This announcement from Steve Runners forum-board-thingy is certainly good news for all of us Phedip fans ! Looks like we may be treated to a more regular dose of Phedip (see the full announcement at Steve’s site here) :
“This is kind of an “inside the podcasters studio” post, so you can ignore it for the most part: but I wanted to let you know about a change that you might notice in the next few weeks.
As some of you know, I’ve had to cut back on the production frequency of Fdip because I’ve wanted to get my research right. I don’t know how many download and listen to this goofy little podcast of mine…I’ve never understood how to interpret the numbers (or maybe I just didn’t want to know), but as my contract with PodShow has come to an end, I’ve received several offers to have my show distributed by other podcast media distribution networks.
My initial reaction was “no way”. I decided that I would “go it alone” and stay independent. I wasn’t really interested in “growing my audience” of fellow runners…I figured that if Phedippidations was interesting, entertaining and fun to listen to…then word would get out there, and it would grow on it’s own accord. I just wanted to concentrate on producing the “show”.
So, last October (after I ran Philly) I decided to try to figure out how many fellow runners were actually downloading the “show”. YIKES! It turns out that, following the publications of articles in “Runners World” and “Running Times” magazines that the number of fellow runners listening to me had more than tripled!
So, that’s when fear overtook me…and I decided that the best course of action would be to ensure that when I produce a “show”…that my facts always be correct, and I decided that I had better let friends and fellow runners know that I couldn’t commit to a weekly schedule any longer.
The support that I received, on the “discussion/forum/board-thing” and the “Google Group” was amazing. It means so much to me that you’d let me know how much you like my goofy podcast and appreciate the effort I put into it.
One of the offers I received, back in October, was from a guy by the name of Rob Walch (host of “PodCast411”) who works for Wizzard Media, the company that owns Liberated Syndication (LibSyn). Rob’s company is a lot different from PodShow in that they are all about building community and promoting podcasting.
In my opinion (for what it’s worth) PodShow is a great company, and I have nothing bad to say about them at all…but they have a much different philosophy, very similar to the philosophy of “mainstream media”, than other podcast networks (I don’t really know if that’s a good or bad thing). Their programming is outstanding, but most of the podcasts on their network are looking for “fame and fortune”. The shows on PodShow are very entertaining, and geared more for a general audience and they’re heavily into video production. In my opinion, PodShow has an ambitious plan to compete with networks like MTV and YouTube. I wish them well, and expect them to do great things.
But Phedippidations is a “niche” podcast, geared towards a very specific “audience”. I’ve never really liked that word “audience”, because it implies that the conversation is “one way”. I sometimes fall into the trap of calling Fdip a “show”, but to me, it’s more of an “audio blog”. If I was going to sign with another podcast network, I’d want to know that the management of that company was dedicated to the promotion of podcasting (not necessarily of “podcasts”).
So, Wizzard appeals to me philosophically. The other reason I re-considered signing up with a new podcast network is that I can’t afford to host the 134 (and more) episode archive that’s currently residing on my ISP’s server. The bandwidth is starting to rise to a level that I can’t afford, and my wife (as patient as she is) has a hard enough time dealing with the cost associated with my running lifestyle…that I feel bad adding the monthly podcast hosting costs to our budget.
I could have re-signed with PodShow for the free hosting, but I just didn’t’ feel that Fdip was a good fit there. I could have deleted the episode archive, and just leave the most recent shows on the server, but when I’ve done that in the past I’ve received a lot of email asking me to upload the shows again.
My contract with PodShow ended at 12:00 midnight on March 2nd. You can imagine my surprise when at exactly 12:04 AM on March second, I received an email from Rob Walch at Wizzard…asking me if I might consider signing with his company.
The fact that he remembered our conversation from last October really impressed me, and I spent the weekend talking with my wife about it, going over the contract, and deciding what I should do for Phedippidations.
So, I decided to sign. As of today Phedippidations is now being distributed exclusively by the Wizzard Media Network. Over the next week, I’ll be uploading my entire archive to the servers at Liberated Syndication and hope to point my Feedburner feed to my new RSS feed at LibSyn.“
Check out Steve’s forum-board thingy for the full announcement.
