Kennedy-Spaien, Dot Com

This week, we’ve lifted the curtain on our newest show, Yoga: It’s a Gas! with a sneak preview of a rough edit of episode one posted at the Health Hacks Podcast site.

We are having an embarrassing issue with screen geometry that we can’t seem to lick, though. If any kind soul has any advice for us on how to fix this issue in Final Cut Pro, please contact me!

See the issue: YiaG

Please, please drop me a line via the contact page at that site.

Oh my! This came in at the Health Hacks Podcast site via email today:

Thank you for your fine work. Today I discovered your URL and I enjoyed the program, except for one thing: the immature “music” and screaming. I will not be returning because of all that jarring, unp;easant noise on your Web site, and I suspect that many others will not return, too. Please do not take my criticism amiss, because it was meant to be constructive. I can tell that you are very decent and likeable folks, and I only wish you had been exposed to the joy of Baroque music. (I believe that the last two generations in our nation have been cheated out of a good music education. Latin and Greek, too, have been shown the door by a severely misguided educational establishment, but I digress.)… [Name Redacted]

For the record, I went to the Berklee College of Music and I write much of the music for that show (not the theme, though), so I must take the blame not only for choosing the offending “music”, but for creating it as well! I believe Mr. X is referring to the interstitial music — a few bars of hand percussion with a sample of a guy rapping “get up… get up” ending with a perky “Yow!”. While I probably do overuse that bit, it does match the overall tone of that show.

I can’t imagine this particular show would be improved by a fugue or canon performed on a harpsichord or pipe organ. I did once excerpt Toccata and Fuge in D Minor by J.S. Bach on LLVLC, but did I get kudos for that?

In conclusion, “Amo, Amas, Amat.”

Grasshopper New Media is an unfunded startup. Mostly we’re “doing it for love”, and by that I mean because we really enjoy it AND we hope to pay the bills from it as well - someday. There is at least one Grasshopper at GNMHealth who has been able to quit his day job, and that is certainly encouraging.

That Grasshopper is not me, however.

As chief cook and bottle washer at GNMHealth, I have had to learn to do things on the cheap, and there has never been a better time to do that. The internet is chock full of “free as in beer” goods and services, but there is still a lot that has to be done by a living breathing human (thank god!).

The money that has gone into GNM infrastructure has largely come from Chris and Ben. The primary investments I have been making at GNMHealth are in terms of time and effort. On show nights, I am lucky to get over three hours of sleep (currently three nights per week, soon to be four). Over time, that can spur all kinds of bad juju. And yet, I feel like I can’t really complain because I get to work with amazing people whom I really respect. Also, there are people in this space whom I admire very much who can’t afford a cup of coffee.

This morning on my way in to my day gig, I threw my packed lunch into the garbage by mistake. Earlier I was crabby with my wife and even raised my voice at my kid. Oy vey. Sleep dep is no longer amusing!

The thing that made me take start to doubt the wisdom of using my time as a proxy for money, was the fact that no matter how late I stay up, staying up won’t give me the magical ability to pay for one of my rockstars to fly to VON in California this month.

Justin asked if depression begets financial troubles or vice versa. I am wondering if lack of sleep is the cause or the result of having more to do in a day than I can pull off.

So yes, my head is swimming, but on the other hand this isn’t really a complaint, merely an observation.

A long time ago, I soured on “hosted solutions” such as Blogger/Blogspot blogs and the like. I have had content just go away magically, and that is a sad thing!

Working with Grasshopper New Media, especially in the earliest days, was all about leveraging other people’s bandwidth. Chris Brogan had us using free dropboxen, PBWiki, free groupware, etc. Chris has a great nose for trying out and adopting new services.

I’ve come around a bit thanks to this influence, chiefly because Chris changed my email account over to Gmail for Domains last fall. That actually worked out incredibly well.

So now, I try to leverage all kinds of services where appropriate… Blip.TV, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, FeedBurner, etc, etc. I suppose one advantage of using so many different (yet somewhat redundant) services is that if content disappears from one, it is still available somewhere else.

One thing I have been holding off on is implementing a GNMHealth wiki. I did set one up at PBWiki for the Health Hacks Podcast, but it isn’t in use.

So I’m now thinking about trying Ning. They offer complete social suites with forums, wiki, photo sharing, etc. You can have your own little MySpace! It seems big, though, and not to be taken on casually. Do I really want to monitor forums, for instance? Is there enough of an audience for the shows yet to support an online community? I just don’t know.

I would be interested to hear your perspectives on Ning, though. Have you seen it? If not, why not have a look.

UPDATE:

Justin Kownacki just Twittered about this same dilemma. Somehow a simple answer came to me when HE asked: It depends on the size and dedication of your audience. Ergo: No, GNMHealth is NOT ready yet.

Sometimes, I must confess I feel out of step with the listenership at some of the projects that I produce. A case in point is the Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show.

The host of that show, Jimmy Moore, is a great guy who I get along well with. He started his blog around the time I started my first blog, and because our interests overlap, we’ve been good friends ever since.

Now Jimmy comes from a fairly conservative perspective and I, well I guess you could call me a “Massachusetts Liberal” whatever that means. I have a long history of friendships and working relationships with people whose views differ from mine, and I have long since learned not to let let differences of opinion get in the way of a great working relationship.

Since Jimmy has been working with me on the podcast, several times I have had to bite my lip when he says things with which I don’t necessarily agree. And that’s OK, because it’s Jimmy’s show, and no matter where he goes, you can bet it will be entertaining.

Last week Jimmy did an episode that has been very controversial, to say the least. The topic was Veganism/PETA and Jimmy came down rather hard on them and invoked a lot of religious overtones. Getting into religion in what seems — on the surface — to be a religion-free context strikes me as an odd choice, but whatever… that’s his prerogative.

When I first heard the raw audio, I was quite certain there would be an outcry, and I was not wrong. The people Jimmy was criticizing (some have said “demonizing”) were not pleased to say the least, and at last I was compelled to issue an editorial refusing to fire Jimmy.

Now via comments and email, I have received wave upon wave of Kudos from Jimmy’s listers, but this has unsettled me even more. While many were kind and merely thanked me for sticking by their favorite podcaster, some were more dark and even trollish. A recent comment from a listener: “Vgeanism [sic] is a mental disorder, just like liberalism.”

I am flabbergasted at how much people have emotionally invested in their dietary choices. When they start getting politics and religion tied into these issues, it can get downright scary. The commonality between diet, politics and religion is that they all seem to relate on some level to a person’s sense of self-identity and therefore self-esteem.

One person said that Jimmy’s comment about eating animals being OK because they “would never have an everlasting life in Christ” could be interpreted as suggesting that eating Jews is OK, too. I hope that was tongue in cheek!

The gist of this is - am I too out of touch with Jimmy’s listeners to be an effective producer? On the one hand, I feel that I’m a fine editor and my skills are up to snuff, but on the other hand, is that enough? Can I really be effective in serving these people’s needs if my head is in such a different place from theirs?

Ultimately, though, I want to believe that a show on dietary choices can be produced appropriately even by a simple Unitarian-raised, secular humanist, left-of-center geek like me.

Can’t we all just get along, people?