Our experiments continue here. At this juncture Robert and I may change the name from BendTech to BendTech Labs – well, more on that and our little incubator here later perhaps. That said, Robert and I are always discussing new ideas for BendTech and we’re actively trying to expand our technology communication and the “community”. So, without further adieu, we’d like to introduce you to the BendTech Podcast medium.
As with all things we’re experimenting with here, our first podcast is a little rough around the edges (you might will hear a bit of background noise). That said, for our first go-around, we were privileged to have Forrest Rodgers join us and, frankly, volunteer to be the test subject. For those of you who don’t know Forrest a bit of background. Forrest has over 20 years of experience in higher education and economic development throughout Oregon. Most recently, he was the Executive Director for the OSU-Cascades Foundation. And, prior to that, he was the Chief Executive Officer of the High Desert Museum for seven years. He has three wonderful daughters and is an active contributor to our Nancy P’s Saturday morning coffee’s.
In this podcast, we discuss our various perspectives on growing the technology ecosystem in Central Oregon. It very much ties in with a few of our recent blog posts and we believe you’ll find it timely and topical. We hope that you will find this new format engaging, informative, and a bit entertaining. If you have suggestions or comments, please do let us know. And, as Robert always likes to say…”It’s an experiment.” Enjoy the show!
[podcast]http://blog.bendtech.com/wp-content/podcasts/BendTech%20Podcast%201.mp3[/podcast]
Our podcast feed.
A special thanks to Forrest Rodgers. And a shout out to Sarayu
Intro music: “Sad Robot” by Pornophonique (found at Jamendo.com – a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses)
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Small world. Forrest and I share a past – when I was a young-pup college freshman at Pacific University in Forest Grove 36 (gulp) years ago, he was director of financial aid. I think. (He’ll correct me if I’m wrong.)
The fact our paths crossed again in Bend many years later was serendipitous. I’ve always admired his intellect and ability to make things happen, move things forward.
Yep, guys, next time, either borrow a studio or another voice recorder;-) I’m sure someone will help you out with a credit shout-out and karma reward.
Not to be too critical, but 40 minutes is quite a long broadcast. I agreed with possibly 1/2 of the comments and disagreed with the other 1/2. (you’re probably not suprised about that). But, at this point I can’t remember what was what, and so have little to offer to the discussion. Perhaps next time we could have some editing to express the viewpoint that is most relevant.
I hope you accept this response in the postive manner that it was intended.
@Gordon: You’re being kind in your criticism. We learned a lot from this, such as:
- Coffee shops don’t make good sound studios
- Write out a word-for-word introduction you use to kick things off – a paragraph (or two) that introduces the guest and topic
- Jot down the key questions/topics you want to cover
- Focus on the guest, keep your commentary to a minimum
- Keep things moving at a quick pace
These are all fairly self-evident – we knew or at least suspected most of this beforehand – but until you hear what results from not doing these things you don’t realize how important they are. I was dismayed when I first listened to the recording we’d made; the technical quality was/is horrible on this, which is a real injustice to Forrest. He’s a very interesting guy with a lot of experience and deserves to be heard. We toyed with the idea of just scrapping this altogether, but I was able to rescuscitate it somewhat using Audacity, enough so that we decided to post it and let people get what they could from it.
I agree that a summary of the podcast would be useful. But we have limited time/energy for this stuff, most of which went into simply making the podcast presentable this time around. As we get more efficient, we’ll be able to polish things a bit better.
BTW, I’ll be honest and say I’m not a big fan of podcasts in general. The engineer in me balks at how hard they are to skim and search, and they are painfully difficult to respond to or excerpt. In short they’re much harder to work with than a regular blog post.
However, they convey the subtle warmth (or lack thereof) of the person and mind behind the words in a way that mere text can’t express. In doing so, they create a better connection to the personalities doing the talking. And since “connecting” is an important part of what we’re trying to do here, it seems worth giving this a shot.
(P.S. Looks like the going rate for podcast transcription services is $0.75-$1.00/minute of audio. If anyone feels like donating their time/money to the cause, let me know.
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