Matt May is a Web accessibility specialist, and has written on the interaction of people and technology since 1995. He keeps his own weblog at bestkungfu.com, and produces a podcast called Staccato, which features Creative Commons-licensed music.
Alex Williamsblogs, consults and produces unconference style events, where people immerse in DIY media. These are fun occasions, designed for people who want to get together with authors, artists, technologists and leading thinkers to converse, eat, listen to music, write, shoot photos and post podcasts and videoblogs. Alex also works with companies to establish DIY approaches, where writing, photography, voice and video come together to create new conversations and communities. Alex is currently fascinated with digital photography. His girlfriend calls him a Flickrholic. Send Alex a nice message: alexhwilliams at gmail.com.
Nicole Simon loves blogging and podcasting, dashed with an European view. As consultant she helps to facilitate such tools for business purposes or personal publishing empires. She can be found at cruel to be kind and on her private blog Useful Sounds.
Roland Tanglao is a well known podcasting enthusiast and a passionate advocate of blogs, RSS, and social software as a means of online expression for people, organizations and businesses. He is a prominent participant in the blogosphere and online communities and one of the founders of Bryght and as Bryght's Chief Blogging Officer reads hundreds of blogs daily. He graduated from the University of Waterloo, worked at Nortel Networks where he ran its first internal corporate blog, has has been blogging since 1999, and was the first business blogging consultant in Canada.
I suppose I'm a little late to the party, but I've only recently noticed that there are at least two different podcast awards sites that are soliciting nominations. The Podcast Awards, operated by Geek News Central podcaster Todd Cochrane, are dubbed as "the people's choice," and will be presented at the Podcast Expo in California this November. Nominations open on June 15th.
The other site I have found is for the Topcast Awards, for which nominations actually close on June 15th and a stand-alone event for presenting the awards is also planned for November.
Are you aware of any other podcast awards that are planned? What is your opinion of these awards programs? Have you submitted anything yet? Will you? What role do you think these awards play in the evolution of podcasting? Just curious what the prevailing view is...
On the new Yahoo! podbiz group, Greg Narain has started a conversation about "the business value of audio quality." I'm very interested in this issue because I definitely think about it for my own podcast, i.e., short of getting a different voice, how can I make my show sound better? (I'm exploring the different voice thing...okay, I'm actually just kidding.)
Looking back at the comments posted to my question about the exceptional podcast, I see some indirect references to audio quality, but not as many as I would have expected. The presence of passion, personality and compelling content seem to be more important factors (at least for those of you who posted comments...thank you!), and I'm wondering if you agree. So here is the next question:
In your view, what is the importance and value (business or otherwise) of audio quality in podcasting? If I have a really compelling podcast, filled passion and personality, does it matter if the sound is just OK? Most of us will never sound like Adam Curry, but is it critical that we aspire to that level of audio experience? I look forward to more thoughts!
While other contributors to this blog focus their attention on news, product announcements and other hot developments from the podcasting world, I'm initiating a conversation around the "art and science" of the exceptional podcast. With your help, I'd like to explore the necessary elements of any podcast, as well as look at what separates truly outstanding podcasts from the rest of the pack.
So let's begin this conversation with a question: what makes a podcast exceptional? I look forward to a wide range of thoughts on the subject.