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05/18/06 Meeting Notes

  • We’re not actually sure now whether Scott is coming or not. He may be home sick.

    Attendees:

  • AW: Amanda Watlington
  • FF: Felipe dal Fiore
  • MW: Mike Walsh
  • Adam: Adam Weiss (from Museum of Science, podcaster)
  • JF: Jon Francis – works at gather.com
  • LP: Lindsay Pettingville – GSE researcher – interested in digital media, kids & digital media, ethics etc.
  • BS: Brett Stilwell
  • EG: Erica George
  • SE: Silke Ernst – Swiss researcher visiting Berkman
  • j: j Baumgart
  • V: Vernica

    Agenda:

  • Scott not able to be here
  • Adam will talk some instead!
  • Adam: http://www.mos.org/cst
  • Adam: podcast, live tv news twice a week on NECN, lots of guest speakers, etc.
  • Adam: while they don’t use it as a blog all that technically, they use wordpress to run their news website. because it’s easy, built in CMS, fits with what they want to do, free. mainly just an easy way to publish.
  • Adam: weekly podcast is a science news show. they have an episode with a physics researcher who studies time travel! at an MIT talk recently, they were the only media covering it.
  • Adam: also do a quicktime video podcast. they use the podpress plugin to allow the audio & video on wordpress.
  • Adam pulls out a totally super shiny sweet speakers thingie he got for being an instructor at a podcast academy at BU, so he can play audio for us since the conf room computer’s not hooked up w speakers.
  • (it has fun music)
  • Adam: we get all sorts of guests, try for at least one guest researcher/show. 2 interviews/show. one is usually with a museum staff member expert on an area in the news lately. try to be topical on current news cycle.
  • Adam: the video podcast right now is just our tv spot. we’d like to do more but it’s a lot more intensive to do a video than audio cast
  • Lindsay: how do you track views etc
  • Adam: we don;t do trackbacks etc for our site cos we don’t really use it as a blog. the mos.org site has a lot of stats software, but i don;t know the backend.
  • Lindsay: do use use creative commons licensing?
  • Adam: our stuff right now we haven;’t specified a license so it’s default copyrighted to us. we do let people use it.
  • EG: what about your music?
  • Adam: I worked on stuff that was public domain already in garage band
  • AW: do you track your rss?
  • Adam: no. because we don;t find that info as useful as tracking downloads of the podcast & hits to the website. also the system is pre-rss reporting.
  • AW: burn the feed and own it to see those stats
  • Adam: the podcast has about 2,000 downloads/week
  • Adam: we only get our stats once a week. we were once up at 3,000 but had some server problems which knocked it back down for a while
  • MW: why do it?
  • Adam: i thought it was cool. we didn;’t have a podcast and i thought we should. i like radio. i had no training but i wanted to try it.
  • MW: why not try to get ontop npr?
  • Adam: initially we weren;t good enough. but we’re getting better. we’ve considered doing things with PRX.
  • AW: what about your bandwidth issues? i know folks who run large podshows who’ve had to seek external bandwidth, mostly thru limelight. it can mushroom pretty fast.
  • Adam: we put them out on friday afternoons cos they run on the same pipes as ticketing, and we don;t want to crash people’s ability to buy tickets! and we’re upgrading, and if we get really popular, the bandwidth will be worth paying for. we’re in the top 1 percent of all science podcasts, top 50 science on itunes, most popular museum podcasts, etc. so we do want to grow the user base even more. and we want to prepare for the bandwidth issue.
  • Adam: we want to be popular enough that we have to address the bandwidth issue.
  • MW: do you know what the geogrpahic spread of your downloads is?
  • Adam: we know we have a lot from california, a lot from around the world. we can’t tell tho about what traffic from .edu or other schools etc.
  • MW: you’ll want to be able to get that kind of stat, to show your usefulness to the museum management
  • Adam: we try to be the premier museum of science. we try to develop curricula the entire country can use. we mean to have a much broader reach than just Boston area. We are trying to become a wroldwide elader in science and technology education. the podcast helps. the fact that w eknow what’s going on in the news and show it can help with that.
  • Adam: we don’t advertise for anything actually happening at the museum or anywhere on the show. we do mention free events and that’s all. but we try not to do that too much to respect the wider geographic audience. we try to be very journalistic. we don’t talk about the museum on the NECN tv spots despite that we do them live from the museum.
  • Lindsay: you say this isn’t really a blog but a news service. do you hope to turn it into a communityt space or is that separate?
  • Adam: we won’;t comment on the news, but we want to implement that for our viewers. we don;’t know exactly how we’ll do it. afraid it could be overwhelming to polic in terms of our user base. we’re planning to experiment a little.
  • Amanda: put a captcha on it, force them to provide an email, that will slow people down and make them think before posting
  • Lindsay: would you edit for content int he comments?
  • Adam: just for offensive comments. if someone says something wrong about science, we’ll go in and let them know what’s wrong, not edit their post or delete it
  • Adam: at least to start we plan to mod the comments, just to be safer, as a family friendly org
  • Adam: about 3/4 of our listeners use some podcatcher software. we think msot of our traffic comes thru itunes. we have about 2/3 of people using itunes as the software to get the shows.
  • Adam: we come up near the top for science and newsy words in itunes.
  • JF: what do you do with prx?
  • Adam: nothing yet, because i need to work out the details still with that and make sure everyone at the mos is ok with it
  • Adam: we’ll do phone interviews when we have to but we try to get ppl into the studio as much as we can
  • Adam: we record directly to the computer. we have a software filter for the noisy environment – the studio is actually in a server room. we have to shut off the a/c while we’re in there, and there’s a transformer we can’t shut off. not ideal for sound recording.
  • AW: what do you do postproduction?
  • Adam: garage band. it’s free, and we do it the way people at home can do it. i want to use the software a home user could use it, so we can tell them how and they can learn. we’re an educational institution. we’re a mac system. we have a good computer and it’s only for recording when we use it for recording.
  • Adam: some of the equipment is my own stuff (EG: ditto for BErkman and Colin R, our spiffy podcast producer!)
  • Adam: I devote about 25 percent of my time to the podcast
  • Adam: my other responsibilities are general part of the media team (live tv spots, getting guest speakers, speaking on tv about science, etc.)
  • Adam: we are separate from the web dept. we have a web & new media team that runs the main MoS site which is entirely different. we are now linked from the bottom of the main page.
  • Adam: no rss on the museum main site. our site is the only rss site on the museum servers.
  • Adam: 1.5 million in person visitors to the museum/year.
  • Adam: we have had some talks about creative commons, etc. but it’s not finalized
  • AW: why don;t you tell ppl how long it is, how large the file is
  • Adam: ppl can learn about podcasts on our page about podcasts. we assume if you’re gonna listen you kinda know what they are.
  • AW: but alsways say how large the file, how long – it’d be a good best practice
  • Adam: not really a conscious decision. but my immediate reaction is that ppl know a podcast is a marginally big file.
  • Adam: we can;’t edit the wp code – the web team has to do that – so it’s an extra layer to go thru to make changes.
  • Lindsay: does the standalone player come with wp?
  • Adam: it’s a plug-in
  • EG: you may just need to get connevted to the right volunteer to tweak your code for you, so the web team just has to plug it in
  • general agreement that the mos web team should learn about rss, and get volunteer to help with the wordpress tweak, and send the web team to bar camp.
  • http://barcamp.org/BarCampBoston june 3-4 in maynard
  • some more discussion of things geeky and explanations of the fubar/foo/bar thingy… leads to mentuoning y combinator…
  • Adam: my dept aims entirely at adults – we’re educational, for adults. our dept is specifically adult ed. we expect people to know a little bit about science – what you;d learn from going to public school & remembering a little. ie, have an idea what dna is, but not needing to know how it works.
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