MWGblog

Last Friday, the Los Angeles station 97.1 KLSX FM Talk changed formats to some low cost top 40 programming stuff like you get everywhere else. This was the former home of Howard Stern, his morning slot having been taken over by Adam Carolla. Working from home, I’m not a morning drive time person and have heard Adam’s show at most 5 times. But this is not about morning drive time shows.

Interestingly, this morning Adam Carolla released his first podcast. No ads, no requests for money or donations, just him doing his thing. No big news there – “known celebrity/personality releases podcast” is not ground breaking and Adam Carolla is not hurting; he has plenty of other projects and his contract continues to pay him through the end of 2009. What I appreciate is he gets podcasting from the get go. His show is genuine. He even admits to being a bit nervous (all podcasters have been there.) He dishes some dirt, complains a bit and just plain talks to you about what is going on, like a friend would. That is the power of podcasting.

Prior to podcasting how could this have happened? In past years he would have had to go hat in hand to multiple stations to get someone to LET him back on the air. All the time being silent so as to demonstrate he is a “good boy” and not upset the radio gatekeepers at potential future stations. The beauty of podcasting is: if he can keep an audience guess who will be asking him back. (And yes – morning radio pays way more than any podcast opportunity in existence.) Maybe someone will pick him up, maybe he’ll move on to some of the other projects he’s been working on. We’ll see.

No idea how long lived this will be or what will come of it. That’s not the point. Maybe he tries to make money at it or maybe he decides to quit it tomorrow. The point is while he still wants to talk to an audience he values anyone who wants to listen can. No one has to grant him permission to do it or dictate who, what or how it has to be done. For those of us who have been there from the beginning, that is everything podcasting has always been about.

You can find his podcast here.

About a week ago we tried an experiment on our Podcast Academy site where we posted an entire transcript of one of the hour long presentations from the New Media Expo. No particular reason we picked the one we did, in fact we had already posted it once before, it was just a quick and easy one for the transcriber to pull a copy of. Although we’re all podcast fans, it’s important to keep in mind that making the content available in a variety of formats helps us all reach a broader audience.

I’m curious if anyone has any feedback. Is this a helpful tool if we continued to provide them?

I saw the advantages as:

• You can link to specific quotes on the transcript pages.
• It increases the relevance of content rich presentations for search.
• Allows presenters one more way to provide their presentations.
• All around good resource.

Obviously there is some cost involved (actually a significant cost) if we continue to do this. No big secret, if you see the pages, we deployed some ads. So we’ll continue to monitor our test to see if it is economically viable on a mass scale for all 153 hours of audio.

Meanwhile, if you like the transcript idea I’d appreciate you thoughts.  Here’s the link to the transcript post.

Thanks to Paul Colligan for the nudge to test this.