MWGblog

Doug Kaye put up a good post on our decision about IT Conversation’s future direction.

Phil Windley has put together a nice little script that generates the Top Ten most listened to shows on IT Conversations. You can check out the list for January here.

It has been one week since we debuted The Levelator™ and to say we are pleased is an understatement. The response has been overwhelming! With kudos and claims of “hit of the Expo” and “best new software” from folks like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte, Jake Ludington, Scott Bourne, Rocketboom, Paul Colligan and many, many others it can get a bit heady. Let me take a step back and explain The Levelator™ for the uninitiated; what it does and why we made it freely available.

The Levelator™ solves a common problem for podcasters: recordings with participants at various levels. Whether this is a multi-mic setup such as a panel discussion, a single mic interview with multiple people, a “double”/”multiple” ender or the infamous Skype recording. With one fell swoop of the drag and drop, The Levelator™ will take a Wav or Aiff file and “level” all those various speakers. Here is a quick example:

Notice that the middle section is severely reduced. In this case I turned and stepped away from the microphone. The lead and end levels are me speaking directly into the microphone. I took this file and with no other audio manipulation dropped it on The Levelator™. The Result:

Now fixing a single segment like this is easy with standard tools, but imagine if this were a forty-five minute interview. Now you understand the power of The Levelator™. I took a sample file that originally took me 3 hours to fix, and The Levelator™ brought it up to broadcast/podcast standards in a minute and a half. Pretty incredible. Many see The Levelator™ and assume that is is doing normalization. While that feature is a step in the process there is much more going on. For a technical description check out Doug Kaye’s explanation. Also, please check out The Levelator™ forums.

So why has GigaVox made this available for free for non-commercial use? As many know, GigaVox Media is the parent company of IT Conversations and our other podcast channels. Currently, we have 1400+ active podcast episodes on our network and that number is growing every day. What many do not know is that in order to run a network and production team of 55 plus people we needed to implement innovative tools and solutions to automate the production workflow. Our three years of experience and development clearly establishes us at the premier podcast technoloogy company. Simply put, while others have interesting ideas, no one has the hard earned and tried and true technology that we have developed. Whether it is the monster Content Management System/Audio Assembly System that runs the entire network that allows us to inject sponsor messages into any and or all episodes with the click of a button, our recently debuted GigaVox Media Audio Lite, our coming video technology or the tools we give to our audio engineers such as The Levelator™, we are the podcast technology leader. We gave The Levelator™ out as an example. It is an amazing tool and one we hope will help podcasters make better podcasts. For those who are curious, you should see what we keep behind the curtain…

Download The Levelator here.

At both the Podcast Academy and the Podcast Expo, we have been showing people The Levelator. We promised it would be available by Saturday and I am pleased to report that slightly after midnight it went live. Those of you who have seen it and asked about availability it is here. If you don’t know about what it is, or what it does, follow the link; Doug Kaye has done a good job of explaining why podcasters are so excited about The Levelator. Did I mention it is free? [Link]

Here is a history of podcasting that gets it right: this is a rarity. Given that every other recent podcast related press release seems to mention a yet unknown participant as a “podcast pioneer,” it is refreshing to see a report that takes the time to dig in to the whole story. Notice that, in addition to the usual suspects (myself included), they take the time to mention, Chris Lydon, IT Conversations, Kevin Marks, Harold Gilchrist and Bloggercon 2003 - all signs of proper research. Dan and I worked hard to get it right in our book. It is nice to see a web version available for all to read.

I feel a bit like Jason Calacanis of old, I just paid our podcasting staff at GigaVox Media for August. Wow! That was real money. Who says you can’t make money in podcasting? The cool thing is these are independent contributors responsible for our audio and website editing for the network pages. I remember Jason’s posts about the checks he had to sign. We are small enough that I still need to generate the payments myself, (I’d love it if someone just brought in the checks to sign like in my last company, but we all need to start somewhere.) I always feel good when a single payment requires a W-9 from someone. My favorite question: “why do you need a W-9?”, because we paid you enough that the government cares! Congratulations and thank you to the entire 55 member GigaVox Media team, this was our biggest payment month ever since IT Conversations, the first podcast network, started over 3 years ago. Wait until you see what we have up our sleeve next!

I am pleased to announce that GigaVox Media launched this week with our three initial channels. My partner, Doug Kaye, and I decided that an appropriate launch would be one with little fanfare - why talk about it, when we could just do it. Doing it, however, was a lot of work and is the main reason things have been quiet here recently. (It is also the reason I haven’t done a Reel Review in a while - though I plan to rectify that.)

For the last few months, Doug and I have been hard at work shaping the vision for GigaVox and handling all the details it takes to role an established brand like IT Conversations (with over 1200 episodes) into our new company as well as to begin the initial expansion of the network. Every startup tells you they have great plans - I’ll just tell you what we can confirm publicly.

IT Conversations has so much content we split off a channel devoted to open source and open standards called Open Source Conversations. We are pleased to have Zend as a sponsor at launch. We have also created an entire channel devoted to podcasting with BSW as an initial sponsor. The Podcast Academy Channel will have content from the Podcast Academy events - coming up now on #4 - as well as conference content. We will begin releasing the audio from the Corporate Podcasting Summit next week as well as our own Podcast Academy #2 which was a sold out event held at Boston University in April of this year. We will debut a hosted show, by yours truly, called Behind the Mic which will focus on the timely and topical events in podcasting. We are also pleased to announce that we are the exclusive audio content partner of the upcoming Podcast & Portable Media Expo.

Speaking of the Expo, we are producing a blockbuster Podcast Academy on Thursday, September 28th, the day before the Expo. It is a schedule chocked full of luminaries in the podcast and videocast fields. This Academy is aimed at Corporate users as well as Podcast Experts and Consultants. We have included an entire afternoon on the cutting edge in video podcasting. Confirmed Instructors include, Leo Laporte from TWiT, Alex Lindsay from MacBreak, Craig Syverson from gruntmedia, Tim Street from French Maid TV, Noah Bonnett and Rachel Rhodes from 88Slide, Denise Howell from Bag and Baggage, Greg Cangialosi from Blue Sky Factory and Kris Smith from Croncast. We worked hard on this line-up and we are extremely pleased with the instructors. This is a not t be missed event. You can register now at a reduced rate at the Podcast Academy.

For ITC fans, IT Conversations will continue to bring you great conference content - in fact we have just completed deals with a number of exciting events as well as informative hosted shows. ITC is our flagship channel and we intend to keep it that way.

While the real work is still ahead of us, I’d like to offer a thank you to my partner Doug Kaye, who has worked tirelessly, as well as Tim McNerney, Paul Figgiani and Darusha Wehm who, among many others, have made this possible. Thank you.

Some of you know, a goal of mine last year was to appear on IT Conversations. I missed it last year, but I finally made it. IT Conversations just put up a presentation I gave at last November’s Podcast Academy. The part I am most excited about is that I have the honor of being the very first video cast that IT Conversations has produced. That is quite an honor. I know that it was a long time in development and I need to thank to Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani for choosing my presentation. They also deserve a pat on the back for all the hard work I know that they put into the project. As I understand it, they have used this presentation to develop standards for future video casts. As a result, in addition to the standard MP3 you can download a video of my presentation. This morning I watched my presentation on my video iPod.

If you are interested, the presentation is titled “Making Money Beyond Podcasting“. I discuss my thoughts on how experienced podcasters can derive more revenue from leveraging their expertise in podcasting than trying to value their audience using a CPM model. In layman’s terms: you can make more from consulting and podcast production than sponsorship and underwriting. This is a unique opportunity that exists now, it will change, but as my friend John Furrier says, play to where the puck is. [link]