Podcast promo, etc.

i consider myself someone who's familiar with a lot of the new technologies out on the market today, so it was surprising when i realized i had no idea how to work GarageBand on my computer. the scary thing about new programs like this is it seems like you are venturing into a foreign world: new language, customs, etc. the upside in this case is that there are plenty of people who have gone before you, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of youtube videos, webpages, and podcasts (interesting that people use the medium to describe the in's and out's of said medium).

so, now that i've taken in what these resources have to offer me, i've created my very first audio recording. i'm glad i've had this experience to force me to deal with this technological obstacle. for someone who has easy access to these programs it seems a real shame that it's taken me this long to use them. regardless, i really appreciated the fact that after a few tutorials i was able to grasp the major concepts/functions and craft exactly the audio piece i wanted.

the practice of recording my audio and uploading it to my itunes, really made me realize how democratizing technology can be. if i can learn how to do this, with the right tools, anyone else can.

fingers crossed. let's see if this works.

from blog to pod

podcasting is one of those inventions that makes me thankful for technology. this is exactly what technology is supposed to do for us: bring together people from all over to share their views on just about everything with no mediating forces to stop them from doing so. the fact that so much of what is on our airwaves is brought to us by the good people at Clear Channel Communications means that most everything we hear on the radio is profit related. Curtis Fox, in his review of podcasting, mentions the real world constraints of being a cog in the corporate radio machine: padding a show to fill the prescribed segment of time, breaking for messages from your sponsors, affording the massively expensive airtime, etc. podcasting makes these concerns obsolete and, best of all, anyone can do it. i don't know what the average hourly rate is for time on an FM frequency is, but i can't imagine it's something a housewife or college student could afford.

what may be even more significant than the democratization of the medium is the fact that, in podcast form, amateur broadcasters don't have big brother breathing down their neck. the FCC does not police the podosphere...and thank god for that. it's enough that corporations decide what messages i should be bombarded with, having the federal government decide what isn't appropriate for me to hear is beyond frustrating.

popular commercial radio may remind me that its got "more music, less commercials, every hour" than its competitors, but i still feel like i'm being sold something every minute. and public radio may have the content i like (relatively free from corporate brainwashing), but it's not radical by any stretch of the imagination. i just can't win here.

but i believe podcasting can be a real success through its free and diverse content. my only concern is, as podcasting's popularity increases will there be better way to promote and organize all of the offerings out there? efforts like story corp's are a good framework for cataloging personal oral histories, but will places like the paley center for media (which is the brains behind nyc's museum of television and radio) organize large scale efforts for recording our oral history on the web?