Podcast: Phatguys Nascar Fantasy #032609
I was honored to be asked back onto the Phatguys on Fantasy Nascar Podcast today. We had a great show and talked about the upcoming race at Martinsville Speedway. My picks for the race were Tony Stewart and of course Mark Martin. My dark horse pick was Brian Vickers, we will see how those picks turn out this week. You can tune in and listen to phatguys podcast here, or click on the player located below:
Phatguys on Fantasy Nascar - 03/26/09 [60:31m]: 
Podcast: The Final Lap Radio (episode 57)
I was honored to be a guest on syndicated radio talk show host Kerry Murphey’s weekly Nascar Podcast, The Final Lap. We discussed NascarView.com as well as the social network Twitter. We also talked a little bit about our relationship with MarkMartin.com and Nascar in general. Jimmie Johnson was also on the show and he talked about Twitter. You can listen to Kerry’s show by click here, or you can listen to my interview by clicking on the player below:
Podcast: Phatguys Nascar Fantasy #032009
Oliver and Kevin from Phatguys on Fantasy Nascar Podcast, who have been frequenting NascarView.com for a few weeks now, asked me to be a guest on their weekly podcast to run down my picks for the Bristol race as well as promote Nascarview.com and our new message board and live racing chat sections. You can tune in and catch Oliver and Kevin each week discussing fantasy Nascar picks at their live show on blogtalkradio.com by clicking here, or you can catch the interview by hitting the play button below:
Streaming with Ustream.tv
This past weekend we did a test stream of our church services at The Church Alive using Ustream.tv and I couldn’t get over how impressive this service is. We have made a few attempts in the past to stream using this service but have struggled because we didn’t have enough bandwidth on the upstream to carry this out. Our upstream from our ISP initially was about 300kbps at best and this past week we had them up our allocation to where we now have 700kbps upstream.
The video setup we are using is a homespun solution, we basically have a Windows XP machine setup to connect to a Canon USB Streaming camera that is plugged into our mixer board that has a t-bar setup on it. It’s actually a very decent setup with 2 cameras that pan to cover our pastor and worship team on the stage. With the addition of the control board we now have announcements that run on the screen as well as part of the feed.
We practiced streaming at around 14 bitrate and our video settings were at 80. This we figured out through trial and error would allow us to have pretty nice resolution without a lot of pixelation around the speakers face. The reason we have been testing this so frequently is because we want to stream an upcoming conference we have going on this next weekend. This should be the ultimate test for us. I expect to have about 200 people online viewing the conference!
If you have considered streaming your events online I strongly recommend Ustream over it’s competitor Mogulus, but that’s just me. I know some people who have used Mogulus and really like it. Here’s some info on Ustream:
Ustream.TV is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. In less than two minutes, anyone can become a broadcaster by creating their own channel on Ustream or by broadcasting through their own site, empowering them to engage with their audience and further build their brand. Click here to start a broadcast now or learn more about broadcasting.
Ustream’s one-to-many live interactive video encourages broadcast-to-viewer and viewer-to-viewer interaction, empowering a much more engaging experience for everyone involved.
With Ustream’s interactive broadcast functionality, viewers can personally interact directly with whoever is broadcasting — including personalities like their favorite musician or politician. Ustream viewers can watch specific broadcasts, explore our networks ranging from music, talk shows, sports and politics to discover a world of interesting new broadcasts, or review our past broadcasts.
Ustream opens up a new world of possibilities and experiences to broadcasters and viewers alike, which the pre-recorded static video that’s predominated the Internet to date just can’t provide. Today, people are Ustreaming everything including:
- Major political events such as debates, speeches, rallies
- Talk shows
- Entertainment events such as premieres and ‘red carpet events’
- Music showcases of their favorite music, of their own band’s performances, and live jam sessions
- Conference sessions
- School and business events and training
- Sporting events at college and high school level
- Personal milestones such as holiday gatherings, weddings, grade school events, parties, even births
- Interactive games for viewers to watch or join
Central Arkansas Refresh Meetup
In case you missed David Kincade’s post on The Arkansas Project this morning, we are going to have our first Central Arkansas Refresh Group Meetup this next Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at Starbucks (9401 Rodney Parham Road, Little Rock, AR) this next week.
We plan on hooking up around 6:00 or so and kind of setting the stage for this unique group. If you are interested in the meetup, here’s a link to our Facebook Event Page:
A couple weeks back I posted about this little group of Central Arkansas technology enthusiast types that Cotton Rohrscheib, area web guru/tech wizard/blogger/NASCAR fan, is looking to launch for networking and education purposes. Remember that?
Well, good news: We’ve set the inaugural meet-up for Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 6 p.m. in Little Rock, at the Starbucks on 9401 N. Rodney Parham Road. (A location somewhat arbitrarily arrived at because several of the interested parties may be coming from Conway and it has reasonably ready access to I-430. We may find another venue for future gatherings, once we have a better sense of who’s attending.)
This inaugural meeting will help us to develop a fuller organizational sense of who’s actually interested, what kind of topics we want to explore, how frequently we want to meet — mostly a ‘get to know you and swap ideas’ session to determine how we can make this a constructive venture for all involved.
You don’t necessarily have to be a hands-on tech wizard programmer type to join up — maybe you’re a blogger or an avid social media user or a chronic Internet porn consumer or just an all-purpose nerd with an abiding interest in the Web and technology issues. That’s fine; the more the merrier. Though probably the fewer the chronic Internet porn consumers, the better. I mean, a couple would be OK, but let’s not go overboard.
Go to our Facebook group page to get involved (or if you’re a hold-out who refuses to get on Facebook, just show up Tuesday).
Facebook | Central Arkansas Refresh Community
Just another update regarding the Central Arkansas Refresh Community, tonight Nick Brewer and I setup a group page on Facebook for those of you that might be interested in attending our meetups. To join the group click here. Once we get some members in the group we will primarily do most of our communication through Facebook regarding meetups, locations, discussion topics, guest speakers, etc.
Be sure to signup if you are interested. This should be an excellent opportunity for us to share ideas and stay on top of emerging technologies that are out there.
Facebook | Central Arkansas Refresh Community
Podango Going Out…
If you are using PodPress to manage your podcast inside of Wordpress and for some odd reason chose to have Podango host your audio files, you will want to take notice quickly and retrieve your files from them because they are going out of business. See the press release below released on Mashable.com late last month.
Fortunately I never saw this as a good platform for hosting audio files so none of my clients are utilizing this, and all have done well w/ our managed hosting services for holding their audio data.
Podcast hosting didn’t look to be a fruitful business even at the start of the year: now, as the year end approaches and amid economic turmoil, podcast host Podango is waving the flag of surrender. Based on this ominous announcement emailed to Podango’s customers this weekend, the company might not even make it to ring in the New Year:
We at Podango believe that you, our customers, are our most valuable asset. Given this belief, we have always done our best to be honest and forthright in our dealings with you. The current uncertainties of the financial market has affected many of us in this nation. As of this morning, Podango is no longer immune to it’s effects. Our ability to continue operations past the end of this year (2008) is in question. We do not want any of you, or any of your shows to be negatively affected by this uncertainty and so we are encouraging you to begin taking all necessary steps to secure your data or begin moving to another hosting provider. On Monday we will have a more definitive direction. As of today, the last day to move or secure your data is December 31st. RSS feeds will need to be redirected by this date as well. It is our hope that the events of the next few days will allow us to continue providing you a service based upon a subscription fee. Again, we will know more on Monday and you will be notified of any changes to the above plan as soon as we are made aware of them. We do apologize for the short notice during a time when many of you are very busy, and didn’t plan on spending this much time on your shows.
We will have a link in the My Podango section of the Podcasters login page by Monday which will allow you to redirect your RSS feed off of the Podango feed to a new feed. Instructions will accompany that tool. Also on Monday we will provide you with alternatives for show hosting.
Inactive accounts, those without recent uploads or downloads, may be already been deleted from the system. If you need to contact us, please use info@podango.com.
Again I personally apologize for this notice of caution. We truly appreciate your business.
Doug
Douglas G. Smith
President – PodangoUnfortunately the Podango homepage lacks appropriate information for users, but as the announcement details, Podango users need to act fast, with the last day to move data and redirected feeds being New Years Eve. If this announcement directly affects you, make sure to login to your account to access the “My Podango” page, and get a move on it!
Podango Won’t Make It to 2009 and Neither Will Your Data
Projects: Podcasting in Wordpress
I have been doing a little bit of research lately on podcasting. I am in the process of putting together a major revision of my Church’s website, www.thechurchalive.org. One of the things we started doing this past year after the last revision was to place our weekly sermon audio files on the web for download. At first I tried to keep everything up to date with the itunes xml file but it just got to be way too much trouble so one of the things on the top of my list this time around is podcast automation.
I had also been giving a lot of thought to using Wordpress as the Framework for our next site upgrade. It already brings a lot of plugins to the table that I would have to otherwise write myself to make things work so I knew going into this that I was likely going to be leaning toward Wordpress. After doing a little research I found that there is a pretty big trend out there with Church’s using Wordpress as their backend framework. One of the reasons I have found is that it’s really easy to handly podcasting! Here’s an article I found on Codex about podcasting with Wordpress: Podcasting « WordPress Codex.
This revision to the site is likely going to take me another week or two so I will probably be blogging again on other parts of the project and working within the Wordpress Framework in the near future….
Powersite Radio Promo – 2003
Back in 2003 I cut a commercial for local radio promoting Powersite. Chad Whiteaker of KFFB did the production and as usual Chad did a phenomenal job. The spot ran on KFFB radio in Fairfield Bay but was heard all around, we were surprised at how many clients called us from the radio spot. Of course the phone number has now changed, it is now 888-276-0848, so don’t call the phone number in the spot, ha.
