I have been enjoying the interviews at /Talkshow. Some great people over the last few weeks, like Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Leisa Reichelt, and Ted Rheingold.
The more I use the Blogtalkradio.com solution, the more I enjoy doing the show, but also the more I want other features.
Blogtalkradio.com, as a sponsor of the show, has set up a service that they may want to offer to other users at a price: a producer for the show. Instead of directly managing my show — in particular, dealing with folks calling in — Blogtalkradio.com has assigned one of their people to do it for me. This turns out to have several interesting benefits:
- Instead of having to watch for callers, I can concentrate on the discussion, and not the details.
- Because I am not calling in as the host — which is based on both a number and a passcode — I simply call in as yet another guest. That means I can call in via Skype, rather than on a phone. (Note: the problem with using Skype as the call in method is a bug of Skype’s, not Blogtalkradio.com’s, as I detailed here.)
- The person assigned as producer, Hillary Leewong, has added some great questions to the show, but more importantly, she can sub for me if I am delayed, have phone problems, or whatever.
Even with this added distancing away from the show — where I act more and more as the ‘talent’ and less and less with the nuts-and-bolts of production — I still have a long list of wishes and hopes for the Blogtalkradio.com technology:
- Multiple Phone Numbers — Blogtalkradio supports two sorts of numbers now: one for the host and one for callers. But that’s not enough. If, like me, you are having guests calling into to be interviewed or to co-host, there should be a dedicated number for that, so the producer or host doesn’t have to ask what number they will be using, to differentiate them from regular callers.
- Two kinds of callers — some callers to the show may just be listening by calling in, and others want to ask questions. Either there should be two numbers, or a single number with some mechanism to indicate you have a question which puts you on the list of callers with questions.
- Transcripts — Another revenue opportunity for Blogtalkradio.com would be to offer show developers the option for transcripts. I want them, and I would pay for them.
- Better widgets — The tech guys at Blogtalkradio.com are working on better widgets, but they aren’t ready for roll-out yet. For example, they are developing a widget that would display the last six shows, and all of them would be playable. However, the current version doesn’t fit my blog margins now, so I have to manually update the stuff in the right margin about the show. And as a result, its always out of date.
Of course, I am a very Internet oriented guy, so I feel that the old-style phone interface should be secondary to a web interface. Blogtalkradio.com does support web streaming, but not web participation. The best solution, I believe, would be a significantly amped-up web interface, with better web streaming, web chat, web audio chat, and audio and text comments.
In particular, I would like to see the streaming solution to include random access into the audio stream, like that provided by Viddler for video. For example, I could reach into the stream of the recent interview with Thomas, and set an audio bookmark at a particular comment. Later on, others could jump directly to that point int he audio, and I could use a URL to direct people there.
Perhaps a full-scale integration with Skype is called for, to achieve these goals.
Also, now that Facebook’s F8 platform is up and running, Blogtalkradio.com could integrate to that platform, so that events in my Blogtalkradio.com stream — like a new show being scheduled, new audio being posted, new comments being created — could stream out to anyone tracking that source, or all of my personal traffic.
Please, Blogtalkradio.com, please.
/Talkshow is sponsored by Blogtalkradio.com
