I’m delighted to announce that the PodLeaders site has successfully concluded a deal with ElectricNews and Blacknight Solutions whereby ENN has added PodLeaders as a channel (on the left hand navigation of ENN) and will re-publish all future PodLeaders podcasts on the ENN site (and in its email alerts). Blacknight Solutions is sponsoring this deal and consequently gets to brand the PodLeaders page on the ENN site.
This is a great deal for PodLeaders as it increases the traffic, adds a source of revenue for PodLeaders and as it is not an exclusive deal, it means that PodLeaders can look for more revenue (I may be able to have bread now with my water!!!).
Sincere thanks to Michele of Blacknight and Ralph of ENN for concluding this deal with PodLeaders.
I will be interviewing David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati this weekend - as always, if you have any questions that you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave them in the comments or emil them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net.
My guest on this show is Ken Carroll - Ken is a Director of ChinesePod - ChinesePod is one of the world’s most popular podcasts (it is constantly in the top 5 of Yahoo! Podcasts most popular podcasts) and it is one of the few podcasts with a successful business model!
Consequently, I wanted to talk to Ken about his business model, how his ChinesePod model will affect traditional language schools and how this model could be used to distribute high quality education to the developing world cheaply.
Here are all the questions I asked Ken and the times in the interview I asked them:
Ken - you might kick off with a little background on who Ken Carroll is and how you into this area… - 0:34
How did you get turned to podcasting? - 1:38
ChinesePod is teaching chinese to non-Chinese or beginner Chinese speakers - why are you not teaching English to the Chinese? - 5:56
Can you tell us what your numbers are and how you are turning that into income? - 9:27
How is what you’re doing a threat to the audio-book industry, the language school industry - 13:14
Do you see a decline coming in those industries? - 18:30
An interesting possibility from this is that this model allows for teaching to be distributed to developing countries at very little cost - 19:55
All the big search engines have fallen foul of the Chinese authorities (MSN deleted a bloggers blog, Yahoo! helped jail a chinese journalist and Google is censoring the web in China) - are podcasts a possible way around the great firewall of china? - 22:36
You seem to be big into community building aspect of things - you ask for comments on the podcasts, you have a separate blog on the site and a wiki - is this something you see as strategic to the development of the site? - 25:25
And finally, looking ahead, what are the biggest changes you see coming down the line and how do you see them affecting ChinesePod? - 27:52
Scott Anderson is the Director of Enterprise Brand Communications for Hewlett-Packard - I just listened to the IT Conversations podcast of Scott Anderson’s talk at the Syndicate conference last December. Scott talked about business blogging and how HP got into it - it is a fascinating podcast, I strongly recommend you listen to it if you get a chance.
In the meantime, I’d love to interview Scott on the PodLeaders show - if anyone has contact details for him, please leave a comment or email me at tom@tomrafteryit.net
Episode 27 of the PodLeaders show - I decided to stop publishing the podcasts as a structured blog and instead publish them as a regular blog post. The structured blog posting was taking longer to post, was affecting the post’s presentation and i was not seeing any appreciable benefit from it - if you have any comments on this decision, please feel free to leave thm in the comments.
My guest on the show today is Kevin Burton, Kevin is the founder and CEO of TailRank - TailRank is a meme tracker - a site which tracks the main stories being written about on the blogosphere and ranks them by importance. Meme trackers can act a a powerful filter mechanism to help overcome information overload so I was interested to talk to Kevin about TailRank.
Here are all the questions I asked Kevin and the times in the interview I asked them:
Kevin - you might kick off with a little background on who Kevin Burton is and how you into this area… - 0:35
What is it that Tailrank does? - 1:23
And how do you define a top blog? 1:58
So it is a filter mechanism for people who are overburdened with information overload… - 2:37
Who are your target market with TailRank? - 3:20
Does TailRank have a business model? - 4:07
What do you see as the main differentiator between TailRank and Memeorandum? - 4:43
One of the main differentiators I would see between TailRank and Memeorandum is that Memeorandum has split out the politics and the tech side of things, is that something you are planning to address in TailRank as well? - 5:36
Questions from Damien Mulley:
Burtonator!
Tailrank is growing better and better and finally getting the recognition it deserves and about time too.
What I’d like to know though is how much work did you put into promoting Tailrank and getting people to recognise how good a service it is so that they’d write about it compared to the grunt work of coding it or did you let the application do the talking. Is the “let the application� do the talking method getting less and less attention now with the flood of web apps that are around the place? - 6:33
Which companiesand/or applications do you see as your main competitors and which apps do you see as complimentary to Tailrank? - 8:42
Your Golden Ticket idea - http://www.feedblog.org/2005/10/20_gets_you_a_t.html made you a quick few bucks but is it anything more than a short term method for getting some cash in to spend on necessities? How would you rate the success of it? Were there advantages and disadvantages to this? - 9:42
You’ve been very reticient about not handing over part of your company to investors (from what I make out). Is giving a large or small part of your company in exchange for cash a bad idea? Is this from personal experience or from what you have seen in the industry? How can one get investors and remain fully in control? - 11:34
How many people are in TailRank? - 13:42
A fun one (maybe). There’s been talk about the Sun being bought by Google rumour and how Digg and Memeorandom got gamed. How can one game Tailrank? Please note smilie face! - 14:39
Where do you see Tailrank fitting into the grand scheme of things. What do you see as being future steps for Tailrank? - 16:30
Bill Gates suffers an episode and instead of throwing chairs he gives you his cash stockpile. If there was one tech company out there that you could buy, what would it be and what would you do with it? - 18:05
And finally, looking ahead, what are the biggest changes you see coming down the line and how do you see them affecting TailRank? - 19:20
I’ll be interviweing Kevin Burton, founder and CEO of TailRank this evening for a podcast to be published here on PodLeaders.com later this week - if anyone has any questions for him, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll be sure to put them to him.
The short version is, if you don’t log in to your Hotmail account for more than 30 days, your email is deleted. Google’s Gmail has a similar policy but only if you don’t log in for over (a far more reasonable) 9 months. Also, Gmail allows you to collect your email using POP so my mail client logs into my Gmail account automatically several times a day. For the same service on Hotmail, you have to pay.
Geek News Central has for a long time been one of my favourite podcasts - it is run by Todd Cochrane out of Honolulu!
I contacted Todd recently and asked him if he would come on the show and he didn’t hesitate for a second - thanks Todd.
In the course of the interview, I asked Todd about the new site launch he has been hinting at in his last few podcasts and I’m delighted to say he gave me the exclusive on the site launch. The site is PodcastPromos.com and Todd talks it up 14 minutes 55 seconds into the interview.
Here are all the questions I asked Todd and the times in the interview I asked them:
Todd, can you give us a bit of background, who is Todd Cochrane and how did you get to be where you are today? - 0:52
People who listen to your podcast on Geek News Central often hear you refer to the day job - what is your day job? - 2:52
Geek News Central is part of the Tech Podcast Network - can you tell me something about that, what its background is and what its aims are? - 3:31
How many sites are in the Tech Podcast Network at the moment? - 6:26
Some sites reverted from being affiliate members because of the load put on them - what are the requirements for being an affiliate member? - 7:04
The PodStats program you mentioned - does that mean that the affiliates host their show on a Tech Podcast server? - 8:25
Where do you see business models going with Podcasting - what do you think is the one which is going to emerge long-term as the business model? - 9:36
You mentioned on your last couple of shows about a new site you are about to launch - can you talk about that? - 12:05
Questions submitted by Conn O’Muineachain:
What are the questions you see for the solo independent podcaster? - 19:12
I heard Todd in a podcast recorded at Doug Kaye’s Podcast Academy last november and he made a good point about the value of good equipment in cutting down on post-production time that can be better spent with one’s family. How long does it take in total to prepare, produce and publish an episode of Geek News Central? - 22:57
How do you keep up with all the news you read out on the site? - 27:19
Do you listen to podcasts yourself and if so, what podcasts do you listen to? - 29:13
What do you mean by you “download a category”? - 31:21
Do you have any non-tech hobbies? - 31:48
And finally, what’s the current story with the ghosts? - 32:51
My guest on the show today is CompuMentor’s Vice President of Knowledge Services Marnie Webb. Founded in 1987, CompuMentor helps nonprofit organisations to use technology more effectively to achieve their missions. I was fascinated with the idea of an organisation set up specifically to help nonprofits harness the power of technology so I asked Marnie to come on the show.
Here are the questions I asked Marnie and the times in the interview at which I asked them:
Marnie, can you start off by telling us what your background is and how you got into compumentor? - 0:30
What does compumentor do? - 2:03
How do you define a non-profit? - 3:52
Is there a difference between a non-profit, a non governmental organisation and a charity? - 4:36
How do non-profits deal with the licensing implications of paid-for software products as opposed to the free and open source models? - 5:04
You work with non-profit organisations around the world, how do they get in touch with you and what kind of practical assistance can you offer them? - 6:43
If I am setting up a social benefit organisation, and I want to kit out an office, do I approach TechSoup, is it a members thing or how does that work from a practical perspective? - 8:01
And has the emergence of Web 2.0 applications helped at all in rolling out technology? - 9:16
Are many using them and in what context are they using them? - 11:20
With the rollout of broadband we are seeing a growing digital divide, is that something affecting the NGO’s? - 13:14
In terms of disaster relief, are there pre-packed ICT kits which can be dropped into a zone to set people up with Internet access, etc.? - 15:25
What change have you seen in the last 3/4 years which most helps NGO’s set up an office - 18:39
Are there things coming down the road which are not quite here yet that will be of use to NGOs? - 21:04
Finally - do you have any non-tech related hobbies? - 23:37
Please note smilie face! - 14:39