OK, so my bright idea was a little under-attended last week (yes, I was the only one to turn up) but nevertheless I did one of the things I set out to do which was to make some media.
Tonight we had a 500% increase in the number of attendees and half of the people who came along can be heard in the podcast we made! I met up with Ronna Porter (who's going to lead our discussion group meeting next week) in the foyer of the National Theatre on London's South Bank. To show her just how easy making a podcast could be, I set up my gear and she set up the gear that she'd borrowed for the night and off we went. We talked a lot about the use of sound and music in advertising and PR and my views on podcasting. A little way in, we were joined by Lars Plougmann, whose contribution, you'll hear, was repeatedly interrupted by his three friends ringing him to find out where we were. Sadly there aren't as many massage parlours in this centre of cultural excellence as Chris, Howard and Debbie found in Las Vegas earlier but then they didn't have a tango band in the background.
I was the only one who'd any experience of podcasting so I showed everyone how simply the file was transferred to my laptop, edited and put through the compressor in Audacity and then exported to mp3. I wasn't able to upload it to my podcast server while they watched as the large amounts of concrete in the National kept us disconnected from the ThamesOnline network. Ronna kept her recorder running while we did this latter part so there may be another podcast to follow! There was quite a bit of discussion about discoverability, tagging and allowing users to create the metadata they need, rather than trying to control it as a creator.
So next week we return to the 3rd Thursday discussion group indoors with beers and nibbles format but on 22nd we'll be out and about again, this time with our video cameras teaching each other about video-blogging - watch the wiki page for details.
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