Monday, 12 January 2015

Scott's little podcast

Well, I have now recorded and posted my first podcast.  Hope it displays all pretty and embedded like Tess's...



Yay, it did!

If anything, the experience gives me greater respect for people who do it all the time. Also, it makes me think I better get a proper microphone if I’m going to do it more often. I hear the Snowball is supposed to be pretty slick.

I was grateful to have GarageBand in my Apps folder (as a Mac devotee), as it gave me an easy tool for recording and mixing multiple tracks, including a couple of nifty royalty-free sound effects. Audacity is a cross-platform alternative, but the learning curve is quite a bit steeper.

Three minutes sounded like quite a bit of time to fill, until I started thinking about the fact that 2015 marks two decades of my life online. The podcast gave me a good excuse not just to stop and reflect on my early Internet days, but to also actually go back and look for remnants of that activity. I sadly lacked the foresight, way back in 1996, to keep a copy of the very first version of my personal home page I created in painstaking, hand-coded HTML. I was astounded and grateful, therefore, to discover that the Internet Archive still has copies of my web page going as far back as 1998.

I posted my podcast at around 5:45 p.m. A few short hours later, I discovered my humble little digital offering had already been noticed and tweeted by a digital literacy blog. Well, as the young folks say, woot!

macnmug
Digital Literacy Buzz is out! http://t.co/ESV7mQeWwA Stories via @lcordelia @ScottRollans @_GCooke
2015-01-11, 11:08 PM

Here are some fun support materials:

First, a link to an archived 1995 USENET thread from the misc.kids discussion group, where I spent countless hours debating such earth-shattering issues as spanking (I was against it) and breast milk (I was for it). Horrifyingly, the Google Groups USENET archive retains evidence that I could be somewhat sanctimonious (thank goodness I’m over that tendency now). Here’s a typical one of my threads: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22scott$20rollans%22/misc.kids/LKhOQsiItJ8/nTQm6h0Y_XIJ

My personal homepage as it appeared in January 1998, lovingly recreated using a version I recovered via the Wayback Machine: http://members.shaw.ca/srollans/1997/

My family website, Rollans.com, was such a novelty in 2001 that it merited coverage in a national magazine, Today’s Parent: http://members.shaw.ca/rollanscom/todaysparent.html

At the time MP3.com bit the dust, my band Juba held three of the top five slots in the African music charts. Just before the site went dark, I snagged a PDF screen grab of the evidence, plus a copy of Juba’s profile page on the site: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/609760/Juba/MP3.com.pdf

Nowadays, Juba's music lives on thanks to iTunes and YouTube.

Kokopelli Choir Association has played a huge part in my life and family, and I'm very proud of my role in boosting its online presence. Here’s the choir’s biggest YouTube hit, which has attracted 127,000 views and counting:


And, if anybody’s wondering, here’s where I grabbed the royalty-free sound effects I used in my podcast:

Modem sound effect
http://www.soundjay.com/communication/sounds/dial-up-modem-02.mp3

Whoosh sound effect – “Magic, spell, pass, by, whoosh” at freesfx.co.uk: http://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/whoosh

1 comment:

  1. I enjoyed your podcast - great use of music and sound throughout!

    The wayback machine is an interesting tool. It certainly shows how much progress has been made in terms of creating a digital presence for everyone from expert developers to the average user. A few times you mentioned being part of something big, being connected. Do you think that the new generation of users, who have grown up with technology, have the same sense of connection to a more global picture or, is it just the norm? Last, I would like to say congratulations on earning ‘dozens of dollars’ on MP3.com…ha ha ha.

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