For the past eight days, I’ve been participating in the Dog Days of Podcasting challenge issued by the awesome folks over at Technorama. It’s been an interesting experience staying current in a podcasting project but having folks following up on my progress. It’s starting to make me think more about how I work with my audio blog podcast and where I want to take it in the future once the project is done. I’ve worked on and off for the past 2 years on the project and the past five on the site itself and I realize how much I could pull from both sources if I set myself to it.
First, a few bits of backstory. The Dog Days challenge started with Kreg Steppe reviewing Chuck Tomasi’s personal audio blog, Freestyle. Kreg made the observation (and I confirmed on my pod reader) that Chuck hadn’t posted an episode in a year and somewhere along the way challenged Chuck to work on getting something out each day. Chuck countered the challenge and Kreg opened the challenge on the Podcast Community on Facebook. That’s where I saw it and jumped in. We’ve all posted various sizes of episodes, although I love Chuck’s hard limit of three minutes, and the topics are becoming more and more scattered as we go. I’m eager to see how our final episode will be on August 31st when we all meet at Dragon*con. I wonder if the guys will record it at their panel as they are the last act on Friday in the podcasting track.
I want to keep this trend going. I’ve worked a number of series in the podcast and I think that’s a concept that can work for this trend. The Dog Days is just the latest project, but in early summer I did a few episodes on my weight loss and exercising. Last year November I did a series on NaNoWriMo, and I know I’m going to do another one this year. So what to do next? I’ve got two months between now and November, and I need to pick a concept that will let me easily do a podcast daily. I think I might try to work next month into helping me improve my staying up on current events. Maybe I’ll review an article or two each day and give my thoughts on it. This forces me to remember to look at my RSS feeds daily and maybe improve my Google Reader by adding more high quality feeds. October, I think I might slip into a month of flash fiction, and celebrate writing with creating a short micro story daily.
Hiddennode is one of those projects I’ve kept coming back to. I tend to do this for most projects in some shape or form but the blog has been the longest lasting. Working like this and on my current active project, Five Things We Like, has me wanting to resurrect one of my older podcast projects. Trans-Dimensional Café was my first podcast, created back in 2010 but didn’t really go anywhere in the two iterations in ’10 and ’11. I’m a better creator these days and I think my understanding of audio work has also improved. Bringing TDC back now might be prudent because it was my attendance in Dragon*Con 2010 that sparked it’s drive from October 2010 through March 2011 where it faded in response to my time working on the F7 Podcast. The URL’s are still mine so why let that money go to waste another year?
I suppose it’s a good time to start revising the website a bit?
Going into the next few months I’m going to be challenging myself to improve my abilities and skills with staying on task. This is one of my weaker abilities when it comes to developing my writing career. I have the desire to break out of my current day job and into a creative field and it’s not going to happen overnight.
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