Podcasting

So this past Friday, we had an intern Podcast over at Yahoo! It was fairly interesting and I've never done a podcast so I thought I'd give it a shot. I was in the production studio in Yahoo Headquarters with some sweet Sennheiser headphones and got to talk about blogging for an hour of the day. They said they would somehow cut that down to 15 minutes but I'm not sure at all how they are going to do that.

They asked a series of questions to us going from basic "how often to you blog?" to more in-depth "what do you think the link (if any) is there between social networking and blogging?" and on of the last ones "what effect do you think the blogs of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting have with their classmates and family members? what happens to your internet identity after you die?" I was caught probably most off guard about the Virginia Tech questions as I never really thought about it or just the presence of someone on the internet once they pass on. I haven't had a friend pass away in that regard so it was interesting to hear that their profiles were like shrines to them and that on important dates (and random dates as well) other people are leaving messages telling them how much they missed them and well intentioned comments.

That left us at kind of a sad feeling in the air so we switched it up to our favorite thing about blogging. Mine was just how blogging has evolved into showing multiple forms of expression whether it be text, audio, or video because you can only convey so much in text without having a connection to what the person may be feeling or trying to express. Sometimes text is nice in the fact that we have to leave it up to our minds to put together the pieces and visualize it for ourselves and then it is interesting to compare it to an actual video of the events described events. Audio is another interesting medium because it is still up to your imagination but you can hear a persons tone, when they might have to pause and varied levels of emotion that you can't express well in text.

When I got into that room I had no idea what I was going to say and being a fairly opinionated person I wasn't worried that I wouldn't have anything to talk about. It was a definite learning experience where you really evaluated what you thought on a particular topic that doesn't normally come into common conversation or deep evaluation. Hopefully I'll get another opportunity to podcast and I nominated discussing the Facebook platform possibly as another podcast so hopefully we can expect that soon!