2007.03.30

7 Songs – I’ve been tagged

Considering I was originally blog-tagged four days ago by Bill Deys (and then two days ago by Charles Cadenhead), I would say that I’m decidedly late getting this post out.  I will spare you the excuses.  However, since I’m so late on the game for this one, I’m reluctant to tag anyone else since I’m probably the last one on the Internet to respond to this.

So, without further delay and in no particular order, here are my seven favourite songs based on current listening habits:

Sting – Fortress Around Your Heart
Xavier Rudd – Messages
The Police – Hole In My Life
Barenaked Ladies – Vanishing
Jack Johnson – Upside Down
Genesis – Trick of the Tail
Colin Hay – Waiting for My Real Life to Begin
Masters of Reality – She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On)

2007.03.30

CrowdAbout.us – Podcasts go interactive

Bob and I have both lamented about the ever growing spread of social media tools geared towards expanding and engaging one’s community. I’ve dabbled in some of them, each of which addresses a specific need for community building. Today, Carter Harkins introduced us to a tool that I think I will be spending a lot of time getting to know. It’s called Crowd About and it fills a need, specific to Podcasters, that no other service does: contextual commenting. Carter is one of its creators.

Sign up for CrowdAbout and comment inside my show!Crowd About offers a simple way for your community to be more actively engaged by allowing it to create text or multimedia comment to any media file in your Podcast feed, and then apply the comment to a specific location of that file. Imagine having your content indexed by comment threads and being able to consume comments by clicking a specific location of your media file, and then participating in the discussion yourself. In fact, you can even index your own content and then let the conversations begin. That’s the core of this tool.

It doesn’t stop there. Crowd About can be integrated into your own Podcast site (WordPress and others) so that the “playground” (my term, not theirs) comes to you and your community – instead of you and your community having to go to the playground. About the only drawback of that integration is that participants are required to be logged into a Crowd About account.

Of course, requisite profile and friends technology is part of the tool. Has anyone figured out how to create a single friends repository in WordPress that can be referenced by every other technology, yet?

2007.03.29

Oh yeah… don’t have dairy

This evening — before settling in to conduct two interviews –  I broke a rule known well to singers, public speakers and on-air personalities: don’t have dairy before your performance.

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