TRANSCRIPT Tele-Workshop: Audio/Video Podcasting for the Byway Visitor Experience >>And I’d like to welcome everybody to the Tele-Workshop today on Audiovisual Podcasting for Byways and Digital Experience. We are fortunate to have with us today Gary Chancey, and he is the Public Affairs Staff Officer with the Wayne National Forest. Gary has a lot of experience in this area and he is able to translate this material and this concept to the byway level. He’s been the Public Affairs Officer for the Wayne National Forest in Southeastern Ohio. Prior to his arrival a year ago, he was on the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota as an assistant Public Affairs Officer and AV Production Specialist for four years. He’s been with the U.S. Forest Service for five years, he’s a native of Southeast Tennessee… a couple of you heard that earlier. He joined the U.S. Army in 1987 and remained on active duty for five years. He has served as a broadcast journalist for the 3rd Infantry Division in Germany and the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Augusta, Georgia. Gary also served as a broadcast journalist with the Army National Guard. He served eight months on active duty in Bosnia producing multimedia content for the Armed Forces Network Europe. He’s also worked as a television news photographer and reporter in Augusta, Georgia and public television stations in Tennessee and I'm sure all of you will agree he has a wonderful radio voice. So with that... welcome, Gary. >>Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate this fine audience that we have on the phone today. This is a really unique opportunity for me to share a little bit of information about podcasting. I'm not a know-it-all by all means but I certainly enjoy sharing some of the information that I know about podcasting. But I hope today that--you know, as you have questions, feel free to interrupt me along the way. I’d rather answer a question along the way than late to the end because you’ll probably forget what the question was or something. So feel free to interrupt me if you’d like. Today, of course, we are talking about introduction to podcasting. If you will, go ahead and go to your computer and what we’re going to do is I have the PDF version of the presentation in front of me and, hopefully, many of you have that. If not--if you have the PowerPoint--that’s good as well, but as long as you’re connected to the Internet. Let’s go ahead and go to, of course, page 1 there… Introduction to Podcasting. You probably look at this equipment here and you say, “Wow, what is all that stuff?” Well, that’s basically my small setup for basically an audio studio and we’ll cover more of that in just a moment. We’re going to move right along to page 2, probably somebody just coming on the line there. Welcome to Introduction to Podcasting and here we go. >>A new perspective… public relations today has never been more exciting and effective than it is today. You know, the power of ideas combined with the latest in technology such as podcasting has put unprecedented power in the hands of the communicator. And that’s what we are as public affairs professionals, whether we’re working for the Forest Service or with the Bureau of Land Management or other agencies around the State level, the Federal level or even local municipalities, or even CVBs out there. Today, we cannot only work with the media in new ways but, you know, we’ve actually literally become the media by way of being able to conduct logging activities, audio and video podcast and so this are really powerful tools in the right hands. Now Forest Service Public Affairs Officer, you know, we like to think we certainly are communicators. At least, we should be. I use podcasting as a tool to broadcast 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So while we’re out there sleeping or whatever we’re doing, these audiocasts and videocasts out there are actually working for us, too… to get the information out there. Or to, of course, help you navigate and thrive in this new environment that we have today. It’s a very exciting opportunity in the field that I’m in to actually get the message out. >>Now what is a podcast? Well, a podcast is an audio or video broadcast available on the web, the Internet, to the public for downloading to a personal computer or even a digital audio or video player. Now when we think about that a little bit, we talk about listening to podcasts or watching a podcast, many of you are probably familiar with the Apple iPod. And there are other devices out there today that are being created everyday; it seems like there’s something new coming out that can play some audio or video file that’s on the Internet. And all you have to do, too, is walk to the airport and see people with their headphones on and listening to music. Primarily, these iPods are used for music, especially for the young teenagers or kids or even younger… they can tell you exactly how to operate one and that’s kind of embarrassing sometimes to see them teaching the parents how to operate that stuff. But that’s what they’ve got at schools and even the college kids today are listening to lectures, their professors on iPods. So when we listen on a portable MP3 player like an iPod, what you’re doing is downloading the podcast as what you call an MP3, okay? Whether it’s music or it’s a speech or if it’s a presentation maybe from a CVB president or chairman or someone from the board or anything like that, if it’s going to be played on a pod or iPod, then you’re looking at that file being an MP3. Or it could be, if it’s a dot movie file--then, basically, that’s a movie. So it’s playing video for your iPod if that’s the version that you have. And, of course, you’d listen or watch it on the iPod. Now podcasting topic examples are on page 4 of the PowerPoint or the PDF, you have Audio Tours could be on these devices, and, like I said, speeches or interview clips or news releases that you could distribute as well. There’s a small area on this PDF file that I distributed, a little symbol down there that says podcast. If you will, just go ahead and click there. Hopefully, most of you are connected to the Internet so we can make this a little more interactive. Is anyone having any trouble getting through to the Internet there? >>I'm having problems. >>You are. Okay. >>I joined late so I'm not sure what site you’re going to. >>Okay. Do you have the PDF document in front of you? >>I do not. >>You do not. Okay. >>This is Sherry at the Resource Center, did you get the email about the FTP site that you need to go to. >>I got the email but I can’t access it. >>Really? Who’s calling? >>It’s Frank Feild from Georgia. >>Okay, Frank, I won’t be able to take care of it here but I will make sure it gets emailed to you, Frank Feild. All right, thank you. I’ll take care of this right away. >>Uh… Gregg Rackin? R-A-C-K-I-N. >>Okay. Got it, Gregg. Okay. >>This is Pat from Arizona. A link on it brought me to the Wayne National Forest podcast website, is that right? >>That is correct. So there you are on the Wayne National Forest podcast and I call my program Forestnet; it’s actually searchable in Google as well and other search engines if you want to go out and kind of look at those. I’ve been really creating these probably for about three years so I got quite a bit of content out there on the Black Hills National Forest website as well but this one here on the Wayne obviously with my public affairs duties, it kind of stretches my capabilities sometimes to be able to produce podcasts and do public affairs work but we’re getting there; doing well, I think. Okay, on the Wayne National Forest podcast page, you kind of see how I’ve got it laid out here. Started back in March 24 producing some and this kind of gives you a basic format. We’ll go over this further in just a moment as we move along with the presentation. We’ll go ahead and close that window if you have time there; we’re going to move right along to page 5 of the PDF. >>Okay, here you are, Introducing Podcasting Equipment. As you can see, this is kind of a wide shot of the audio board, the microphone, the headphones that I have and a small recorder. All of this fits on one small table. Years ago, you would have to have a whole big studio to be able to do this kind of work but, today, it’s really--everything is getting much smaller. >>Now we’re on page 6, Shopping for Podcasting Equipment. A year ago when I put this list together, this was some of the equipment that I'm using and obviously I'm not endorsing any of these products but this is what I'm using and I think this is doing a fine job getting a good quality sound out to the public. You see some of the prices, not too bad, everything here basically under about $1500 and there are systems out there that are even cheaper. But I can only talk about what I'm using so I haven’t tried out a whole lot of other equipment. Page 7, Audio Mixing Board. You look at this and probably many of you are intimidated by it. So all these buttons, look at all that stuff… I don’t know what to do with it, like sitting in a Cadillac or something. But if you look at each knob at the bottom there? Basically, what you see there is a channel for a piece of input. It could be several microphones, several sources for audio. As you see in the rear of the mixing board, I have two microphones plugged into it… one to the far left and I skip two channels and I go to the fourth channel. So basically, that’s the way I’ve got it set up; I’m not using anywhere near the capacity of this mixing board, okay? All right, moving on to page 8. These are the microphones I use, these are standard broadcast microphones. They work very well, they’re called the RE20s. Okay, we’re going to move on to page 9. This is a recorder that is very popular in the broadcast field for recording field interviews. Many of you would probably be out in some field situations whether it’s a tour of a location or it could be where you want to go interview people, maybe in a certain setting of their business or it could be during a ceremony or something like that. Page 10… this is the configuration. >>You know, many of you--I don’t expect you to really learn this today but at least it’s available to you and I'm obviously available by phone if you want to talk to me. But if you want this equipment set up, it takes about 10 minutes to do it. It’s set up for good and you obviously take notes and things like that, not very difficult at all. But this kind of gives you the configuration of how to set that up coming from the mixing board. As you see here, this is some other diagram that would help you as well. >>All right, moving on to page 12 here… Audio Editing. Say, for instance, you’ve already got your broadcast recorded and all your equipment set up, everything’s working properly and you’ve recorded your podcast, now it’s time to actually record your audio. What do you guys think about this right here on page 12? When you talk about audio editing, you say, “Good grief, what is all that?” That’s what your voice looks like on the computer; that’s what we call a WAV file, okay? That’s a WAV file. And what you’re going to do is edit all the mistakes that you made, kick all that out and bring it all together and get it ready for broadcasting. Let’s go ahead and click on that link there, this is free software. This is some good software that you won’t have to spend any money on and you can actually go to this website and actually download it and start playing with it. You know, you can start using some short clips, maybe some little 2 or 3-minute clips and then you would actually bring it in to that timeline there and start editing it. We’re not going to do that today, it’s a little more advanced process that we can do at another time if it’s permitted or people have the interest. >>All right, we’re going to move on to page 13. One thing about recording your podcast, you want to keep your file small; so you want to record and edit your audio file as a WAV file as I mentioned earlier. Now you want to save or export as an MP3. Okay. And sometimes, people--you want to think of it as producing a document, a word document, and converting it into an MP3 or, excuse me, a PDF. Well, here you are, you’re taking audio as a WAV file and exporting it as an MP3. So what it’s doing is it’s compressing that file down to an MP3 eventually when that happens. All right, the sampling rate--many of you probably won’t know what this means--it's a 16-bit and when you get to that point in your audio editing software, you’ll understand that a little bit better at 44.100 kilobytes per second which is a great bit rate. So it streams or it’s delivered over the Internet at a much… you know, it’s clear and it’s fast. Some people have tried to put big files on the Internet and they’re hard to download because they don’t stream very well. Okay, yes. >>Question. This is Dan Albrecht from Lake Champlain Byway in Vermont. What’s your definition of a small file? >>Well, on the Internet, sometimes you’re talking maybe… we’re not talking about many megabytes. You know, you’re probably anywhere from up to about 11 megabytes for maybe a 15 or 20-minute audio. And then you could actually reduce it even smaller than that and when you get it down to around 44.100 kb per second, you might be able to get it down to 4 megabytes. Most people think, “Well, that’s a lot.” But, you know, in the beginning, audio… or the phone lines have always been able to communicate audio over the lines quite well. It’s when you introduce pictures, videos is when it has a tough time sometimes depending on your access. >>All right, moving right along, page 14. You’re thinking, “Where do I put my audio files?” I use a company called Streamhoster; we contract out to these folks. For about $25 a month, I'm able to put a lot of files up on this site. You get administrative access to upload your file; it’s very easy to upload. The site generates a web address for you; you don’t have to talk to anyone. And that’s something I thoroughly enjoy. You take that web address and then give it to your webmaster and they post it right into your website as a hyperlink. >>Okay, page 15. If you choose to go to a company like Streamhoster, that’s the company I use, they actually allow you to monitor your traffic. You know, many people say, “How many people are listening to that product that we spent so much time on?” Well, this way you can actually tell the powers that be. You know, we’ve had 2,000 or 3,000 hits on this video or this audio and you can monitor even more--really analyze every day of the month and track the history of that audio or video file. >>Page 16… okay, Marketing and Distribution of Your Podcast. Now once you put it out on your website, you know, you’re really not finished with it. I went into Blogger.com and then there’s a product called FeedBurner, you see that there, and then iTunes. Before we go into each on of these, I created a blog first. This is a place where I store all of my content and I'm able to actually put more of a description of the video and things like that. Now FeedBurner, you set up a FeedBurner account which actually is constantly pinging or reading your blog, all of the time. So what happens is once you put information into your blog, it notifies--well, FeedBurner picks up on it and then distributes to people that subscribe to your service. Okay? Without getting too deep into that, eventually, you actually have subscribers that actually sign up to your news feed and the sign up through FeedBurner, okay? Now what iTunes is actually gets my content from FeedBurner. Okay? And then it’s registered into iTunes as well, I have an account there as well. So, really, these three areas here, if you have these covered, it will cover everything on the Internet for you as far as distribution of everything. Here you are producing something and then you’ve got to distribute it and then you’d be able to monitor that activity. >>All right, I'm going to go ahead and click on Blogger.com. Okay. And the blog that I started here… and many have heard about blogs. Newspapers are getting into them, other media outlets are working on this. You will see here on poorservice.blogspot.com--by the way, this is not an official Forest Service website. But since the things that I’ve produced are in the public domain, I feel that I can go ahead and put this out there and let it be working for the public, giving information. But as you look down through here, there’s quite a bit of data and stories that have been posted. It’s really a diary, that’s what I think of a blog; people can actually interact with you, too, if you allow that. So if anybody has any questions on that, feel free to ask now. But if not, we’re going to move right along with this. This is basically an introduction to these kinds of things; we’ll spend more time on them later. But here’s FeedBurner… I'm going to go ahead and open this up. As we go into FeedBurner, you see what it’s doing, it’s monitoring basically my blog. You see here’s this forest podcast, podcast powered by FeedBurner. Okay, you see the iTunes is very much friendly with this and when I post something, it automatically is made available to iTunes. And if you wanted to, you could actually click on these little symbols as you scroll down the page where it says ‘play now’. You could actually play some of these podcasts that have been produced but keep your own mute; that’d be a good thing if you want to listen to one album for a little but we’re going to move right along. How many of you on your computer right now, maybe you have iTunes; anybody? Okay, so we got some people that have iTunes. Yeah, it’s really a cool way. If you get a chance to sign up an iTunes account… I'm going to go on in there and see how far it’ll let me go. I have iTunes on my computer and what you can do is subscribe to this, it’s free, you can download things that are free. And when you go into a podcast search. Go in… you could put my name in there if you wanted to under Gary Chancey, or you could go in and put Forestnet. Forestnet is a product that I often produce and you’ll see the podcast come up in there. Okay? >>We’re going to move right along now to page 17, this is more good stuff down the road here I'm going to want to cover. Now posting your podcast to your own website, that’s a first thing you want to make sure you are able to do. It’d be pretty embarrassing to produce something or record a speech that you couldn’t put on your own website, share it with the world. So here on the Wayne, here’s an example if you want to click there. That’ll take you to our page; we visited this earlier. And naturally, you know, you’ve got the dates… it says ‘Forestnet Podcast Number 2’ and the title, the host of the show, the guest--well, make sure you include all that information--the duration. And then, you know, we have what we call--it's a little audio player graphic that I'm going to share to any webmasters that are out there; I'm going to share with you the player code so that when you are able to update your website and design it you can actually use this code if you’d like, okay? Notice there also--we might get back to this a little down the road-- but it says download a transcript. One thing--we’ll get into the Section 508, American Disabilities Act information, but go ahead and click on where it says ‘Download Transcript Number 2’ there. Okay. Now you see there, there’s the whole transcript which is very good information as I’ve got five pages here. A lot of people really like that. And, of course, if you’re a government entity, it’s required for us or mandated we make sure we comply with Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act so those folks that need assistance there can actually read the transcript right here. There you have another podcast posted there as well. Don’t close that page quite yet, I'm going to go back and show you one other feature on that page. I go ahead with this transcript in HTML. Basically, it’s a web page that’s been created from the transcript. Webmasters will thoroughly enjoy because of the--basically, this content is being indexed into the search engine. Okay, so you make that available there, too. >>All right, we’re going to go ahead and move on now to, let’s see where we’re going, page 18? Anybody got any questions so far? Probably not. Okay. Hopefully, I'm not talking over folks’ head too much; it’s a lot of fun. Here we go; here’s the code for that audio player that I showed you that’s embedded in the web pages, okay. Look at all that information, just for an audio player to play… your audio. And there’s another page with that information as well. Okay? When I got that, I enjoy sharing that with other webmasters because they’d say, “Where’d you get that?” I share it with them, okay? We’re going to move on to page 20. Of course, our domain is, you know, once we send out a podcast it’s out there for the world. Okay? So once it’s posted it’s free to all to link to. If you notice, click on that link for the Rapid City Journal. They have a blog similar to what I have, but they started their own blog. It mostly is a political blog but it’s called Mount Blogmore; obviously for Mount Rushmore, I'm sure of it, yeah. Hopefully, all of you can see this web page, it’s the Rapid City Journal. Go ahead and scroll down the page. Scroll down the page there until you see where it says “Up in Smoke.” There’s a picture on that page, someone from Chadron State College, I believe. Yeah, okay. Now once you’ve gotten there, look in the story… he put some information that says ‘also check out the video shot by myself of the Black Hills National Forest’. It says the links gets you to a press release and a link to the video. >> Now this is a great way of what we call multimedia news releases. So when you send out a news release about your byway program or something like that, have a little video to go with it or maybe a podcast that you can advertise in the news release. There’s the news release that was published back in 2005 and then if you have the time, maybe later, you can go back and watch the video and you see it’s embedded in the news release there online. That is a video news release. Okay? We often send those out to the TV stations and other websites. So that’s just an example of when your content is out there or you advertise that it’s out there. Other people create blogs and just insert your links into their stuff. And before too long, you’ll be doing Google searches and your stuff would be popping up everywhere. When we talk about the search engines, there’s one that does searches for podcasts; one of them is called Podcast.com. And I'm on page 21 now of the PDF. >>Here’s a sample of some of the searches that I was able to come up with. I did not submit these to the search engines. Once your information is in to iTunes, people from all over start picking up your stuff. They help you market your program, whatever your video is saying, your message. As you see there on Podcast.com, they’ve got all my stuff out here. Or not my stuff, but the Forest Service stuff up there; very exciting. You could, if you wanted to, we could go ahead and click on like the QuickTime movie video “Watershed Restoration Project” This is a video podcast. If you click on it, it says ‘play video’ to the right of the title. It should pop up. If it doesn’t, it could be your stream rate or something like that but you can check some other podcasts and see how they work for you. Okay? If we come out of that now and go to the Google search… are the results there? Just go to Google. Clicking on it now to see if it takes me where I'm supposed to go. Sometimes these links are broken. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Okay. Tell you what, I'm going to go over to AOL and see if… Okay. What we can do later on… if you want to, you can actually copy those links and put them in your browser and they allow you to go those places. All right, we’re going to move right along here to--you know technology, guys--sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It could be operator headspace for me but… let’s go to number 22, page 22. >> When we talk about the Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act which many of you out there must be conforming with it because you’re either with Federal, agency, State and you just need to start thinking about making your content, whether it’s a video file, an audio file, making it accessible for those in need of assistance, okay? That’s with transcripts, or with captioning. As you see, their website offers audio files with no video. Do they have to be captioned? It says ‘no’ because it is not multimedia. However, since audio is a non-text element, text equivalent such as a transcript must be available. So the story there is just like podcasting with the audio cast, make sure you got a transcript to help it out there. Now as far as captioning, if you have a video and audio file, this is where the text actually comes up inside the video window. You need to have that available. Okay, that’s basically what that is saying. >>On page 23 of the PDF file there, you have the web link that supports what I'm saying there. Okay? Page 24 is very exciting, this is a project that the Black Hills National Forest did about a year-and-a-half ago and we finished it up with--it was a lot of work but it was a lot of fun. This is a virtual tour of the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway. This is a good example of a virtual tour, of course. If you go to the Peter Norbeck link there… this better work for me this time. Come on. Is it working for everybody else? >>Yeah, I'm getting it. >>Good. That’s pretty bad when I don’t get it, huh? I'm going to find another way to get there. All right. Hopefully, everyone else is making their way there. All right, give me just a second. Okay, I'm headed that way; it says Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway loading. This is a virtual tour that I worked with Steve Teagan on the Black Hills National Forest. It was financed with some Federal Highway dollars and this is a platform that was created in Flash programming. If you work your way around there… you know, take your mouse and just cruise over some of those boxes where there might be some content. There is one there… let’s go ahead and go to… up there it says ‘Mount Rushmore National Memorial’? Look underneath it there to the left, that’s a picnic bench. There’s Breezy Point overlooking Picnic Area. If you click on it, okay… hopefully those windows have opened up. You have a photo gallery which is very cool. It’s got all kinds of beautiful pictures of Breezy Point. So if you’re a tourist and you want to go there and visit, you‘re getting a sneak preview of some of the things that you’re going to be seeing when you visit there. This is on the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway, okay? Up to the top right there you see… it closes it out. I’d like to go back to it for just a moment and actually look at the video. >>This is a videocast, a podcast… if you notice, it just kind of streams for you. See how fast it plays? This is the new way of really playing video over the Internet with Flash. It really starts playing very fast. Everybody likes that, I think. And what’s neat is you can go backwards, forward and backwards, on your player there. I really like that. Now we contracted the programming of this out to a programmer in Rapid City. Anybody wants to know who they are or anything like that, I can share that with you but we omitted that out and they got a low bid on it and they have a lot of great experience working with Flash. So this kind of gives you a little bit of a model of what you can do. Notice also over there it says ‘For more information’, you got the Forest Service shield, you got the Mt. Rushmore links built into this; that’s very valuable for folks at convention and visitors bureaus, cities that you’re working with… they like to keep those partnerships active and able to actually work with you on a project like this. It’s an excellent way to recruit partnerships, too, to help you with your scenic byway program. >>We don’t have a whole of time to go through any more of this particular site but if you notice--just bookmark this if you want to and come back to it another time and spend some time with it and kind of get to know it and see all the different options it has. But to me, I use it as a platform to be able to distribute podcasts, whether it’s audio or video information, over the Internet. Let’s go to page 25 real quick on your PDF. >>I actually worked with the byways.org folks to get our information posted on their site. So this again is more of your marketing. Click on this here, one of my links isn’t working too good but I know those are active links, folks. It just happens to be… okay. All right, if you go to that website, Byways.org, Explore Byways, and at number 2459… when you go that site, you see how we’ve embedded that virtual tour in the marketing of that scenic byway so that people can get to your content… the brochures, maps, anything like that. And I’ve seen some websites that are very nice. I just thoroughly enjoy the multimedia content of a virtual tour. Okay, move right along here. Let’s go back just a moment to the PDF and go to page 26. Okay. When you click on page 26 there, you’ve got an area where as part of the case study here of the Norbeck, the Byways.org actually allowed us to check the stats to be able to obviously monitor our activity on that website. I’ll give you just a second to get there, okay? It also gives me a little more time here, too. Anybody got any questions out there? Awfully quiet. >>Okay, we move to that stat page. And good webmasters that may be on the phone can actually appreciate some of these programs managers you see there in June and July… right there in the center of the page it says ‘Unique Visitors’. Look at that; 3,000 unique visitors hit that page. You see the chart there, we didn’t launch it until the 1st of March. And then, WHAM! We got January 120, February 190, and then in the summer it had 3,000 hits. Now it’s starting to drop, of course, because it’s getting cold out there. Okay. And we’re going to go on the last page here. >>This is my contact information on page 27. Anybody wants to try to get ahold of me, I’ll do my best to return my calls and stuff like that but we’ve given you a lot of information. I know that it’s kind of hard to absorb it all but you at least have an introduction of what some of the things about podcasting is. And when you’re producing podcasts… a lot of times, you could contract this out to maybe a radio station, someone that would make a good host for the show and you record it for about, say, 10 or 15-minute show about your byway and some of the features that you want to feature. And then you put it up on the web and then people start coming to you, listening to your information. So I'm going to open up some questions, don’t anybody be afraid to ask a question. They’re all good questions, I'm sure. There’s no stupid questions. >>Maybe I missed this. Sorry, this is Linda Muller from a couple of scenic byways in Iowa. Did you say how you did the transcript? >>Okay. What I’d do is when I have a contract, and typically a 15-minute audio production costs about $30-$35 for a Word transcript. And a lot of people think, “Why don’t you use a software?” Well, the error rate on that is still too high and it’s just another step that I don’t have really the time or the resources, I have someone else to do it for me. So what I do is I capture the audio file which is on a flash card--compact flash card, that’s what I use as my storage device. After I’ve finished editing the WAV file, I save it to an MP3 and then I send the final product electronically through the email to these folks--they’re out of Maryland--and the very next day they send it back to me with an invoice. >>And you said you contract that for about $30-$35 per podcast? >>Uh-huh. Yeah, for about 15 minutes, yeah. Any other questions? Well, we got about 10 more minutes. We can talk about any video podcasting or audio podcasting. Anybody out there using podcasts? >>Sample of some of the different types of audio content that you use? >>You mean some topics? I'm sorry; could you repeat your question? >> I was wondering if you could give an example of some of the different topics you might be developing on. >>Okay. Well, I would think that for a--most of the podcasts that I would produce--because we look at--at least I think in the Forest Service, we look at a scenic byway as a way to connect the public to the forest, okay? And many times, we would have features along that scenic byway such as camp grounds, maybe excellent swimming opportunities, that’s good tourist destinations. So we’d do features on a camp ground, maybe it improved its accessibility? Something like that would make a good podcast on, you know--and you talk about the grant that you got, probably from Federal Highways and other sources; sometimes with matching dollars. So you could do a podcast on that. And so that’s just one example of a good topic, I would think, at least on the Forest Service perspective being along the byway. >>Are they informational, educational or interpretative in nature? >>Well, it’s really up to you. As you plan something like this… say, for instance, if it’s here on the Wayne National Forest, we have a covered bridge scenic byway, it’s a Forest Service Scenic Byway, and what have planned right now is that each one of these covered bridges has a unique story to it. And we actually have some old soundbytes or audio that have been taken of these people about 10 years ago. Many of these people aren’t even alive anymore. So we’re going to take this information and incorporate it into an audio feed that people can click on a virtual tour similar to what I showed you on the Peter Norbeck. And then they can download that, the podcast as well. And so when they come to visit, they just click on that track and they can watch it or listen to it. Is that pretty clear there? >>Thank you for that answer. >>But interpretative is great, too. Say, for instance, if the scenic byway is going up through and again I'm thinking of the U.S. Forest Service there and, you know, there’s many ways you could actually talk about many of the features along the route such as trees that are there, many of the natural resources and maybe a thinning project that’s been going on to improve the landscape as well as the health of the forest. >>Gary? >>Yes. >>This is Anne with the Daniel Boone National Forest. I was wondering if you had some ideas or suggestions on other places to get in creating podcasts? >>Well, as far as resources out there…? >>Uh, yeah. >>Yeah. Of course, the Daniel Boone is just down the road from me so, hey, you’re the closest. >>So we might take you up on that. >>Yeah, we might have to… maybe during the wintertime or something but pretty busy here but, still, if you go on the Internet and you just go into podcasting, there are people out there that you can hire to actually produce your podcast. You know, it can get--you'd be spending probably $500-$1,000 to produce something like that but I really think that with a little effort and a little bit of training, you could actually do it yourself. I really believe it and you would improve the quality each time you do one. I have all the faith in the world in people out there… kind of like citizen journalists, you know? You’ve heard that term on the Internet a lot; people are doing that. And you don’t have to sound like a radio person, the deep voice or anything like that, but you do need to be able to communicate, of course. But I just believe that people can do it. And, of course, I'm negotiable, I guess, if some people need my help. I don’t know. We’ll go there if we need to. >>Okay, thanks. >>Is there any other question? I'm sure we got a couple of more questions out there. Can anybody out there kind of give me some idea how you could use a podcast on your website or how you would, you know, use the video or the audio portion of a podcast? >>…to develop the audio kind of podcast and get comfortable with that before you go to the video? >>Yeah. That’s a good point. I would start out with audio first. That way, you can kind of understand the… you see, a lot of times in video; video’s a little harder to do. But you could also, when you talk about video, it doesn’t have to be moving pictures either. You could actually use still photography to tell your story, okay? There’s another software out there that isn’t in my presentation, it’s called Camtasia 5. So if you do a Google search for that software, they have done an incredible job in making it very user-friendly for people to use this. In fact, recently, a Wildland Fire Use Team… I think it was in Idaho, that used Camtasia to record a video on how the Forest Service and other interagency partners were conducting a wildland use of fire out there, why they did that and what it meant to do that. So they did a real good job and these are people that aren’t, as far as I know, they didn’t have a lot of training in producing videos. It’s getting much more user-friendly for just the consumers out there to be able to buy the software and actually put… You know, they’re teaching kids in elementary school and high school how to do these things these days. So it’s definitely the future and I'm excited to be a part of it. Any other questions? But that software, by the way, is Camtasia 5. >>Hi, Gary. So, hello. >>Yes, I'm here. >>This is Dan again from Lake Champlain byway. Have you seen any application for video or podcasting linked to auto, jeep system? I'm talking about driving the byway. >>No, I haven’t. I can’t say that I have. And this is audio GPS systems. >>Like car… talking about? >>Yeah, I haven’t seen that out there. >>This is Jeff from Seaway Trail. >>Hi, Jeff. >>Before I started working here, I know that they had set up along this byway different places where there are FM transmitters for people who listen to the MP3. And so it was basically… they turned to the dial of the station of that transmitter which was basically a pre-recorded MP3 file. So that’s how we’ve used them in the past. >>Right. Yeah, a lot of people in depending on the range of those--they're basically FM, I guess. They have for AM signal that’s being broadcast so they’re very low power. But it’s kind of a loop. It loops that audio continuously, right? >>Yeah, that’s right. >>Yup. You know, I think more and more people too… take for instance training opportunities, too. If you’re going on a plane ride and that’s 2 or 3 hours and you got a 1 hour training opportunity you could be listening to on an iPod. You know, and it could be on scenic byways program or stuff like that. It’s just an excellent opportunity to be able to store that information on there and retrieve it when you want it. And maybe by this Christmas they’ll be even cheaper. Is there any other question? >>Yeah, are you there? I have a question for you. >>I'm right here. >>This is Chris from Kansas? >>Yeah. >>What I want to know is if you can get a local radio station that would partner with these productions and everything that would go on in a byway website… are we able to say the radio station’s name, that the podcast is live or is that sometimes a conflict? >>It depends on what kind of funding you are using. And you know what, off the top of my head, I don’t have that answer. But we could talk about it a little bit later on. If you’re using private funding, it’s not a problem. If you’re using Federal Highway funding… at this point, I couldn’t give you a clear answer on it but we could talk about it after the call and we could try to find out. >>…trying to let us know or we’ll talk later? >>Yeah. And Gary, you may be able to add into that; I mean, it’s the same… Federal Highway does interpret the rules slightly differently than Department of Agriculture but, by and large, if we’re talking about using Federal funds to promote a byway but could you state the private radio station that’s helping the information. >>To them, basically, a radio station is producing the content and they want to make sure they get recognized for producing it, right? >>Uh-huh. >>So what you could put in there is in cooperation with WXYZ Radio Station which is a partner in interpretation of the scenic byway. Could be like a partnership agreement of some sort. >>Cool. >>Yup. And in fact, sometimes I take a news segment from a public radio station and I’ll link to it as I did on the Wayne National Forest website. I linked to their content because, obviously, that’s a non-profit organization. They did a story interviewing from the forest… So that was a good podcast. Any other questions? I see it’s about 2:00. >>Well, Gary, I want to thank you for a fabulous presentation and I want to thank all the participants for listening in. I hop you got plenty of information. We will leave the PDF file up on the FTP site for another week or so. So if you need to go back in to that web address and download it, please feel free to do so. And again, thank you very much, Gary. And thank you to everybody else.