Taking a look at the podcast, it was October 21st, 2007 that I started this podcast. After producing the Norbtek.Info Podcast for about 2-1/2 years, I wanted to change things up a bit. I decided to do a shorter podcast and more frequently.
I got into podcast because of my job really. I had been commuting out of town to the Bay Area from the Sacramento area in California, about an hour and a half to my jobsite. I work in construction and go where the job takes me. I had been listening to internet shows that had MP3 files available for download (manually), then I found Doppler that would grab them automatically. Then I found podcasts like Geek News Central, Chuck Chat, In The Trenches, and some others. I became hooked and grabbed as many as I could each time I had to go to the Bay Area jobsite. I was using a Dell Axim X5 and a 64MB CF card. That was late 2004. In 2005 I got a Samsung MP3 player for my birthday. Sweet! 20 gig HD and I could load pictures on it too. Doppler and I were good friends. Then I was assigned to another bay Area job full time. Great.
I found more podcasts that would keep me company for the 3 hours a day of commuting that I had. That was brutal driving let me tell you. Thank goodness for the podcasts. Well, after listening to the podcasters for several months, I decided to pic up a mic at the local Radio Shack and start one myself. I already was being called Norbtek at work by my buddies because I was up on the newset and latest tech. So I put together the Norbtek.info podcast. I chose a “.info” because it was cheap and I might drop in in a year if things did not work out.
So about May 2005 I started a podcast that came out on average every 3 weeks. It was 45 minute podcast that would be on a tech topic and I would talk about several items. I loved doing the podcast and had fun but my audience was not growing. I think I had the longest running podcast with the least amount of listeners. They are loyal and I love ‘em for it, but the podcast needed a change.
I finished the hospital in the bay area at the beginning of 2007, so I was sent back to the main office in Sacramento. My commute went from 3 hours a day to 50 minutes a day (20 minutes in the morning and 30 in the evening). Well, I no longer needed 3 hours of podcasts a day. Some of my favorite podcasters stopped podcasting or rarely produced podcasts anymore (Kevin Devin of In The Trenches and Christiaan Stoudt of Home Network Help). I dropped some that were really not relavant and some decided to switch to Macs, and ended their PC podcasts. I still subscribe to the Mac podcasts, but do not have a lot of time to listen to them. I decided to produce a podcast that would fit my drive time as I figured there were people like me with either a short commute or a short attention span. SO I came up with the Totally Cool Tech Podcast. It would feature cool tech that was old school and new school, hight tech or low tech, but always cool tech.
It took me months to decide on the name, register the domain, setup the site, figutre on the graphics, and get the site up an running. But on October 21st, 2007 I launched Episode 1 of the Totally Cool Tech Daily Podcast. And it was daily, every day including the weekends. That only lasted a while as the family made it abundantly clear that they wanted more of my time and the weekends were theirs. I succumbed and changed the format to Monday through Friday.
After a while I found the Geekazine podcast and was asked recently to produce a segment for Jeffery Powers site. So that was a cool thing for me.
I now find myself less than a month away from the 1 year anniversary of the podcast. I’m thinking of a way to thank my listeners and also a way to get new ones. So I need help on the getting more listeners and maybe some ideas on rewarding the current subscribers.
If you think you have an idea, send it in to me at tctpodcast@gmail.com
Tags:
anniversary,
chuck chat,
in the trenches,
podcast,
technorama,
totally cool tech,
typical mac user
15 Second Promo
Entries (RSS)