Reading Radar

Arminasx Saiman and I were talking about SL related blogs and podcasts the other day, not particular ones, but just the fact that audiences for both are by default, limited in number.

I’ll grant you that there are a number of popular SL related blogs (this not really being one of them) but the fact still holds true that only a limited group of people is going to have interest in subscribing to an SL blog compared to the number of people that might want to subscribe to something like Lifehacker or The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Bearing in mind that with a blog, web searches bring traffic in that might not otherwise find the blog, and that once there, the material is at least right in front of their faces and there is at least a small chance they might stay and read, and I have to think that blogs are much more likely to attract new random followers than podcasts are. People may randomly stumble across a podcast but then they have a barrier of deciding to listen, and that entails downloading it or subscribing unless they use the blog’s player control. But I doubt people will typically fire up an hour long audio file that they found by accident.

Given all this, I’m wondering, how do I grow my SL Under the Radar podcast? I don’t mean I want to have 40,000 downloads a week (that would be more than my hosting can handle) or that I want to rule the universe, but I’ve noticed the podcast has plateaued in terms of listeners. It just feels like things could be more active, and even so with my current listeners. Am I doing a good enough job of getting you involved and a part of the podcast? I don’t know. I’m not sure where people stand on that question. I think SLPN has some work to do in this area too, and it’s something I think we should start considering more heavily.

I don’t have time or inclination to just promote my podcast all over the web. Truth be told, I hate self-promotion. But among the SL podcasts, I think mine’s one of the good ones. I know that’s rare coming from me, the eternally self-effacing man with the mic, but I don’t say that vainly. I think I’ve had good guests who are genuinely interesting people and it makes me even enjoy listening to my own podcasts again after uploading them just to hear them, and get a sense of their thoughts and personalities.

I think I can say without being egotistical or having a overly inflated view of my work that this podcast should be at least one that gets thought of when thinking of SL related podcasts to subscribe to. So this leads me down the path of doing some thinking about how to be taken seriously without having to become overly serious about my material. And while recognizing I only have so much time to work on it. I think that’s the hard part of podcasting for me, being able to take advantage of limited opportunities for recording time.

For the moment, all I can ask is that if you enjoy any of the SL related podcasts, let your friends know. All of the podcasters I know in SL take their podcasts seriously and work hard on them. Feel free to drop them a line and let them know what’s working, and what’s not. You, the listeners, are the reason we do this in the first place. If you’re not enjoying it, we podcasters won’t be either.

Sick again. I really, really couldn’t afford to stay home a second day but I woke up with chills and a clogged throat. I should have gone in to work and made everyone ill. Bastards.

I think today I’ll sleep, script, and be sick. I found the correct rss url to use for blip.tv feeds that gives the mp4 conversions on all files so even if the originals were in wmv or some other format, the itunes feed will let you play all of them in mp4 so they’ll play for anyone in-world. That solves my problem for getting a reliable in-world SLPN Video player set up. Thanks to Dedric and some of my own LSL and a little php modding, we can host the rss -> sss conversion on my server and not rely on third party players that have gone belly up in the past. I know I’ve said it before, but Dedric’s the guy you want for solutions to programming problems.

I just need to finish up the menu code and a couple minor things and I’ll be done. Yay. I got sidetracked with another project this week, but it’s going to be a fun one. It’s something Itazura and I will get going at some point.

Dedric Mauriac, the original guy with blue hair, took time out of his busy schedule tonight to come help me get set up with what I need for running a php script on my server for converting rss feeds to SSS. I was looking for a way to get rss parsing onto my own server and have flexibility on how to implement the LSL scripts in-world to call that, so that we could create video players for the SLPN headquarters and the Destination Station on PI for video podcast viewing which are fully copiable so that they can be rezzed from a variant of Itazura’s RezzHud.

This kind of help goes above and beyond the call of duty and it shows the really giving side of community in SL. Huge thanks to Dedric for setting me up.

You can find his store on his Woodbridge sim next to Edloe, or check out his products on SLExchange. And finally, here’s a video from an SLCN tv interview with Yxes Delacroix.

One thing I almost forgot to mention, there is another scripter in SL with a free podcast player who states on his slexchange page that he’ll help people get set up if they want to run the php scripts on their own servers. I contacted him via IM and notecard (which he accepted) but never got a response. Even a simple “I don’t have time for this nonsense” would have been fine, because that’s an answer I can completely understand. The moral of the story is to support people who have a history of collaboration with others. Dedric’s always been really involved in helping others find answers to their problems.

After a lot of babbling for the podcast, Stuart turned the SLPN building on Nowhereville physical and we all fell down. It seemed like the right thing to do… after all, that building had never hurt anyone in its life, and that seemed kind of stupid. Time to fix that little failure on its part.

They need some warning stickers about falling buildings being dangerous. I got hit on the head a couple times. How was I supposed to know?