Category: Geek

Here’s a shameless plug for Tucows Farm, one of the blogs I get paid to write…

What programming web site will not just inform you, but entertain you as well?

That’s right: Tucows Farm. Because programming is more than just Aspergers and Emacs these days.

The podcast that I mentioned earlier — the one in which I interviews Tucows’ VP of Product Development, Alain Chesnais — now has a transcript, which I’ve posted on Tucows Developer.

Why Podcasts?

The “podcast-and-transcript” approach is the one that I’ll be taking with the podcasts over at Tucows Developer, as it offers the best of both worlds.

You might ask “Why post podcasts, anyway?”. The preliminary observations of the results of podcasts from technical websites seem to be good. At the Evans Data Developer Relations

Conference that Ross and I attended in early February, we saw that a

number of companies found that podcasts were a good way to explain the

broad strokes of a technology or product.

In his presentation, Bill Roth from BEA systems said that podcasting “lets you touch customers

at points where previously no opportunity existed.” Translated from marketer-speak, podcasting

lets you communicate with your users and customers at times you couldn’t before: on their

commute, at the gym, while running errands, and so on.

There’s also the “high-touch” factor of podcasts. It’s one thing to read

an essay or the transcript of a conversation, but another thing entirely

to hear the speakers say things in their own voice. The spoken word has a different “flow” from the written one, and a conversation between two or more people has a certain spark and spontaneity that a group-written article can’t capture.

There’s a world of great podcasts out there, and their number is growing every day. If you’d like a sample, take a look at the IT Conversations website, which features speeches and interviews with some of the brightest and most interesting minds in high tech. For a fun listen, I recommend Wil Wheaton’s “Just a Geek” presentations at the Gnomedex conference — here’s part one and here’s part two.

Why Transcripts?

For the benefit of people who can’t listen to podcasts, who want to scan a podcast quickly for a specific topic or phrase and search engines, we’re also posting transcripts of our podcasts. Luckily, a service like CastingWords.com exists. CastingWords.com is the podcast transcription service whom we used to transcribe the podcast for us. They did a good job and their rates are very reasonable: they charge by podcast length — 42 cents a minute. We’ll be using their services for future podcasts.

Renaissance Faires, which I consdier to be one of the lower rungs of the geek hierarchy are just one of those aspects of geek culture that I just can’t get into (and remember, I can put up with a lot of crap: I sat through Spanglish and a Reform Party student meeting).

Swordplay, jousting, mead, wenches — those are all fine things in my book. It’s when you combine them all in festival form and put a sloppy Knights of the Round Table cosplay veneer that it all goes straight to nerd hell. That’s why I found this entry by Patrick of Bad News Hughes so funny: he went to a Ren Faire simply for the purpose of mocking them. Prithee, Sir Bad News Hughes, I raise a flagon of…oh, never mind.