pages | Croncast - Life is Show Prep

Structured Data: Follow-Up to Palegroove Blog Post

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:02:54 -0500

In the my previous post at Palegroove, "Improving your SEO with RSS in 3 easy steps," I shared some insight about how to setup your RSS feed URL's so that they are search engine friendly. After reading the post again, well, I missed explaining why search spiders like feeds so much. The answer is structured data.

PC Magazine defines structured data as, "Data that resides in fixed fields within a record or file. Relational databases and spreadsheets are examples of structured data. Contrast with unstructured data." I'm sure a future revised version will include XML or RSS ;-).

When your content is placed into feeds it has the benefit of being described by a template - structured data. It is described by elements in the feed the same as mine, CNN.com, Apple, Microsoft or anyone else with a RSS feed. RSS is the ubiquitous, defacto standard for syndication. The simplicity of RSS as a standard to describe your content's title, description, dates, content, enclosures, etc makes it a magic API for search engines, developers and database administrators. Your website doesn't do this. It is full of unstructured data.

On your site the post titles could be in a h1-6 tag, div or a legacy table cell with a style applied to it. This makes it harder for search engines to understand your content. Sure, there are insanely engineered algorithms that are in place to create associations between the content on your site and the code that is used to display it, but RSS makes it uniform and much easier for search companies to cache, categorize, rank and re-syndicate your ideas. The primary reason is that the feed describes the data types instead ot telling a browser how to display it.

So, like I said in the last post, "Treat your feeds with the same care that you do your pages," with the caveat that maybe you need to treat them better because the next iteration of the web is being built on structured data.

Tags: RSS SEO structured data feeds seo

Season 19 Ep 13: The Coffee Drinker, Whip Antennae, CB Radio Booty Call

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:54:53 -0600

Croncast - 2008-02-06.mp3
Show: #459
Length: 29:08
Size: 20.0mb
Format: mp3

Show us some love and leave us a review at iTunes

BigJon wanted to know who "The Coffee Drinker" is
Suspense, I don't how we did it
The Coffee Drinker background
Has something to do with CB Radios
The big whip antennae's on trucks
If you had two you were the shit
So some ladies would come on night and ask for "The Coffee Drinker"
We thought it might be a kid like us
A sophisticated kid drinking Folgers with their folks
Could have been the farmers having coffee
Water and syrup falls on ice in cup
Too much for a small town person to handle
Yeah, you need training to run the fountain soda dispenser
The old guys brought in a scanner
The Coffee Drinker wouldn't reply back
Of course he wouldn't
Kris, you need some help
Get yourself something nice when I don't talk
Cruising around in the morning
How do you know who his kid is?
Bill had some issues
He had rebel flag stickers on his car, no one really liked him and he listened to too much AC/DC
He says, that The Coffee Drinker was his dad
His dad tilled my garden every year
Is that why you are the way you are?
Maybe I should have said tilled my mom's garden
You gotta use the lingo
Smokey and the bandit style
A CB radio booty call
It's not the one that you are thinking of
They are like nannies
Small town = "Not my business"
I think I need to resurrect this story
You can't just end there
You have to come with conviction
Your car won't want to stop
These people just let life happen to them
Until something forces them to move on
No lapping waves at their shore
Lots of driving around happens
He pulled you over because he wanted to talk to you
Where I'm from men can't do that
You're with that Smith boy, ain't you
Johnny law vs. the high school kids
Typical
They don't have any training
This is how you hit'em with the yellow pages
This is how you hit'em with the white pages
He was throwing the beers out the sun roof
Straight up in the air
The cop is dodging our beer cans
You left a trail of beer crumbs for him to follow
It was late at night they could have been anyone's beers
There were a lot of drunk bunnies and chipmunks the next morning
What should you do in that situation?
Full circle in your life would be becoming the town cop

The Resale Queen Podcast is now here! Every Saturday by 9 a.m. CST

View Kris's resume or download it

Tags: CB Radio The Coffee Drinker rebel flag stickers drunk bunnies sun roof

What good are 3 hits from Google search results?

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:56:11 -0600

I can tell you. It all depends on what people are searching for.

Painfully obvious, right?

Well, not so much when someone searches at Google for intitle:"chocolate" ext:rss. The odds are astronomically high that even chocolate experts weren't even returned as results. See for yourself.

So what does this mean? It means that someone searched Google for a RSS feed (ext:rss) with the word chocolate in the title (intitle:"chocolate").

Yes, the search is more advanced than a keyword or phrase based search but that isn't my full point. The reason that it matters is that not only did this individual search for chocolate but also culture and abba. Not quite sure what it says about the person searching for those topics . . .

So for me, these three hits matter. They are three more than I would have normally received for those topics and a chance for me to get them to possibly subscribe to those feeds, subscribe to my podcast, click an ad (yes, I like money) or get my brand in front of them.

I am able to do this with keyword feeds that I create dynamically from posts that get the same SEO treatment that a normal webpage would get.

The other plus for this type of search is the fact that they return so few results and Croncast happens to be ranked #1 for most of them including searches like, say . . . "CNN" or "Micorsoft" or "iTunes".

I've had conversations with a friend, Rick Klau, about RSS feeds being indexed in Google search results. Most of those discussions focused on my saying that feeds should show up in search results and Rick saying that they shouldn't.

My stance is that some people, like myself, benefit from these results the same way that we benefit from a normal click through to our sites. I am able to do this by checking where the individual who clicked through is coming from and displaying a web page instead of the RSS with the exact same data that was in the feed.

But I don't stop there. I also make sure to let the user know how they got to the page and that they can now subscribe to that feed. It's a soft landing for what traditionally has been a hard look at XML or ugly feed displays in browsers. Which is where you will end up with 99.9 out of 100 feeds if you click through them when returned in a search.

What is Rick's position? If 99.9 are bad then they should be removed. For the time being I will agree that he is right. But that doesn't mean that this is the way it always has to be.

A couple of things could change this:

1) The uptake of RSS since IE7 and and FireFox now display their own XSLT to prettify the XML. Sort of like FeedBurner does.
2) Publishers add their own XSLT for their feeds
3) Publishers using blogs, most of which are dynamically generated, are written with code that can check for referers like Goolge, Live and Yahoo and redirect the user to a page that has the same content as the feed
4) My favorite. Google could create their own XSLT document that loads the feed into it.

Maybe that was more than a couple but I believe there are a lot of ways to welcome feeds into indexed search results beyond having to type in a search like intitle:"Google" ext:rss.

By the way, I'm not number one on this one Google is with it's YouTube property.

Next up, how to create RSS feeds with keywords in the title, how to get the .rss extension added to your feeds and landing pages for feeds.

Tags: RSS search page rank Google search RSS XSLT FeedBurner

Status of Tweetair

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:49:24 -0600

For those of you that were following my project, tweetair, it might appear that not much progress has been made. Unfortunately, there has been progress but not of the type that is conducive to bringing tweetair online.

Basing the main functionality of tweetair on the twitter API seemed to be a safe bet until I began working with it extensively. When I put the project down for about 3 weeks and came back to it some of the core functionality that tweetair requires had been removed. Not removed from the documentation but the API itself.

I found this out after a couple days. I thought it was my code that was causing the problem but after a message exchange with Alex at twitter he let me know that the feature had been turned off. He let me know that it should return, however, he doesn't know when. That's why they left my desired feature, pagination, in the API help docs. Turns out that I'm not crazy, I just didn't know.

The reason that pagination is so important is that it can return more than minimum of 20 results per API query. With pagination I could do multiple queries across 2-3 pages and get 40-60 results. A useful number that means fewer dropped tweets on an active channel. But the high number of results, as Alex stated, are the reason that pagination has been turned off.

It sucks, but I understand why. Twitter offers access to this API for free. And not just that but the impact that the API and extensive calls can have a major impact on Twitter's overall performance like locking up databases.

For what it's worth, if pagination comes back or new features are added to the API that make it possible to get more results then I will get back on tweetair full force. But until then I will move on to another small project and come back to it with the mind set of removing the Twitter connected piece and make it a standalone app.

Tags: Twitter API pages Tweetair API pagination

Betsy and her husband Kris Nov 05, 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:18:32 -0600

Croncast - 2007-11-05.mp3
Show: #429
Length: 30:35
Size: 21.0mb
Format: mp3

Betsy and her husband Kris Nov 05, 2007

Show us some love and leave us a review at iTunes

Betsy sneaks up on you . . .be prepared
Happy Birthday Mr. Mark Chernesky!
The Strawberry Short Cake house
I know why you are stuck in the 80's now
Explain what is on the table
Fisher Price loving family Beatle
Left Behind the kids series
More fear for your kids
The kids wonder if they will ever make it home
End of times, end of days whatever
I need to write a kids book
All about death
Three pages - you were born, you lived and you died
How can you be that grumpy?
What?
Yeah the morning didn't start so good
Maggie at a refillable pencil part
We spent morning at the emergency room
Sure now you want to tell me that I am a bad mommy
Betsy is full of the venom today
Kenny Logins and Annette Funicello made a teddy bear
They are friends with Kenny Rogers
What?
Everyone in the biz is friends with Kenny Rogers
That bears purrty
More venom
Tubs of the Christmas stuff thanks to Unitarians
Yeah, I don't want to look at it
Maggie might end up eating this stuff
Kris is listening just not paying attention
Vickie was important to have for Wheel of Fortune auditions
How am I bad at the improv?

Audience Survey, please fill this out for us
Look for the graphic on "Audience Survey" on the main page

Tags: Strawberry Short Cake Mark Chernesky Kenny Logins emergency room Annette Funicello

Naperville nerd posse member gets more ink

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:08:59 -0500

Fellow Naperville nerd and flafoo.com halfsie, Mike Marusin, will be getting some ink very soon. The online version of an article that he appears, "Is it time to move to the suburbs?," by David Hochman, is up already but it'll be hitting the stores and mailboxes soon on the pages of Details magazine.

Nerds are real men too.

I had no idea House of Pain drove Mike and Liz to the suburbs but I can see how that is likely with the confluence of rap addicted white kids from the suburbs that migrate to the city . . . to be cool.

Maybe this is the new circle of life? I can't wait for the National Geographic video on this.

Tags: Mike Marusin David Hochman Details magazine Naperville flafoo

Making things yellow - Croncast Stickers

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 21:37:22 -0500

All is quiet on the sticker front tonight. But Tuesday it should be hopping when the stickers arrive.

Send some support loot from the banner on the pages in the amount of $5.00 and we'll send you out 3 stickers. That is:

1 for your cube
1 for your car
1 for your dog

These stickers will make you smarter and encourage other drivers to tailgate.

Tags: stickers croncast life is show prep support the show loot

Move to Naperville and hang with us

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:28:35 -0500

Speaking of Mr. Klau, you can purchase his former abode here in Naperville. With this purchase you can not only have beautiful home with a sweet basement bar but you can hang with some of Naperville's finest nerds.

If you buy it, yes you reading this post, you'll get a dinner for two with Betsy and I to give you the dirt on your new town. Rick, Robin, this will sell your house!

This I lifted this from Rick's post about the house (if you are a Democrat check out the last line of this post):

And maybe most significantly, we loved how close we were to some of Napervilles gems: Ribfest (walking distance to that most gluttonous of charitable events!), Last Fling (seeing They Might Be Giants a couple years ago was a highlight), and the Riverwalk. We spent a ton of time walking around downtown - between the library (#1 in the country!), the restaurants, Andersens bookshop, events like Oktoberfest, there were plenty of opportunities - which was just a mile away.

We added a bit of history to the house, hosting Barack Obama for a fundraiser during his 2004 Senate run.

Tags: Naperville Homes Ribfest Barack Obama Rick Klau Andersen's Bookshop

Smartphone absurdity, I want just one

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:23:33 -0500

I didn't realize how absurd this smartphone crap was until the day before yesterday. We have a potential client using Blackberries as podcast players. Which was no big deal since I worked on a solution a few years ago at my day job but I needed to get the same version as the client. Hence a new radiation hot spot for my palm.

Now in the house:

1 Treo 700 (mine, Verizon)
1 xv6700 (Betsy, Verizon)
1 iPhone (work, AT&T)
1 Blackberry 8703e (work, Sprint)

Two of them are for work, like I marked them above, but it is ridiculous. They all do like one thing better than the others, one carrier's plan is better priced or the network makes all the difference. What do I mean?

Best sounding as a phone:
1. Treo
2. iPhone
3. Blackberry
4. xv6700 (horrible)

Ease of use as a phone:
1. iPhone (my mother-in-law could use it)
2. Treo
3. Blackberry
4. xv6700 (need 3 hands to make a call)

Ease of use overall:
1. iPhone
2. Blackberry
3. Treo
4. xv6700

Best OS:
1. xv6700 (windows mobile 5.0, too bad everything else about it sucks)
2. iPhone
3. Treo
4. Blackberry

Best media playback:
1. iPhone (wonder why?)
2. xv6700
3. Treo
4. Blackberry

Best keypad:
1. Blackberry (update: thanks Garrick for pointing out I misspelled it the first time -LOL)
2. Treo
3. xv6700
4. iPhone (it's pretty . . . hard to use quickly)

Best sms device:
1. Treo
2. Blackberry
3. xv6700
4. iPhone

Best email device:
1. Blackberry
2. Treo (would be third if AT&T edge were faster)
3. iPhone (on wifi this is second)
4. xv6700

Best web device (network):
1. Treo (doubles as EV-DO modem, love it)
2. xv6700 (doubles as EV-DO modem, never used it)
3. iPhone
4. Blackberry (locked into a special start page, blah and doubles as EVDO modem but Sprint rates are insane)

Best web device (wifi):
1. iPhone (experience much like real browsing
2. xv6700 (fast but reformats pages)
The other two are AWOL with no wifi capability

Best camera:
1. iPhone
2. Treo
3. xv6700
Blackberry is without

Best network:
1. Verizon
2. Sprint
3. AT&T

Best overall:
1. iPhone
2. Treo
3. Blackberry
4. xv6700

Taking all of this into consideration and my experience with all four operating systems and form factors, I have decided that my ultimate phone and carrier combo would look something like this:

An iPhone on Verizon's network, use as EV-DO modem, with an add on keypad and GPS onboard. That would get an 'ooh la la' and an amen.

Tags: iPhone xv6700 Treo 700 Blackberry 8703e Verizon EVDO Sprint GPS

Hella code day

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:59:08 -0500

I spent the bulk of my free time today knocking out code on the site.

Things were just clicking today for some reason and I couldn't let it go. I think it is easier than ever to get to all the content in the site.

Maybe it's the Grinderman?

comments RSS feed and respective page
cleaned up all feeds and urls to make them more human readable - for example www.croncast.com/all.rss instead of www.croncast.com/feedbuffet/all/feed.php
setting feeds that are indexed by search engines to redirect to the internal Croncast search page if they are clicked from google, yahoo, aol and others (this is a big deal since many of the people clicking these links have no clue what rss is especially porno seekers. example page 3 of these google results search for "spice channel" resullt 21 is a keyword feed . . . copy the url and add it to your reader and it works no problem, click it and it will take you to the same results as the feed but only at the website, nice)
added the unique feed to the internal search results for those who have been referred by a search engine
added the unique feed to the internal search results for regular users button looks like this - example Kris Smith
created new includes for blog, podcast, news and all content archives so they can plug and play on any page
re-ordered the navigation
created a two new archive pages - one for navigation of all content with pseudo categories and the other as a master archive of shows by month
edited internal search results page to recognize when referrer is a search engine to display a message that explains what Croncast
added another adwords box to the search results after item 7 in the returned results
tons of other mundane stuff for tracking keyword feeds and referrers

Up for tomorrow

new rss page
moderated media rss (mmrss) creation tool, for listeners (it's going to be sick)
new contact page
new "people say" section for listeners to leave reviews
new db table to hold mobile browsers to redirect for rss

Tags: croncast mmRSS rss archives keyword rss feed rss seo rss redirect

Ron asks, 'What Equipment Do You Use?'

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 13:27:57 -0600

It's been a while since I talked about the equipment that I use and no time seems better than now thanks to this question:

"Can you tell me what microphones and mixer you use to record Croncast? (I heard the "expensive" microphone show recently and I had to laugh--I'm more interested in two microphones that are in the $100-$125 price range [each]).
Thanks!," Ron

Here's what currently makes up my audio signal path, hardware and software for Croncast.

2 - Marshall MXL 2003 microphones (Ron, for an extra $25 you won't be disappointed) [link]
2 - Universal Audio 6176 channel strips w/ preamp and compressor [link]
1 - PreSonus Firepod [link]
1 - Sony VGC-RB62G computer [link]
1 - Sony Sound Forge 8 audio editor [link]
1 - Waves L2 Ultramaximizer mastering compressor [link]
1 - Sony Vegas 6 multitrack for putting show together [link]
1 - Xing MP3 encoder (included in Vegas) encoded to Joint Stereo, 96 Kbps at 44.1 KHz
1 - MP3 Tag Tools to edit ID3 tags [link]
1 - iTunes to add more meta-data specific to iTunes (I can explain way below this)

This is what takes a Croncast from nothing to something.

Here's the breakdown.

Marshall Electronics MXL 2003 [link] microphones . . . I recommend these mics to everyone that asks. And after recently cheating on them with a Neumann U87ai I like them even more. With a price tag of $149 at most dealers you can't go wrong. We've used them now for two years and I own five of them. The sound is clear, they knock a lot of ambient noise down and their pick up pattern is second to none with a great low end and limited high end. The mic comes with a bass cut and a -10dB pad switch that can help when finding the right sound for your voice and recording space. These are phantom power microphones so I need a preamp.

Universal Audio 6176 [link] analog channel strip with 610 Tube Microphone preamp and 1176LN compressor. These two units are a new piece to the puzzle. They've replace the dbx 166XL that I was using for some limiting. The 6176's bring a nice warm sound to the shows that the 166XL didn't have. Most studios use them for recording bass tracks or heating up/distorting some vocals but I prefer them on a little lower setting to add a level bass and compression to our voices that would take me a couple of hours to create in post production through eq and other plug-ins.

PreSonus Firepod [link] is a 24-bit/96K FireWire recording interface with 8 preamplifiers (8 XLR/line inputs with phantom power). I originally bought this to replace an M-Audio MobilePre that was flaking out and causing intermittent popping in tracks. The reason that I chose the Firepod was primarily the 8 XLR inputs with phantom power to multitrack instead of force output to a single stereo track . . . a huge plus when recording more than 4 voices for a show. Also, if the UA 6176 wasn't part of the signal chain anymore I could live with the sound, I did for five months.

Sony VGC-RB62G [link] Intel Dual Core 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM. I've done little modification of this box other than adding a new video card, an extra FireWire card, a gig of RAM and a second hard drive. Usually, I prefer to build my own computer but was in the middle of the Alltel Racing Podcast when the old one died and I needed something right away. I went to Fry's and this box was best thing that they had in stock that met my requirements. It is or was sold as a Media PC and came with remote, surround speaker set up and more software than I could care to have (primarily the shit that just gums up the system). The only complaint that I have had so far with this computer is that every input in the back of it USB, FireWire or 1/8' has a ton of electrical noise in it when used for recording. I am forced to use the front 4 pin FireWire input for what should normally be a transparent sound recording.

Sony Sound Forge 8 [link] audio editor. This is the software that I record the shows into. I have been using Sound Forge for the last 7 years. When I got my first computer in 1999 at age 25 I learned how to use it by working with Steinberg's WaveLab (another great audio editor) but late in that year switched to Sound Forge. WaveLab had a lot of great features but they never compared the bundle of plug-ins that came with or for Sound Forge. WaveLab relied on the VST model and Sound Forge on Direct-X which meant that there were also more plug-ins to choose from. The killer plug-in was the Noise Reduction tool that prior to version 7 (maybe 6) wasn't bundled with the license. It is the best noise reduction tool on the market. I've heard most of the rest first hand, even the ones used in million dollar studios and would still choose the one in Sound Forge. I don't use Noise Reduction on our show but when doing post on audio recorded out of the studio I use it about 90% of the time.

Waves L2 Ultramaximizer [link] mastering compressor. Yep, I already ran the audio signal through an amazing compressor in the 6176 but the L2 puts the finishing touches on the wav file before I close out Sound Forge. This plug-in is the secret in my sauce. I have used it for about four years and find it's sound brighter, more open and louder than any other including Ozone 2 or 3 (which is an attempt to recreate the sound at a lower cost).

Sony Vegas 6 [link] multitrack video editor. Video? Did Kris just say, video? I sure did. When this product was first developed by Sonic Foundry it started out as a multitrack audio mastering suite that was supposed to be an upgrade from their Acid line of software. That didn't quite work out and they released a second version for video. With two competing versions on the market they made the wise decision to morph them together into Vegas Video, Sonic Foundry was bought by Sony and the rest is history. I use Vegas basically the same way that I use Dreamweaver for coding pages, as a template. All i have to do for Croncast is plug in each new recording on the timeline and poof there is a fully mastered show.

Xing MP3 encoder (included in Vegas) all shows are encoded to Joint Stereo, 96 Kbps at 44.1. This lowest quality that I will encode my own work to or for that of a client. This range is somewhat higher than many podcasters will recommend for a speech driven show but I find that anything less sound hollow and purely focuses on midrange sounds. Blah. At a bit rate lower than 96 Kbps most audio encoders, like this one, won't allow for a sample rate of 44.1 KHz. I used to encode the shows to a lower value two years ago when we first started but then iTunes came to town and studios started cranking out CD quality audio files. Once that bar was raised I figured it was okay for me to join that party.

MP3 Tag Tools [link] to edit ID3 tags. It is open source and the best ID3 tag editor that I have found. It will allow you to make changes to version 1 and 2 tags that will cover most of the popular media players like WinAmp, Windows Media Player and iTunes. It'll even let you add up to 18 images per file in the album art that can be displayed in iTunes.

iTunes for adding iTunes specific data to the ID3 tag. Didn't you already do this? Sort of. iTunes uses on the variances of the ID3 V2 tag standard to display meta data that is included with the MP3.

That is it friends. Once all that crap has happened it is time to upload the show to the server, fire up Castlock, start adding show notes and then make the show available for download.

Tags: MXL 2003 Universal Audio 6176 PreSonus Firepod Waves L2 Ultramaximizer Sony VGC-RB62G

She went kaboom

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 20:31:53 -0600

Something happened. At least I noticed something happened. Croncast blew up in Internet Explorer with crazy JavaScript errors. Sorry for those of you using IE6 or 7.

I'm not sure when the problem began but it is fixed now thanks to Paul Wall. Turns out the problem was the Flash player that I had in all the pages. Who'd-a-thunk that the browser was actually parsing scripts that are in Flash?

I've got a stop-gap Flash player, that pretty thing above (ha!) from a previous client project. Maybe in a day or two I'll get it cleaned up for find another one.

Tags: Flash MP3 Player Internet Explorer errors Flash player 8 Paul Wall javascript errors

Betsy and her husband Kris Sep 18, 2006

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 07:02:35 -0500

Croncast - 2006-09-18.mp3

Show: #275
Length: 36:28
Size: 25.0 mb
Format: mp3

Betsy and her husband Kris September 18, 2006

0% September 11th drama around here
Kris says I'm not dealing with it
His usual process it takes him a week to ge it
Last week was the NFL podcast launch
Special Note: You will only be able to see the podcast pages not the other areas of the sites.
Larry Fitzgerald
Joe Jurevicius
Joe Horn
Steve Smith
Betsy could hold it down
Except when she sees money coming in and then slows her ebay stuff
Betsy's Hebrew Green Eggs and Ham
Kris thinks it is the score of the century . . . better than 1st edition Torah
Where's Waldo in French
Things not to do: Tree trimming 9:30 at night in the dark
The family is oout doin it up
Trimming the night before dries out the branches
The dog is even with us
Zeus starts to spaz out
Running in loops
He starts a run at Gigi like a crazed horse
He hits her and she does a flip and lands on her head and back
Betsy saves her dog with a shout
Kris gets to Gigi and her mouth is bleeding
She made out great with only the little cut
Kris goes on about his lack of responisibility when it comes to safety from the dog
I had to restrain myself
Betsy got the lecture about "Next Time"
Please let me finish
For some reason Betsy doesn't understand Elliot's lack of love for the dog . . . hmmm
Betsy tried to leave her sister for hobos
The chili cook-off and Kris telling the neighbor he is not social
Betsy came to my rescue as usual
My new 14 ft saw
Not replacing Slowsky . . . supplementing
6 years, 1 month worth of ebay stuff still in Betsy's stash

1) Fill out the appropriate form for you - *New* Listener or Get a Handle (current listener)
2) Verify your email address (Activates and qualifies those with a "Handle")
3) *New* listeners get activated and qualified by using their special RSS feed
4) 300th new listener and the person whose Handle they use win iPods AND
5) A drawing for 2 more iPods from everyone who entered!

Tags: tree trimming NFL podcasts Hebrew Green Eggs and Ham Zeus Croncast

Croncast - Betsy and her husband Kris 106

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 05:46:50 -0500

Croncast - 2005-08-08.mp3

Show: #147
Length: 35:04
Format: mp3
Bit rate: 64 kbs
Size: 16.1mb

Croncast - Betsy and her husband Kris 106

Project Day
Why next time I am going to look for a husband
in the yellow pages
under "Handyman"
Just kidding Kris
Toilet Installation 101
Chance of house fire 30%
Why you shouldnt do anything yourself
Why cant we figure that out
Uh Oh its our anniversary
and we forgot
at least I did
again...

While we wait you can check out the new Flash Player with a Croncast playlist.

Tags: croncast husband kris betsy cant

Croncast - Susan and her friend Kris Ep. 1

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 08:21:52 -0600

Croncast - 2004-12-20.mp3

Length: 38:16
Format: mp3
Bit rate: 64k
Size: 17.5 mb

Croncast - Susan and her friend Kris Ep. 1

Today's guest is Susan Manning, manning.susan@comcast.net. The topics for discussion today are based around Susan's work with audio for ESL students, professional development and a bit on women in podcasting. I keep forgetting to mention Nicole Simon and owe her an apology!

I think. Ill have to listen to the show again but we do have some fun.

Today's Show

Intro
Susan ain't sweet
Susan teaches technology for the University of Illinois
White knuckles about podcast
The experiment and two pages of notes, typed
Auditory learners
Priming the scenario discussion
Meeting the team for scenario
Kris is good with the names
Dr. Susan Manning busting it out
Doctorates are expected
Pull me out of the quicksand, Susan
Scenario based learning
Engaging the learner through story and script
Getting groups to work effectivley in an online course
Dialogue and media in online learning
Novelty can move the students along
Susan teaches ESL
Frenchies gave us Wimba
Susan slinks away
Susan breaks down using Wimba
Grading papers using Wimba
Wimba Wimba Wimba
The Wimba party for ESL
Now they want to meet
Identifying one another by voice
White man sits here and says he's not in power
Sometimes the accent can stop'em
Women and podcasting begins . . . now
Communication and play, boys vs. girls
Women will say it differently
People with bad thoughts or no thoughts just want to talk
What's up with the iPod mini? It's fo' ladies.
Will there be another digital divide with mp3 devices?
Devices will be a social status - more ubiquitous than a cd player
Susan, Betsy and Amy on Skype conference call . . . maybe

Tags: susan wimba esl scenario kris

Croncast - Kris goes solo Ep. 10

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 12:10:52 -0600

Croncast- 2004-12-06.mp3

Length: 21:00
Format: mp3
Bit rate: 64k
Size: 9.62 mb

Croncast - Kris goes solo Ep. 10 is general nerdery, a bit about the music business and PBS Frontline. Mixed with all of the shout outs and plugs for podcasting and podcasters.

Today's Show

Intro
Kris remebers to give URL's
No special for today, Friday
PBS HD Frontline "the way the music died"
The wrong and how podcasters can help fix it
Plug the Podfly.com and Gary Bibb
Podcast.net redesign, newbie friendly
Podcastalley.com redesign and forums
In studio with Broken Vegas
Music industry dollar advances - hint: walk away
The formula
What's up for this week's shows

Tags: music croncast kris pbs redesign