OnQ

On Broadcast

We ran our second live broadcast this morning for eOnCall. Tim Barrett of No Geek Left Behind joined me for a discussion on communities in the relam of small businesses. We also videotaped the broadcast so at some point in the future, for those who may be interested, you can see us pull back the curtains and witness just what we go through to put on a live show (it's not really as interesting as you might otherwise think).

Getting ready for the broadcast was a bit of an adventure, though. After being up for 22 straight hours (and only getting two hours sleep before that) I was about to crash in the hotel room when I noticed it was a bit warm in the room. I had turned down the AC earlier in the day, but it wasn't anywhere near that temperature. So I placed a quick call to the front desk and they sent someone right up. He got the fan blowing, but the compressor wouldn't come on, so I could either take a new room or let him spend a couple of hours trying to get it working. It was cool enough that I opted to open the balcony window to let the cool night air in and give it a go at that, and the thought of packing up the room and moving right then wasn't very palatable.

Unfortunately, I should have requested a room move right then and there, because it never did cool down and there was (surprisingly) a lot of traffic noise, and so I didn't get much sleep. So, at 5am local time, I called down and requested another room. I got a new room key brought up to me immediately, and I packed up and moved with an hour to spare before hooking up to get online for the broadcast.

At any rate, the show went off without a hitch, and the episode is already available on the archive site and on iTunes as well. Enjoy!

On Air

In case you hadn't heard yet, EON Consulting is promoting a new radio show, eOn Call, which will air on Apostle Internet Radio Wednesday mornings at 10am Central time (US) starting October 5. I've toyed with the idea of doing some sort of podcast discussing computing and technology topics for small businesses for a while, but had held off until I was done working on the book. I knew that setting up a podcast would take quite a bit of work, and I wanted to be able to devote time to it.

In my other life, I’m a semi-professional musician (although I'll freely admit I've done very little music since getting the business off the ground) and have a better than average recording studio at home. Even with a 24-track all digital studio, however, I knew I'd have to work to not only get the audio recorded and cleaned up, I'd also have to get the recording converted into a streamable format (maybe), find a way to host the audio files (streaming or not), and get myself on a regular schedule to do all the work. Even though I had more time, I didn't know that I had that much time.

That's when I finally sat down with the folks at Apostle Internet Radio, who had been hounding me about advertising on their station, and heard what they had to say...

Apostle Internet Radio is based in Denton, which is where I happen to live and work as well. Even though they broadcast to every part of the world via the magic of the Internet, they've been targeting local listeners and advertisers. In September, they had over 1 million hits to their web page for the month and streamed over 160,000 minutes of radio content in the month. Both of these numbers were up significantly from the month before.

Bottom line, I was interested in at least hearing what they had to say about advertising with the station. I went in to meet with them and got to talk with Ed about the technology behind the broadcasting. It's a simple setup, but with what he's doing, it doesn't need to be really complex. We spoke for about an hour, and during the conversation I mentioned that I was thinking about doing a podcast, and that's when he hit me up about doing the talk show.

We had one of those "this is the right thing to do" moments when he described what they could do and I described what I wanted to do. I would be able to get content out on the net without a lot of time and effort on my part to get the technology working correctly. He would be able to get some content on his station that could help draw in more listeners.

Two days later, I was in recording the first show, and two days after that we did some more production work, and that was it. Then I started getting the web site together, and lo and behold, we go from notion to concept to implementation in less than a week.

Man, I love living in the digital age...