Socially Speaking

Our first interactive podcast with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel was not only fun and insightful, but historical. People were able to communicate, comment, share and ask questions to Robert and Shel directly, whether via chat/IM or via phone. The content is smart, interesting and the energy level is high.

Since the event ran over an hour and a half, we’ve split it into two parts. There are a few ways to listen:

1) Click on either Interactive Podcast or Naked Conversations on Waxxi’s home page. You may download parts one and two, or play it within the page. There, you may also subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

2) Listen live here to Part One and here for Part Two

A few things to note:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Cordless Phone. What you’ll notice in the beginning of Part One is a bit of fuzziness, especially on Robert’s line. That’s something we learned not to do in the future: have guests call in on cordless phones. Landlines with a quality headset a must, everything else (cordless, VoIP, cell phones) a no-no.

Radio Quality, Digital Sound. My voice will sound different, in terms of recording quality, than the others. That’s because I did my part from a studio. And I worked with folks with more than four decades of broadcasting experience. The goal, as Shel mentioned, was to help move podcasting forward.

To Edit or Not to Edit? Should the interactive podcasts be completely, well, Naked? In the aforementioned ‘forward’ thinking process, we felt it would only improve the listening experience to edit out some of the “uhs” “ums”, seconds of dead air here or there, and to record an intro and a close.

Chat is as Important as Voice. We implemented a chat client very close to the launch, and were not able to alert everyone to that fact until the day of the event (next time, plenty of notice so that international callers don’t have to worry about staying on a direct phone line to the US just to have their questions answered). The chat/IM was equally as important to the interactive experience as having people call in. It also allowed for commenting, and facilitated the flow of the conversation quite nicely.

We’ll detail each part in future posts, but in the meantime nobody does it better than Jeremiah Owyang. Thanks again to everyone who signed up, participated, and interacted, and to our incredible guests.

Enjoy the listen.

update: We gave Jeremiah a sneak peek (he’s good at pulling those eStrings). His announcement of Waxxi going live is here.