Tomorrow is April K27 and it’s on a weekend, woohoo.
This week there are a few initiatives on the Net you may wish to comment upon.
1) In some sad news, Ross from the Dry Shave podcast has had a heart attack. Mark Blevis has organized a campaign to send Ross funny get well cards. For more information, you can check out Mark’s post at http://www.markblevis.com/humourous-get-well-cards-for-ross/ .
Please send your humourous get well cards by May 5 to:
Zee
c/o Mark Blevis
PO Box 4813, Station E
Ottawa, ON K1S 5H9
Canada
Mark will forward them on to Ross to enjoy.

2) Mike the Birdman Dodd of This Week in Geek has organized a campaign to help his friend, classmate and podcasting partner, Pierce Derks. In short: Pierce is an American Citizen applying for Canadian Residency and the process is stalled. This is putting his education at Niagara College in jeopardy unless he can come up with about $10000 for International student tuition fees. You can find out more at http://www.savepierce.org.

3) Congratulations to Dave Fleet ( http://davefleet.com ) for completing the Boston Marathon, and for using his marathon run to raise $2315 for cancer research.

That’s all for me today

Take some time tomorrow to send some feedback to a podcast and continue the conversation.

Sean McGaughey
http://ductapeguy.net

P.S.  My K7 number is  206-337-0611 .

There is a wonderful music store in Downtown Midland, Johnstone’s Music Land which has been run by 3 generations of the same family. It is a funky small town music store which has over the years sold musical instruments, stereos, rented rehearsal space, sold records, then tapes, then CDs, and rented PA equipment. They also were great about having a rack in front of the store for recordings by local musicians. In short, it is much like any other small town music store. I pop in there when I need strings for my guitar or just to shoot the breeze. When I went in the other day to chat, I noticed that the CD racks have been replaced by shelves and shelves of sheet music and more floor space for instruments. I asked Steve if they had gotten out of CD sales. He said that it was no longer profitable for a small business to stock and sell CDs. It’s been many years since I bought a mainstream CD, so I asked when they had had gotten rid of the CDs. He said that it was 2 years ago. I hadn’t even noticed. It was the only retail store where you could buy my CD. Ouch.

I also noticed a couple weeks ago that the gigantic Music World in a mall in Barrie has closed down and has not been replaced. I guess the world really has moved to digital.

I had a bit of a brainwave. Alot of podcasters use the free K7 voicemail service to receive voice comments. A drawback of the service is that like many free internet services, if you don’t use it for 30 days, you lose your K7 number. I also know that podcasters love to receive voice feedback, so I have a simple proposal:

I am declaring the 7th, 17th and 27th of each month as K7 days. On a K7 day take 7 minutes to leave voice feedback for some of your favorite podcasts.

In my feedback I may mention that it’s K7 day and ask the recipients to pass it on. It can be a kind of chain of good will, … and it will reset the counter for the recipient’s voicemail number.

If your like me, you’ve been meaning to respond to a few shows at any given time. On the K17th of March, try to reach out to other podcasters.

P.S. my K7 feedback number is 206-337-0611.

Remember that K7 numbers are in the Seattle area code so normal long distance charges may apply. I use SkypeOut, so I have almost unlimited North American calling.

Update:  I set up a K7 Day group on facebook.  Join the group and remember to add to the conversation by leaving a message for a podcaster on the K17th.

Here’s a little roundup of my podcasting activity for 2007.

I have released 40 Episodes of For the Sake of the Song thus far and have about 9 ready to go in the upcoming weeks.

On the weekend of October 28, I was feeling sorry for myself that I wasn’t at Podcamp Boston 2 so I called several of my friends who were at Podcamp Boston and released about 4 Podcamp Boston Special Reports.

These reports evolved into a regular podcast for Podcamp Toronto with Connie Crosby. We have currently produced 6 Episodes of the Podcamp Toronto Podcast leading up to the event on February 23 and 24.

I produced a Podcamp Toronto audio promo to use on your podcast here.

2007 Also saw the release of my recording of my brother-in-law, Drew Beatty’s novel, White Trash Land, on Podiobooks.com . It has done fairly well for Andrew there.

I’ve continued to record audiobooks with Librivox.org and I continue to be a semi-regular host for the Librivox Community Podcast. Here is a list of the 15 podcasts I hosted for Librivox in 2007.

I love the ability to pre-publish articles to a future date in Wordpress, but if you prepublish alot of articles and shuffle them about like I do, then wordpress gets confused and sort of randomly publishes shows on the earliest date you originally posted them, but with the date you intended.  Anyway the last two shows with Peter Judd and John Lunman both appeared earlier than I thought they would.   Enjoy.  The next scheduled show of For the Sake of the Song will feature guest songwriter and podcaster extraordinairre, Mark Blevis on January 21.   I think.  I hope …  at least that’s what it says in my Wordpress dashboard.

 Episode 38 with Peter Judd [18:05m]: Play in Popup | Download (533)

I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Judd at the Canturbury Folk Festival in Ingersoll. Peter is a very funny country-flavored songwriter from Kitchener. We sat down on a picnic table at the edge of the park and recorded this episode. Enjoy.

Songs:

Theme Music: For the Sake of the Song (©2003 S. McGaughey)

If I were a Cigarette ( © Peter Judd)

How to Build a Wall ( © Peter Judd)

Namedropping (Links discussed in this episode)

Peter Judd at New Music Canada

juddsongs@yahoo.ca

Ontario Council of Folk Festivals: Songs from the Heart Competition

My daughter enjoys listening to podcasts with me particularly, The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd and Dancing with Elephants . We were thrilled to find out that Grant from Doctor Floyd has a daily Grant’s Advent Calender Video Podcast, and we’ve been watching every morning as we eat the chocolate out of our advent calendars. Today, Grant announced a contest on his video podcast to find out how many times he said, “Hey Everybody” in his 2005 and 2006 video podcasts.

We watched all the videos instead of Saturday morning cartoons, and here is our answer.