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February 18, 2006

The iPod Gurus

The PC Gurus have been in a bit of a funk for a while now. Membership participation is down, the Web site was "hacked" and we've had no radio show since Sokoler was canned. I personally believe that if it weren't for Kevin and the guys who keep the newsletter going, this team would've fallen apart over a year ago.

So, a few months ago I began pondering what it would take for a few of us to get back "on the air", so to speak. I figured that the easiest way to do this was to create a Guru podcast. I bought a USB mic and have been playing around with Audacity, but have since discovered that I lack the real instruments required to create a podcast.

The other night, I sent out the following e-mail to the entire team to get a feel for us doing a podcast:

"Anyone want to try a Guru podcast test with me? I want to do something like an open forum discussion and just ramble about technology in general. I'm not sure what software to use at this point, but it would need to be something like Google Talk or Skype that would allow a group of people to communicate over the Internet using microphones at their PCs. I'm open to recommendations.

Reply to the group if your interested."

The response was great. I received responses from most of the team members and all of them were positive with the exception of a select few. Ideas started flowing and opinions were thrown about. It seemed to me that it was the most team related discussion that had taken place since god only knows when.

It's pretty bad when the prior most active discussion was about non-related sports topic months ago.

Regardless, it seems that the idea of doing a podcast has ignited a spark back into the team. With any luck, we'll be able to put together a semi-coherent first try that we can distribute to our current newsletter base to get the word out. What's also nice is that several team members have gotten the proper equipment at hand to really make this into a full scale podcast production. Heck, we might even be able to do a video podcast once in a while as well.

With that said, the choice of software to do this podcast remotely has been somewhat limited. Our best choice, although it's a fantastic piece of software, has been Skype. The only problem with using Skype is that it has a conference limitation of 5 people (4 people + 1 host). Tonight, I found a piece of software that may allow us to get past this limitation. It's called Festoon, and is designed as a plug-in for Skype and Google Talk. It's a audio/video conferencing application that may just allow us to get past the 5 person limitation. Theoretically, we might just be able to get all team members involved on a single podcast, whereas beforehand we would have to trade off.

I'm really keeping my fingers crossed on this one. I've missed the team when we had a radio show. We were all more involved, and it was a fun experience.

Maybe we can even begin to grow again.

~out...

Posted by ed at February 18, 2006 08:12 PM

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