How Podcasts can Save Every Person in the World
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
This is the follow-up post to my last post about "17-Minute Podcast Which Could Change Your Life Forever". In this post we'll look at: How/why podcasts are amazing, possibly life-changing, mediums.
In my next post we'll explore my frustrations with Twitter not having an archive which could preserve tweets about great podcasts (or other items which might be helpful to others).
And if you think these 2 points are mutually-exclusive, according to Princeton's WordNetWeb, the first meaning of "medium" is "a means or instrumentality for storing or communicating information"...and we're talking about both storing (archiving) and communicating (podcasts & Twitter) here.
How/why podcasts are amazing possibly life-changing mediums
- Hearing illuminating life-changing information, most of which is...free!
- Listening to podcasts while exercising: Walking, cycling, working out at the gym, etc.
- For me, this makes working out fun and interesting because I'm always learning and finding out about new things and trends in social media, internet marketing, searching the web, etc.
- Advancing in your business or career or profession or studies because you're learning new things all the time.
- Being respected by your peers because you're so knowledgeable about subjects, current events, etc.
- Becoming a subject matter expert because you're so knowledgeable about it.
- Becoming a great conversationalist because you're well-versed in a diverse variety of topics.
- Keeping your mind active by learning new things.
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Possibly preventing Alzheimers Disease, exercising your mind, keeping your mind and thinking processes agile, and improving your memory. And if you have a hard time remembering what you hear while you're working out at the gym you can try using Evernote.
The Problem(s) with Podcasts
The information (your information if you're creating the podcast recording) is locked in an audio (mp3) file. There's gold in podcasts and you need to find a way to release the treasure contained within so others can find and experience it.
- To unlock the file you need to either:
- Add "show notes"(notes describing what's in the podcast which would be posted on the podcast's blog),
- Transcribe the podcast (yourself, using a transcription service, using an automated transcription program like Windows Speech Recognition (#8) or Dragon Naturally Speaking, or an online program like EveryZing's search, now discontinued).
Why would you want to unlock your audio/video podcasts by summarizing them or converting them to text?
- Answer:
- For people who don't have time to listen to the whole podcast and just want to skim/scan what was talked about,
- So Google's bot (robot) can index the content and key phrases which were talked about in the podcast, and/or
- To improve the SEO (search engine optimization) for your podcast blog.
For more/related info on Podcasts see my blog post on: 11 Quick Questions for Evaluating Podcasts.
For examples of "show notes" see:
Next blog post: "The Trouble with Twitter" and why I archived the Twitter tweets in my last blog post: 17-Minute Podcast Which Could Change Your Life Forever about C.C. Chapman's Managing the Gray phenomenally helpful and inspiring podcast "You Are The Only One Standing in YOUR Way".
Microphone image above courtesy of :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanhp/ / CC BY 2.0
