Website: Check

I can’t believe my website is done.  I have been working on it and tweaking it for weeks.  Before that, I was thinking about it and making drawings of it.  So, the biggest thing wasn’t the aesthetics anymore.  The biggest thing was the publishing.  My hosting package let me add a site.  I conjured up a domain name that I liked and bought it.  And I realized using ftp (file transfer protocol) is pretty easy.  And so “POOF”, a website is born.  I’m still tweaking, but pretty soon, I’ll launch it and see if the idea is an attractive one.  Any comments you can give me, I’ll appreciate.

Music, Words and Attitude

I finished and posted the Raveonettes interview last night.  It was a long one (night, that is) .  It sounds great.  Also, I edited and posted an interview with Daniel Simpson.  Simpson was a reporter with the New York Times between 2001 and 2002.  He decided at about 6 weeks into his cushy job with an expense account, a nice apartment, a great salary, a jeep and the kind of cachet you can only have with the Grey Lady that he was being punked by her.  And it all kind of goes downhill for him from there.  But it was a great interview.  I told him about Andrea Seabrook, a former NPR reporter who also, in the parlance, has gone “native”, “over the wall” or whatever euphemism you want to use for being tired of being lied to.  She has a new blog called “DecodeDC” which I read.  And I found a picture of her holding a sign that I loved so much that I turned it into one of those iconic inspirational posters you see everywhere.    Yes, I’m convinced that the world runs not on money and made up not of atoms, but of stories.

Contingencies

Motivational Speaker Jim Rohn has said if you do something enough times, a ratio will appear.  So, while finishing my 10th interview so far, the PC crashed and deleted it.  Ten hours of work, gone.  So, does that mean I can expect that I’ll have to redo one out of every 10 interviews because of PC problems?  Is that one of those business contingencies that has to be figured into a production schedule?

Bringing Value

I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out a business page for Facebook, and converting a lot of the lists I built over the last few years into sharable content.  I love data, and I can sit in front of a PC for hours and build databases.  It’s a sickness.  But I have so many lists that I used to help the non profits I volunteered with, and to help me with my other business ventures that I decided to get in a usable form for other people.  I’ve got about 30 to start and I’ve already started scheduling them in Buffer.  I’ve got a nice mix of scheduled content that helps keep that wee hours internet presence I was talking about before.  I’ve got the promos for the interviews I’ve done (more are coming), I’ve got articles I’ve found about interviewing which I think are excellent, and I’ve got these lists that can help writers, artists and other producers find contacts and make contacts.  Why not share?

Gear

The gear I use and will use to do these interviews isn’t reliant on a location or a power supply to give good quality.  There is lots of top of the line portable equipment with the specs to rival anything you can get in a studio.  One piece in particular is the Yeti Pro from Blue Microphones.  For one, it’s gorgeous.  It harkens back to Radio Days from the 1930’s and 1940’s.  For another, it has four different audio pickup pattern settings and all of the controls, volume, mute, microphone gain and headphone preamp control are in the gadget itself.  And finally, it’s not all that expensive considering what you get.  A couple of these in a backpack, and a reasonably quiet place and you can do a terrific interview for a podcast or whatever.

The Raveonettes

Just did a great interview with Sune Rose Wagner of the Raveonettes.  What a conversation!  We covered a lot of ground, and I think you’ll really enjoy this interview.  It should be up in a few days.  Something he said, among all of the insightful things he said, was he enjoyed our talk because it wasn’t just about “facts.”  Nobody likes to be bombarded with discography and statistics when what they want to talk about is the music.  And he gets a lot of that.

The Worst Interview in the History of Radio Broadcasting

The Bryant Park Project was an NPR morning show that ran from about 2007 to 2008 and was promptly replaced by The Takeaway, a much slicker, faster, newsier program.  The BPP, co-hosted by Faith Sailee, was an experiment in how stodgy NPR could reach a younger, edgier audience.  The fact that the show isn’t around anymore proves they did some things wrong.  But, this autopsy of the worst interview in the history of radio, is one Oscar winning work they should be commended for.  Watch the interview and its dissection, and try not to cringe.

 

Conversation = Interview

What’s a conversation?  (1) Two people starting out by establishing their value in the other person’s eyes, (2) Agreeing on a common subject, (3) Accepting that the other person can competently talk with you about it, (4) Trying to satisfy the others emotional needs so you can get yours met (whether that means sharing practical information or an personal experience), and (5) Ending the conversation feeling good about it and yourself.  Most human interactions are this simple because we are this simple.  They don’t take long … minutes, maybe.  A bad one can wreck you day for hours, but a good one can power your life for days.

Waddya Mean?

Someone said, “Waddya mean video is not portable?’  I mean, it’s not portable if you’re moving, driving, climbing, playing or in motion (unless you’re a passenger).  It also isn’t portable if you’re trying to do something that you have to look at like read, care for children, use power tools, etc.  Video only works if you’re looking at it and that means you can’t do anything else.  So, video is pretty, and crippled.  Sound frees you and can do anything with you.

To Paraphrase A Character from a 007 Movie

Promos Galore!  Two left to do.  They take so long, but when they’re done, they are so versatile.  And this site I was telling you about, Buffer, also has analytics to show if anybody clicked on the links.  When I have the text only and a link to the full interview, it’s BORING to people.  Nobody clicked them.  The regular link looked like this:

Listen to my interview with Dwight Yoakam at http://www.soundcloud.com/interviewer-1.

But each simpler link got clicked.  The simpler and more effective link looks like this:

Country Music Legend Dwight Yoakam Soundbyte Here: http://www.dmassociates.biz/images/Dwight_Yoakam_Promo.mp3

It doesn’t look shorter, but with bit.ly, it is much.  And I say soundbyte because everybody knows a soundbyte is very short.  Besides, audio is so much more powerful than video.  These video links, I think, are a waste of time.  Sound is portable, not video.  Anyway, it’s promos and links for me.  That’s all the proof I need that they work.  Who would’ve though something from radio days could be resurrected for Twitter or FB?