting for. My oldest son Nicholas started Cub Scouts. He posed with his younger brother Will for this photo. I am looking forward to Scouting. Funny, I think I am more excited than my son Nick, but then I know how fun it is! I can’t wait!

I posted a few weeks back that I had picked up my amateur radio (HAM) license. The basic license is Technician Class and I was issued the call sign KI6MDR. I felt like I needed a good personal challenge and had a some free time so I decided to see if I could get all the amateur class licenses. About two weeks after my first license I found two testing dates for the next two classes taking place within a week of each other. I figured I’d try to cram all this into a confined period of time and give it a shot. If I succeeded great! If not, at least I’d tried.

The General Class test took some studying but was not all that hard. The Amateur Extra was a whole different story! I spent a good 6 solid days studying, memorizing and constantly sorting through flash cards for that one. I have no electrical engineering background, so for me it was like trying to cram an entire semester for a college level final in just 6 days. I’ve never had so many microfarads, megaohms and intermodulation interference frequencies running through my head. Anyway, right around the one month anniversary of my initial license I passed the Amateur Extra exam.

One of the additional privileges of the Amateur Extra Class license is you can apply for some special Vanity call signs that are shorter than those allowed for the other classes. I got word this week that I am now officially: KX6A. (Thanks to Jason Niedle who helped with the graphic.)

Over the last few years I have set up numerous web sites and email addresses. Much like your garage, one day you look out and wonder where all the mess came from. I am too spread out – my current situation is not efficient. As such, over the next two weeks I am going to consolidate all my hosting plans, servers and emails. While I’ll keep all the sites, moving my corporate and personal sites, I’ll also redirect a number of my key URLs. BTW, if you are a WordPress server wiz, I am looking for someone who can move 4 WordPress installs to my new server. I can do it, but my guess is an expert can do it in 20% of the time it would take me.