The podcast that I mentioned earlier — the one in which I interviews Tucows’ VP of Product Development, Alain Chesnais — now has a transcript, which I’ve posted on Tucows Developer.
Why Podcasts?
The “podcast-and-transcript” approach is the one that I’ll be taking with the podcasts over at Tucows Developer, as it offers the best of both worlds.
You might ask “Why post podcasts, anyway?”. The preliminary observations of the results of podcasts from technical websites seem to be good. At the Evans Data Developer Relations
Conference that Ross and I attended in early February, we saw that a
number of companies found that podcasts were a good way to explain the
broad strokes of a technology or product.
In his presentation, Bill Roth from BEA systems said that podcasting “lets you touch customers
at points where previously no opportunity existed.” Translated from marketer-speak, podcasting
lets you communicate with your users and customers at times you couldn’t before: on their
commute, at the gym, while running errands, and so on.
There’s also the “high-touch” factor of podcasts. It’s one thing to read
an essay or the transcript of a conversation, but another thing entirely
to hear the speakers say things in their own voice. The spoken word has a different “flow” from the written one, and a conversation between two or more people has a certain spark and spontaneity that a group-written article can’t capture.
There’s a world of great podcasts out there, and their number is growing every day. If you’d like a sample, take a look at the IT Conversations website, which features speeches and interviews with some of the brightest and most interesting minds in high tech. For a fun listen, I recommend Wil Wheaton’s “Just a Geek” presentations at the Gnomedex conference — here’s part one and here’s part two.
Why Transcripts?
For the benefit of people who can’t listen to podcasts, who want to scan a podcast quickly for a specific topic or phrase and search engines, we’re also posting transcripts of our podcasts. Luckily, a service like CastingWords.com exists. CastingWords.com is the podcast transcription service whom we used to transcribe the podcast for us. They did a good job and their rates are very reasonable: they charge by podcast length — 42 cents a minute. We’ll be using their services for future podcasts.