Steel White Table

I’m thinking about writing a book called Podcasting for Dummies, because it doesn’t seem to take much to become a pioneer in the field.

A while back, you might remember I wrote a post here on Steel White Table called Poor Man’s Podcasting, which leads to a page which I later retitled Podcasting on a Budget. I wrote the page as a response, or as a complement, to Jim Kloss’s “How I Make an Audio Magazine”. Most of what I know about podcasting, I know from listening to Jim. I don’t even know how to subscribe to a podcast. So it beats the hell out of me how I could be considered an authority on podcasting. Nevertheless, my little “Podcasting on a Budget” page (or dare I say article?) has received more attention than anything I’ve posted to Steel White Table so far.

— A couple months ago, I got an email from a fairly-well known technology writer writing a book on podcasting. He’d read my “Podcasting on a Budget” page and asked me if I’d like to contribute to his book. I told him he should talk to Jim, and that was the last I heard from him.

— If you do a Google search for “podcasting on a budget,” you’ll find several references to my article (yeah, what the hell, we’ll call it an article). Hit #1: Whatis.com. Hit #3: DoWire.org. Hit #6: PodcastExpert.com. Then AllPodcasting.com, and a few more. So it’s getting noticed.

— A reference to my article even appears in Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds For Dummies by Ellen Finkelstein. I show up in the book’s index (p. 307, PDF file).

“What the hell’s going on here, Bob?” said Tom Waits at the end of Down by Law. Good question. The answer: I must have been the first person to post something using the phrase, “podcasting on a budget.” So I guess that makes me a podcasting pioneer.

As wonderful as it is to be noticed, I don’t plan to get back into podcasting any time soon. All you need to do is listen to a podcast with real content to realize how lame most of mine are. Recording them, mixing them, encoding them, tagging them, uploading them, then writing out the damn posts with all the proper links is also a waste of time I can do without. But if I actually took the time to learn how RSS feeds work and familiarized myself with a few more tricks of the trade, who knows, maybe I could write a useful book on podcasting.

Update: I just did a bit of research, and it seems to me that most of the podcasting pioneers out there are a bunch of jerks. And Podcasting for Dummies has already been taken. So that’s it, I’m done. (But I’m still holding fast to my pioneer status when it comes to podcasting on a budget. “Podcasting on a Budget” copyright 2005 by Mud Songs Ltd.)

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