Deeper Podcast is Done

Another Deeper podcast is in the can. Well, actually several cans since I create both an audio and a video version. For those who might like to know, the podcast is currently being filmed on a Canon GL-2 and simultaniously being audio captured into Garageband via a PreSonus Firewire mixer. I then do all my video edits in Final Cut Pro using various visual elements from the Editors Toolkit Pro from Digital Juice to make it look pretty. On the audio side of the house I just stay in Garageband and do all my work there since audio is mostly just chopping up the file into pieces and laying down the musical track. On those days when the audio on the camera isn’t that good (because, you know, the camera is sitting 20 feet away and I only have one mic–the one going into the PreSonus–anyway) then I cut and paste the audio out of Garageband and try to synch it up with the video in FCP (which is often a bit squirrelly).

After I get through mangling things up, Mr. Todd Gable comes along and makes it all iTunes-worthy and gets it ready for the podcast world. And after that is all web magic and light.

Future plans are to upgrade to a better camera (Canon, Sony?) and maybe even another mic or two (woo!).

So there you go–nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, but I’m sure having a lot of fun doing it.

Update: the podcasts are now live on iTunes.

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Post-GiEN Observations

Spending time at a denominational confab is always an adventure. For the first time in many years I just spent the better part of week hanging out with a combination crowd of Adventist techies and administrators, with some significant international presence thrown in for flavor. I usually have an allergic reaction to such a heavy concentration of church administrators, so fortunately there were enough techie types there to put some oxygen into the air.

Not surprisingly I discovered that there’s even some church politics in the mix as well. Seems that one level of the church developed a hosting service for all churches to have a website and so did another administrative level and never the two shall meet. So now you have dueling hosting and website development services. [Just for the record at FLC we use neither of them and are strictly a home brew shop.] It was fun to be approached by both competing services and asked to join their particular platform, but no one really gave me much of a hard sell, more like a glancing blow.

I was surprised that an international conference in its 5th year still only has 60-80 in attendance and the majority were not from the US, even though the meetings were here in the US. I would imagine that most every Adventist church in the US has its own website by now, yet there are only 80 people in the world who are interested in sharing the Gospel via the web? Not even some folks from Denver, just some people with a travel budget. A marketing problem? Lack of interest? Hard to say.

Back to the swamp tomorrow and then back to work…

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GiEN 08-Sunday Morning Session

Gary Krause-Morning Worship

In the spirit of the Internet, we need to get real. Sort of like vegetarian Adventists who look far and wide for food that looks and tastes like meat. There is a lot of spin going on in the news, etc. So we need to be able to cut through the spin and distortion. “The Word of God is living and sharper than any two-edged sword.” The Word of God is a guide to our feet and we are fooling ourselves if we think we can walk in a straight path if we are relying on our own intellect and strength.

Presentation #8-Panel: Nancy Lamoreaux, Robert Henley, Gordon Harty

“e-Marketing the Gospel”

Henley-how are we engaging the community via our website? Does a lot of pastor training in terms of technology.

Harty-most effective things seem to be social networks, particularly via Facebook notifications, etc. Center for Post Modern Studies and GiEN both have groups there.

Different presenter now….

Carl Gordon-BiggyTV. A delivery platform for video content. Marketing for movies in order to separate the content out from the background noise and static. In terms of the Adventism, this is called The Adventist Channel. Biggy brings a reputation and marketing experience. This is an “inward-facing” site that only hosts “high-quality” content, not the homemade, YouTube stuff (his terms). Target distribution is Adventist Media Centers and Adventist websites. URL goes live tomorrow. Programming is both inward and outward and now has a social networking component, too (MySDA). There was then a demonstration of the Adventist Channel.

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GiEN 08-Friday Afternoon Sessions

Session #1-Klaus Popa, Creative Director, Adventist Media Germany

“in need of a beauty farm 2.0.”

Design principles for websites-its easy to miss something you’re not looking for

1. Do visitors know what to look for? the human aspect (can’t be changed)

2. Do we know what to offer? the content aspect

3. Will visitors find the essential? the design aspect

1. What is attention?

a. being awake

b. choose and filter

c. conciousness

d. control

e. direction

f. interest and curiosity

g. memory

2. Attention on the web-high attention requirements

a. search for information

b. recognition of relevant information

c. ignorance of irrelevant information

d. differentiation between the similar

e. making right choices

f. problems of fatigue, poor design, complexity, etc.

3. Principles on attention

a. intensity and size–bigger and more intense gets more attention, thus the size of objects on the screen should correspond with degree of importance for the aims of the user

b. color-general rules

i. contrast helps something be visible

ii. less is more (5 colors is more than enough on one site)

iii. use subdued colors for surfaces

iv. use intense color for detail

v. be aware of culturally specific color codes

vi. a good interface works fine without any colors

www.vischeck.com–to check your site for color blind people

vii. color dominance and consistency-if the colors shift around then people get lost

c. sequence and position

i. example-an iceberg. Things that find themselves below the bottom of the screen do not get attention. If content is long, provide an outline of links to various subsections.

ii. long pages vs. short-an ongoing discussion, depends to some extent on the content and audience

iii. people remember what they see first and what they see most recently

iv. certain positions are expected for certain items

d. exception

i. certain exceptions draw attention to that item

e. dissonance

i. MAYA-most advanced yet acceptable. Move too far “forward” and it falls into dissonance

f. habituation

i. the wear-out effect, exampl: overworked visual cliches

g. combination

i. not a hard, fast rule but the more elements that you can combine, the better off you are

Question: fluid width versus fixed width? He codes now for 1024fixed (western preference)

Also, probably not possible to create a single website for everyone-cannot work for low and high bandwidth at the same time, so perhaps create two separate websites after a decision point

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GiEN 08 Afternoon Sessions-Thursday

Session #2: Bob Hancock, Jr.

“Search Engine Optimization: What it is and why you need it.”

Why discuss? Because that is how people find stuff on the Web. Based on frequency of posting/fresh content, number of links, responsiveness of hosting server, etc. Of course the Google algorithm is a closely guarded secret, so no one really knows how it works. See Google for their recommendations on creating an index of tag words and such.

Resource: www.SEOmoz.org

Three Key Ranking factors-

1. Content–keyword use in title and body

2. Code–anchor text of inbound link (name links on pages meaningfully)

3. Inbound Links–link popularity both globally and topically

Important question: What keywords will your target audience use in search engines?

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