Is Podcasting in Your Future?

by Patrick Lufkin
Patrick is chair of the Kenneth Gordon Memorial Scholarship and membership manager of the STC Management SIG. He also works with the EBSTC Career Connection.

Where communication capability goes, technical communication is sure to follow.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s improvements in authoring and display technologies came together to produce the mass communication revolution called desktop publishing. Technical communicators soon leveraged the new technologies to produce collateral—manuals, specifications sheets, white papers, employee manuals, flyers, press releases—with a speed and quality never before seen. Likewise, as Web technologies made the Internet easy to navigate and use, technical communicators began writing online help, FAQs, and other documents; soon providing Web content became an important technical communication specialty.

If the pattern holds, technical communicators may soon find themselves involved in podcasting.

What is podcasting and why is it important?

For those who haven’t been following trends, podcasting is the desktop equivalent of radio production and broadcasting. In 2005 the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary declared "podcasting" the word of the year, a sure indication that podcasting has become one of the hottest technologies around.

In September Jerry Franklin visited the Eastbay chapter of STC to introduce podcasting and explain where technical communicators can fit into the process. Much of his presentation was dedicated to showing how a podcast is actually produced.

Podcasting technology has actually been available since around 2000, but it was not until 2004 when Apple began to throw its considerable weight behind the technology with its iTunes music store and the iPod portable listening device that the technology really blossomed.

Franklin says that estimates put the current podcast audience at between 2 to 10 million listeners; some predict that this could go as high as 60 million by 2010. He notes that even 30 million listeners would be 10 percent of the US population.

What started as a music distribution tool soon became a platform for those who wanted to sound off with movie reviews, political commentary and so on, a practice called audio blogging. Business has now discovered podcasting, and the technology appears to be positioned to take the corporate and technical communication world by storm.

In the past year corporations have come to realize that podcasting gives them a useful platform for building their brands and keeping in touch with prospective customers. Being audio, a podcast is an easy-to-use format that is especially attractive to multitaskers, those too busy to read, and those trapped in automobiles on long commutes.

A number of large corporations are experimenting with podcasts. Franklin says that the Whirlpool American Family podcast claims to have achieved 60 thousand weekly listeners with no promotion. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft all have corporate podcasts.

Franklin cited a recent study of 3,900 IT professionals in which more than half of the decision makers said that they would prefer listening to a podcast to reading a White Paper; a quarter said they were already using podcasts when making buying decisions. Franklin predicts that by year’s end all large technical companies with over $1 billion in sales will be podcasting.

Franklin became involved with podcasting while helping his wife build a business as a certified dog trainer. He is a PeopleSoft alumnus, and is a member of STC and the IEEE Professional Communication Society. He will be giving a presentation on podcasting to the IEEE later this year.

Franklin says that technical communicators have what it takes to produce podcasts. Most are well-rounded people who have held a wide variety of jobs. Podcasting, he says, rewards such breadth of experience. In his own case, he draws on a background in music, which helps him work with sound files, and broadcast journalism, which helps him with interviewing. Most corporate podcasts, he says, use an interview format, and most technical communicators, by nature, are good at asking questions.

He also believes that we are in a honeymoon period that makes this a very good time to get involved. At the moment, “people are willing to forgive podcasts their warts,” he says. While you want to be good, you don’t have to be perfect; there is room for those who are working their way up the learning curve.

Making a podcast.

Franklin says that for the kinds of podcasting that technical communicators are likely to produce, short—5 to 20 minute interviews with a music introduction—there are only a few things you really need to know. The process Franklin outlined is simple and straightforward.

• Import sound files
• Edit/clean each file
• Create musical introduction
• Create smooth transition between files
• Mix and master podcast
• Export as MP3 and prepare ID3 tags

To make a podcast, you need a sound editor. One of the most popular is Audacity, an Open Source program that is available free on the Internet. Franklin demonstrated the use of Audacity, pointing out its major features.

Audacity is similar to a text or photo editing program. In the Audacity user interface sound files are represented as waveforms, squiggly lines like those generated by an oscilloscope. You edit the sound by manipulating its visual representation. As you gain experience, Franklin says, you will learn to “see” the audio through the waveforms.

Using Audacity, you can record and import sound files, cut and paste sound segments, stack sound channels on top of each other, adjust volume, distort sounds, apply special effects, undo and repeat what you have done, and so on. A timeline at the top of the screen shows the playing length of the file. To move files, you just drag and drop. You can turn tracks on and off for editing. You can also generate silence for use where needed.

Workflow.

Franklin suggests that you import files, arrange them in chronological order, and rename them to something meaningful: “intro,” “first segment,” and so on.

Next you want to clean up each sound file. You can zoom in to cut out unwanted passages (parts of the interview you don’t want to use) and artifacts (unwanted sounds such as background noises and ‘ahs’ and ‘uhs’).

After cleaning up individual files, string them together in the correct order. Franklin says it is a good idea to do all of your editing before stringing things together; if you go back later and make a cut in a file you may have to do a lot of realigning.

After you have edited your individual files, you enter the process of mastering which is where you even out the volume of the whole and otherwise prepare for distribution. When all is as you want it, convert the file from wav, the file format used for editing, to MP3, the condensed file used for listening. (MP3 takes up about a tenth of the space of a wav file.) You must also create something called an ID3 tag, which is a small code segment that identifies your content and enables people to find your podcast.

Finally post your file to an aggregator where it will be made available to the world. Franklin says that that is really all there is to it.

If you would like to give it a try, download Audacity and LAME, a required MP3 extraction file, from the Audacity site at http://audacity.sourceforge.net.

Franklin’s podcast, The Good Dog Show, can be found at www.dogworks.libsyn.com.