The Gift

I gave a presentation on podcasting recently.  The host was a small private college.  As a thank you gift, the PR director gave me a lovely spiral bound book with the college name and seal embossed in gold on the cover. Inside was a  pen. 

The pages were blank .  Given the beauty of the book, I took it that it was to be used as a diary.

I thought about that gift a lot.  Because I spent many years writing daily notes in tons of notebooks, it really hurt to throw the book away.   I don’t mean any disrespect to the PR director. I suspect thousands of PR, alumni and development folks are giving out things like these.

And I bet no one uses them.  Certainly few people under the age of, say, 50, are making notes with a pen in a spiral bound notebook.   Even grandparents have migrated to computers to exchange emails and photos with their children and grandchildren.

The notebook drove home the realization that the days of holding a pen in your hand and physically creating words on paper are pretty much over.  That’s not an insight that’s going to rattle anyone’s brain but holding something so regal, expensive and useless made me realize again how much our  culture and way of doing business has changed.

If you give out gifts like this, you should rethink how you’re spending your money.

I kept the pen for my post-it notes.

Yahoo!Kickstart Great Site for Colleges

I recently discovered Yahoo! Kickstart, a new (yes! Another!) social site, but this  one has a lot of potential.  Kickstart is a professional network with the goal of connecting college students, recent graduates, professionals and alumni of an individual school.  Students can search for internships or jobs.  They can get career advice and mentorship. 

It’s a great example of niche marketing.  Yahoo! has identified a need, an audience, and found what I think is a simple, effective way to meet that need.

We all know that networking is one of the best ways of starting a career or changing jobs.  Kickstart, if it takes off, will enable alumni to help fellow alumni, especially, (but not limited to), younger alumni or students.  It’s a  new way for alumni to give back to the university in the form of helping fellow alumni.

The site is pretty bare bones right now.  You create a professional profile, including a photo and (for me at least) start recruiting other alumni. 

I’ve corresponded with  Scott Gatz who is heading the project, who says Yahoo! Will be adding more features and growing the site according the suggestions from users.  Sounds good to me.

In a smooth marketing move, Yahoo! will donate $25,000 to the alumni association with the most profiles by Dec. 31, 2007.

If you’ve seen the new site, I’d like your thoughts.  I’d also like to share ideas on how this site can grow and be even more useful to individual colleges and universities.  Mansfield University has more than 20,000 alumni.  If we could sign up even half, what a useful organization this could be to alumni of all ages.  I would think it could be a vehicle for news  dissemination and for announcements of upcoming events.

I have other thoughts but I’ll save them for a future blog.

Check it out at http://kickstart.yahoo.com/

Send me your thoughts.

Podcasting Equipment Part 2

This is a continuation of my podcast gear list. In my Beecher House studio at Mansfield University I use a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. I like the 17-inch wide screen for detailed editing.

I bought this more than two years ago when 80 gig was a lot of memory.

I use a Mackie Onyx 1220 mixer. I bought it mainly for the Onyx fire wire sound card and the sound really is excellent. But, as I said in my previous post, there’s no need for that large an investment. Mackie is the workhorse mixer, but a six-channel Mackie is plenty, or as I mentioned before, the $99 four-channel Peavey I use at home is more than adequate.

My Samson monitors, bought because they’re small for cramped quarters, do an excellent job. I like using monitors. I’ve found my students prefer headphones so they bypass the monitors completely.

I’ve tried a lot of different microphones over the years, both in the office and at home. I’ve settled on Heil mics. I use a PR40 for myself and a PR30 for my guests. The PR40 lists for $375 and the PR 30 lists for $299. My voice is low and quiet. I have to get in close to it but the result is a warm, rich sound that you can hear on podcasts from the past year, the length of time I’ve been using Heils.

The PR 30 is really just as good for one-on-one interviewing. Again you can hear them with a lot of different voices on our various podcasts over the year.

The mics do an excellent job of picking up the voice and not a lot of ambient sounds, and believe me, unless you have an enclosed, sound proof studio, you’ll find many challenges with ambient sounds, from passing trucks to slamming doors.

I use a Heil PR 20 in the field. It lists for around $179.

Having said this, there are dozens of mics that are more than adequate for departments on a tight budget. Shure makes a great line. The SM57 and SM58 have been standards in the music business for decades.

And there are others that well adapt to or were designed for podcasters.

Buy as good a mic as you can afford and remember if you’re doing interviews, you’ll need two. Buy two of the same thing so you and your guest are on equal footing. It will make life easier for you during the editing/mixing process.

The world of microphones is a huge and diverse one. Discussions and comparisons are all over the Net. If you use a microphone, I’d love your feedback. Let me know what you use and why you like it.

If anything I’ve talked about raises questions, feel free to post your question.

Podcasting Equipment Part 1

I’ve done several presentations on podcasting this year, both in person and via the recent collegewebeditor.com webinar. No matter what angle I’m coming from, I always get the same questions, which makes sense since I’m presenting to folks interested getting into podcasting.

There are three questions that come up consistently:

-What equipment do you use?

-How much does the equipment cost?

-How much time does it take to produce a show?

I’m sure others have the same questions. I have a studio at home and one in my office. They’ve evolved a little differently, so in today’s post, I’ll talk about my home studio equipment.

A couple years ago my wife bought me a custom made Sweetwater Music tower. I love it because it’s devoted solely to recording, mixing, editing and posting. Because it’s not cluttered with a lot of other programs, it remains lightning fast.

(I’ll be right up front. I do most all my business with Sweetwater because their prices are in line with most everyone else, my sales rep’s knowledge is excellent and the service is consistently outstanding.)

Actually any computer will do. Just make sure you have a lot of space because wave files eat up a lot of memory.

For a monitor I have a 17-inch Sony flat screen, also a couple years old. I like the larger screens because you often have to zoom way in to delete an unwanted sniff or cough or throat clearing. Clean edits are a must.

I use a pair of Mackie monitors.

They’re a bit pricey but I went for the quality of sound because I want to hear everything—highs and lows—when editing. And I want to hear the recording as clearly as possible.

At the same time, they’re probably more than you need. I’ll talk about less expensive ones in my office studio.

For recording I use AKG Solid tube microphone, which, I’ve found is no longer available. Again it’s a little pricey but I wanted to get that old time tube sound which is warmer than digital. In the next post about my office equipment, I’ll talk about some different mics.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting as high quality mics and sound card as you can afford. You want the best possible recording because it’s your raw material.

At home I have an MAudio Delta 66 sound card. At $189, it’s fine for voice work.

My wife “borrowed” my Mackie mixer so I bought a Peavey four channel mixer for less than $100 and it works just fine. http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PV6

I use Adobe Audition mixing software which costs $300.

However, you don’t have to invest any money in mixing software. Use Audacity software. It’s free and has more than enough features for any podcaster. .

For the music beds, I hire a freelance musician to create original loops. You can create your own loops with Adobe Audition or by buying loop packages. There are also numerous sites like fruity loops that have hundreds of royalty free loops at low rates.

There are also some free sites. Just poke around on the Web.

All my links are to Sweetwater but that’s just to give you visuals. While I did plug Sweetwater, there are many other good sites that my wife and son use such as Musicians Buy, zZounds, Musician’s Friend and many others.

I have about $3,500 invested in my home studio, but you don’t have to spend that much.

More later.