Spoken word

I’m not gonna lie, I missed podcasting.

I’ve been listening to so many of them in recent months, from Extra Hot Great to Kevin Smith’s stable of ‘casts (Tell ‘Em Steve Dave is really surprisingly good) to Comedy Death Ray and the very irregular Out of the Game.

I was also feeling a bit of malaise with Digital Savant, I think, trying to figure out ways to keep it fresh and keep myself from feeling like I’m just shoveling text every day.

So, with some software setup help from Glark, I recorded my own first attempt at a podcast with Wesley Faulkner, a test run of what a Digital Savant podcast might sound like. The self-imposed criteria was that it be under 20 minutes, easy to edit (it took less than an hour, including sticking in images and other iTunes-friendly metadata) and that it be loose and fun.

I love talking to Wesley; he’s a good friend and he was such a huge help helping me get this done. I owe him.

In the future, I’m hoping to keep the format as 1-on-1 interviews, but with the same fun, goofy tone of Digital Savant. My bosses at the Statesman seemed to like it and there’s even the possibility that we may put it up on iTunes once I’ve got a few more episodes under my belt. That may be a a problem with South by Southwest Interactive coming up. Overall, I’m pleased with the result given it was all done with my aging Macbook, two cheap USB mics and just a few pieces of software in addition to GarageBand. You can download the podcast-formatted AAC version here or download it as an MP3 here.

The other thing that happened this week is that I broke a little news about Google in Austin and the first of some video reviews I did with Kirkus last week have started appearing on YouTube. You can view two of those below.