In today’s email I have a message from Hugh asking me to go and take pictures of chickens in my local supermarket. There’s the BBC food newsletter with the recipe of the week; the Economist digest of world events (brilliant heading on the Republican presidential campaign: Goodbye, Rudy Tuesday), the Snowmail account of a worsening situation in Afghanistan (dear God how can it get worse?), a petition to save sharks…How on earth can any email, enewsletter or blog stand out in this crowd? That’s why I went to the Inner Ear podcasting workshop at the beginning of the week.
I know we all suffer too much information. That’s a bitter truth for any old (or new) hack. If the old media faces the threat of a declining and fragmented audience, the new media is equally challenged. There are so many of us sending our thoughts into cyberspace there simply isn’t time to keep up with it all. It’s not just vanity that’s bothering me – it doesn’t really matter if no-one reads this (all right, it does matter to me a bit ) but I have a new batch of community blogs to write and I must find a way to make people read them
Podcasting to the rescue? I was intrigued to find such a mixed group at the Inner Ear podcasting workshop at the Urban Learning Space in Glasgow ( a wonderful mixture of youthful optimism and grizzled Glasgow worldly wisdom). I was sitting with organisers of the Aye Right festival, (Mitchell Library) and there were other museums, dance organisers and even a representative of old time BBC Radio. All of us in some way grappling with the challenge of getting people to take a look at our website. The screen, we all agreed, is not so good for text. Moving pictures, speaking voices: that’s what the audience wants.
Some of us arrived thinking we were there to learn HOW to make a podcast but soon discovered what we needed to be thinking was WHY and WHAT to make it with. I think we came up with some good answers and I have absolutely no time to write about them now (come on, I’ve got chickens to photograph in Tesco) but if anyone actually has time to read the words I am bashing out then here’s the link to find out more.
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