I’ve just come across the Hott 100 from podcast host, Libsyn. It’s a chart showing the most downloaded podcasts on Libsyn over the past 24 hours. Libsyn probably has most of the top indie pods, so it’s a good one to follow. It’s different from rankings by number of subscribers, such as the Podfeed / FeedBurner top 100. I don’t see many British pods there, but Storynory is at 85 today, and seems to rise to around 51 on our strong days (Monday usually being a good one after we publish on Sunday evening). Learn language pods do well, as does Grammar Girl, for all those Americans who are up tight about not knowing how to write English properly. Askaninja, which passes for humour in Geek land, is number one.

But Grammar Girl really is on to something. It’s short and simple, and presumably easy to make. Take heed Brit-podders, Grammar Girl doesn’t RAMBLE! I think self-improvement is a huge theme in Podcasting, and much over looked. People want to use that half hour on the train to limber up their brain-cells.

Download Jeremy Strong Interview

Packages are where audio editing gets creative. They are big part of BBC output, but not many podcasters make them. They are all about creating pictures with sound. You have to record plenty of ‘wild track’ atmosphere and mix it in with the words later.

This package comes, of course, from Storynory. It’s a visit to Reigate Priory Junior School to meet Jeremy Strong, author of The 100 Mile An Hour Dog. He was speaking to 600 school kids and did a wonderful speed-reading. It came about as part of our continuing friendly relationship with the children’s book publisher, Puffin. As I have mentioned before, I think Puffin understand the power of the Internet for reaching kids, as well as anyone.

For those who are interested, I mixed it in Sony SoundForge making ample use of Special Paste Cross-Fade and Mix. I also used plenty of fade out and fade in. Part of the trick is to make sure that a blast of atmosphere fades out and fades in gracefully. Also, you often start the atmos under that last few words of the preceding sentence, or even just ‘tuck” it under the last word. You might want to pick up the narration over the end of the atmos.

I could equally have done it in a multi-track program like GarageBand. The hardest part of recording it was to capture Jeremy’s words while he was speaking in front of the school. I sat on the floor near his feet, which didn’t look too silly as all the kids where doing the same.

The owner of the world’s most self-regarding newspaper has been musing that his NY Times might no longer be in print in five years’ time,

Here’s what Arthur Sulzberger has to say;

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either… The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

The Times’s online readership stands at 1.5 million a day besides its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

But Sulzberger seems to think that people will pay to read his news online…. I doubt that somehow. News is a commodity now, and the NY Times doesn’t do it that much better than anyone else.

Hope readers / listeners don’t mind. I was asked to take down the post about our pilot podcast until some negotiations over it start / finish. So there’s a post missing for now. But we’ve already received some interesting feedback.

Plosives are the bain of podcasters. They are the breathy sounds that sneak into the microphone, however hard you try to keep them out. “Ps’ are apt to explode all over the place. I often hear them popping out of the most experienced podcasters’ microphones.

As always, it’s best to avoid them in the first place. Haul a pop guard over your microphone, or even use a silk pop screen in front of a condenser mic. Point the microphone at your chin, rather than directly at the mouth. Try to hold in and soften those ps with your lips.

But despite your best efforts, some plosives are bound to find their way onto the track. But don’t despair. In many cases, it’s still possible to edit them out. Bump up the size of the sound wave on your screen, and you should be able to see the angry zig-zags, characterised by the wide spaces between the lines of the wave. Sometimes you will also see the explosion shooting up above the natural height of the words Try cutting out the nasty bit with your sound editor, and preview it to make sure it still sounds natural.

This sort of precision editing is quite time-consuming. Perhaps it’s mostly for perfectionists.

One of the reasons that Firefox is such a great browser is that it’s so easy to personalise and put it at the center of everything you do on the computer. Most of what I do now is through my web browser. I write in Google documents (it’s one click away on my tool bar), I do my email in gmail, I read my rss feeds, and of course write this blog.

Often all you have to do is to add one of the many free extensions. Here’s how I’ve optimized by firefox experience.

1) Add Fasterfox -and it will make your browsing even faster. It automatically makes a lot of small modifications to firefox.

2) I bookmark my most essential RSS feed and place them in my “book marks toolbar folder”. You will have a drop down menu of all the latest news on that feed.

3) Also in my “book marks toolbar folder” I include the log in pages of my wordpress blogs, Google Analytics, Feedburner, Google Reader, Google Documents and all the other places I’m constantly popping into. To fit them all in, I go into “manage bookmarks” and rename them with one short key word.

4) I’ve also installed a Google Toolbar, this has a login for my Gmail account, a spell checker for forms (such as blog entries), a subscribe button for RSS feeds, and a page rank indicator. It automatically fills my address into forms, and works other magic.

5) The
Del.icio.us Extension: puts two icons right by my home icon. One to tag the current the page, another to go to my del.icio.us bookmarks. It also gives me a drop-down menu of delcious goodies next to the help menu at the very top of the browser.

6) The Adsense Notifier sits in the bottom right of the browser, and very discretely tells me what our latest Adsense earnings are from Storynory (about $200 a month if you are interested).

7) Greesemonkey - actually allows you to add features to regular web pages you visit. So every time I go to Google, I have I can click on “blog search” just as easily as on “images.” (add google blogsearch)

The Web developers Toolbar lets me view the CSS of any web page I am on, alter it in “preview”, see how that page would look, and then save the altered style sheet on my computer. If it’s one of my own sites, I can then upload it.

9)ColorZilla allows you to pick the hexagonal names for colors of a webpage using an eyedropper. Unforunately it doesn’t work quite so well on the mac.

10 ) And don’t forget under “firefox / prefrences” at the top, you can set all sorts of stuff, including privacy settings, home page, where you download stuff to, whether to block popups, etc.