Creating a podcast has been very difficult for me, to say the least. It has been difficult on many different levels: finding relevant data, collaborators, creating the site, and editing.
I attempted to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement in Los Angeles, and had a hard time finding sources that covered the entire movement. There were newspaper articles that covered specific important dates, but left the day-to-day Occupy grind out of the picture. Therefore, I used the OWS LA calender (which was accurate and detailed) to make a detailed list of the occupy protest in and around the downtown Los Angeles area. Furthermore, I highlighted specific important dates in order to let my readers see the OWS LA progress.
Finding people to interview was not a problem while I was at the OWS LA site. However, trying to contact someone of authority to interview was very difficult, because the group does not have an authority and renders people equal. Therefore, I had to change my vocabulary and ask “Who is an avid organizer?” I then got some answers, but getting a hold of people was very tough.
Creating the website to host my podcast was difficult for two reasons: uploading the content and getting the content to play. I used GarageBand to create my project. The program saves the information as an .aac, which cannot be uploaded (as far as I know) to a website. However, I found that that GarageBand has a built in MP3 encoder, and I converted my project easily to that format. Once it was MP3 I had to find a MP3 player to embed in the site, and play the information. I created my own HTML player in DreamWeaver at first, but then opted to listen to one of my peers, and I embedded a Yahoo player within my site that looks and works better.
Editing is just editing. Editing thirty minutes of media took hours. I guess that’s just something that comes with the trade.
Walking around the downtown OWSLA site was interesting. I love Los Angeles, so I enjoyed being in the city. I met a lot of people, and had some good conversations. The only issue is that I used a poor recording device, and the most important information I gathered was useless. I was very disappointing that my first attempt to gather information was a waste, but at least I get to go back. Maybe I’ll see and learn something that I didn’t see before, and have even better content for my podcast.
I thought it was interesting that you had difficult “finding relevant data.” I thought it weird at first because it’s the Occupy movement and what kind of data could there be? But who knows there might be statistics and the whole 99% vs. 1% thing. There could have been data on who different Occupy camps had been treated fairly vs. those who weren’t. Since this movement is still new there’s probably plenty to document on audio and hypertext.
On a side note, where’s the link to your podcast?