It’s no secret that I would like to launch a Podcast. I’ve got everything set up and ready to… so what’s stopping me? Time. The “producer” in me just won’t let me “just do it”. I have to fuss and fret over production values. Oh, well.

This session was a great intro to Podcasting. Good information about utilizing and planning for Podcasts; the best thing I took away was the importance of “Show Notes” to make it easy to find your Podcast. Because audio files aren’t searchable (yet–get on that, Google) the notes that accompany your show are essential for getting the word out and letting people search to find your Podcast.

There are many issues which were only touched on briefly that I would like to see explored more: what are the licensing mechanisms and issues for using original music in your Podcast. What are the issues about licensing the content of your Podcast?

The first session at BlawgThink 2005 just wrapped. It was “Advanced RSS” with Rick Klau from FeedBurner. Overall, it was a pretty interesting session. Some of the topics we addressed were extending RSS, security issues/providing secure feeds, and touched on the dreaded “monetizing” blogs.

It wasn’t as “advanced” as I’d hoped, but given that I’ve written several books on XML, that wasn’t too surprising. I also disliked that Rick made editing RSS on your own seem “frightening”. XML is text. It has a few rules, but they are pretty easy, certainly not out of reach for most users–that aspect could have been handled better. It was an advanced session, after all. But Rick was very straight up, answered questions, and I did come away with a better outlook toward FeedBurner than I had going in. I think I’m going to give it a whirl.
Note to self for future sessions/open sessions: Seth Godin’s “Monetize This“.