the podjournal

Being a podcasting consultant means working in a new field and building a completely new trade. Working with clients and helping them to plan, produce, publish and promote their audio or video podcasts is not a simple thing. No one possesses all the competences it takes to advise and animate clients to use this new media to reach their audience.

Podcasting professionals are not only good podcasters themselves, they are expected to be experts in their field. They need to keep up to date and up to speed. Everybody who decides to work full time in this field needs a very good radar.

A News Radar.

An application that can automatically notify, when something new, interesting and relevant occurs. And which has been written about in blogs. By podcasting professionals themselves. The experts. The key to this news stream about podcast and podcasting, new hardware, new software, new trends, new issues, debates and hacks, is RSS.

You can see a screencast tutorial about how to use the Podcasting Professionals News Radar. Video tutorial.

This is the reduced-size version of the application - full-size version is here.

RSS is Really Simple Syndication, which is already the foundation on which podcasting is built, is the way to make the news on the internet come to you instead of you having to go looking for news everywhere.

RSS and building applications based on this extremely advanced technology is complicated. But this project has been in the making for some time under Marjolein Hoekstras guidance involving the creators of the involved services. This has only been possible due to the knowledgeable and very competent RSS expert Marjolein Hoekstra from The Netherlands, who has been tireless in her endeavours to make a long list of different applications work together in the ecosystem of RSS, OPML, HTML, XML and a lot more abbreviations, she juggles with so impressively well.

Marjolein Hoekstra suggested this News Radar, because she knows how important it is to keep informed about her own peers in the RSS field, for instance. She is now able to secure an RSS bond between individuals a growing community of podcasting professionals, who can make use of this professional sphere of interest. Read Marjolein Hoekstras blogpost Podcasting Professionals : Advanced News Radar using Grazr explaining the technology behind this application and the other applications connected to the Grazr News Radar. And you can get to know more at Marshall Kirkpatricks blog.

PODHANDLE, my own podcasting business, chose NewMediaExpo2007 in Ontario, California, to launch this very advanced tool for podcasting professionals to keep informed about their colleagues work and written words about their business. This annual event attracts some of the most qualified, innovative, leading and trend-setting podcasting professionals in the world.

I created a list of more than 50 podcasting professionals, who maintain blogs about podcasting and related matters. Combined with and based on rather advanced technology this list will hopefully be a useful tool for myself, my company and for my colleagues and competitors in the business.

I will, throughout the NewMediaExpo, and ofcourse afterwards, contact and be contacted by colleagues, who would like to be a part of this list and this News Radar.

I will be able to update the list. Marjolein Hoekstra has made it very easy for me to maintain and evaliate the list whenever I need to. I see great potentials in the way she can now enable not only this but other fields and trades, businesses, communities and organisations to create News Radars for the benefit of their professionalism.

PODHANDLE is sponsoring this News Radar application and is happy to share the value of the list, the widget, and you are welcome to take the OPML and import all the feeds into your own feedreader, as well as take the entire widget and embed it on your own website og blog. And even choose to change from the green PODHANDLE colour brand into your own preferred style.

Do feel free to look me up during NewMediaExpo or email me on karin@podhandle.com, if you would like to discuss the value or eventual insufficiences of the News Radar, and how you can be part of this list, if you are not only on it.

There are a few requirements you need to meet:

1. You need to be a podcasting consultant, meaning someone who is making it into a business to help others start podcasting.

2. You need to be podcasting yourself and be working practically with the media.

3. You need to have a blog, where you write in English about podcast and podcasting. (A podcast feed will not be relevant)

4. You need to agree to be a part of this list of colleagues and competitors in the business.

If you are not on the list, and if you can meet these few requirements, you are welcome to join us, and contribute with the skills you are building and all the relevant news you find and write about. I will set up a candidate list and evaluate it continuously to extend this list and keep it up to date.

Nothing of relevance should slip under the Radar.

The reason why I, as a co-founder of PODHANDLE am creating this service is because I hope that other podcasting consultations will find it useful. the publishing service that I have made together with programmer Jimmy Escherich and IT-Architecht Frans Meyer is a webbased tool we are convinced will make life easer for podcasting consultants who help their clients publish their podcasts from their own website.

If you are ready to get a free trial and use our service with a client who needs to podcast audio or video, let us know, and we can provide you with the first logon to the online service for free. Maybe you find it so convenient for you and your clients that you would like to be a PODHANDLE partner with an account at a reasonable price for each podcast, you set up. Let you and your clients devote your time and resources focusing on creating interesting content, rather than the nuts and bolts technicalities of podcast publishing.

Tags: PODHANDLE, Podcasting //