Advertising: Fruitcast

I am dipping my toes into the world of advertising on our Lost show. The service I am trying out is called Fruitcast and they launched last week. They pay 5 cents per download and the ads are right at the top of the show and are really quick.

Right now I am finding that they don't play an ad with every download.. I think this is because the few advertisers that they have, have setup daily dollar limits. So my show continues to download, but the ad is not inserted.

This could also be a nice service for people looking for free MP3 hosting to look into. In order for Fruitcast to count your downloads; they have to serve the file. Not a bad trade off, they pay you to host your show with them.

Deciding to run ads was an easy choice for me. Our LOST show gets a ton of traffic (we started using Fruitcast with episode 6, but our archives are now downloading there too) and it's a short, minimal effort type affair.. We have less of a connection to our Lost listeners and it was always considered to be an advertisement for our main show anyway.

Running ads on our main DPP show is really not an option. First off, it gets a fraction of the traffic of the Lost show, so the payment wouldn't really out weigh the tarnish factor of running an ad. And I think running an ad on that show might turn-off some of our listeners.

If you do try out Fruitcast.. make sure you are using Feedburner or something similar to send out your feed. This way you can always shut off the ads without making your subscribers resubscribe to a different feed.. You just have to switch the source feed you are giving Feedburner. If that is confusing it is explained better here..

Anyway... I will be checking this service out and report back what I find.

Photos from the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference

Ontario Airport Banner
Originally uploaded by JoshB.

You can check out all of my photos from the Portable Media Expo and Podcast Conference, and Podcast Academy, in this set on Flickr.

I still need to do some tagging and organizing of the photos, but they've all got at least titles and descriptions, where appropriate. I'll likely be blogging some of them individually, to highlight something I want to talk about. I've also been posting my thoughts over at TinyScreenfuls.com.

Enjoy!

Start Planning for the Portland Podcasting December Meetup

It's not too early to sign up for the Portland Podcasting December Meetup, happening at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, December 14, at Macker's totally awesome Urban Grind.

I know I keep saying this, but I've got my calendar blocked off for this, and I'm not scheduled to be at any conferences that week (yet ;-), so I won't miss this one like I have the last three meetups. At least Tim was able to Skype me into the last meetup. :-)

For all the cool Portland people that I met in Ontario, California, at the Portable Media Expo, make sure you come and join us! We've got a great, fun community around podcasting here, and we'd love to have you!

I'm tired of missing the Meetups

The Portland Podcasting group meetup is tonight (7:00 PM at Urban Grind - be there!), and guess what? I'm out of town again. I don't know how it happened, but I've managed to be out of town at conferences or on vacation for the last three meetups. I feel so disconnected from my Portland Podcasting buddies! The ironic part is that I'm by no means a travelling globetrotter. I don't usually go much further than Seattle or Eugene.

At least I'm going to a podcast-related conference. Doug Kaye of IT Conversations asked me to teach a session at Podcast Academy, a pre-conference he arranged the day before the Portable Media Expo and Podcast Conference. I'm super excited to go, and honored that Doug asked me to participate. There are going to be several awards for podcasting given at the conference, but a couple were pre-announced, including Doug Kaye as Podcasting Person of the Year.

Lots of big names in podcasting are going to be there - Dawn and Drew, Adam Curry, Eric Rice, etc., plus lots of companies in the portable media market (Griffin, etc.) will have booths at the expo. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on some cool schwag. :-)

I'll be blogging all the cool stuff that I find, either here, at TinyScreenfuls.com, or at BloggingAcademy.com. Or more likely, all three. :-)

And like I've done before, I might try to send an audio greeting via Jason or Tim for the meetup tonight. Heck, I'm going to be sitting in my hotel room tonight (my session is early tomorrow morning), so I might try to Skype in with someone who's there, so I can at least listen in to what's going on.

Hope everyone has a great time at the meetup, and I promise I'll try to actually be there at the next one! :-)

Just posted Blogging Academy Podcast #8: "Photoblogging"

I've posted Blogging Academy Podcast #8: "Photoblogging" over at BloggingAcademy.com. Go check out the show and the wiki page to hear us talk about using Flickr for sharing and blogging your photos the easy way.

Extra special bonus - I managed to capture a decent video screencast of the whole thing, which I'll be posting soon, so you can watch my screen as we talk about Flickr and it's features. Check it out!