Podcast Ping

A Podcast Ping Christmas This is a reworking of the Podcast Ping Christmas Calendar from 2009. I took all the poems and music and compiled them together into a single episode. Doing this made me realize how much work I put into the Calendar. Just putting this together took a couple of hours even though I had everything else already done. The episode runs more than an hour and a half. I did have to redo the credits which themselves run about a minute and a half, and that's after compressing them. I used all the old recordings of the poems instead of re-recording them. They probably would sound better had I re-recorded them but I wanted to save some time and effort. Re-recording would likely have taken a few days to record and edit, and it may not have made that much difference. The original recordings aren't that bad. The idea was really to give people the convince of getting all the songs and poems from the Christmas Calendar in one file. This way the special can be played as background for a Christmas party. And I'm sure there's many who will be surprised to hear so many Christmas songs that they may never have heard before. Since the Christmas Calendar was twenty-five days long, this special contains twenty-five songs and poems about Christmas. That means I've written about twenty-five Christmas poems, although some are just seasonal poems about winter. It's likely that I wouldn't have written many of them if I didn't have to do them for the calendar. As for further episodes of Podcast Ping, it's going to be a matter of wait-and-see. I would like to do more but it does take time. But it's not so much the time it takes, it's more that I've just got so many other things to work on, and working on Podcast Ping takes time and effort away from those. But I never really quit Podcast Ping, I just put it aside. And this is the second special I've done since the wrap-up show. I did have an idea for another podcast but I've been unable to get into that. And it's really hard to get an audience now for a new podcast. The podcast market is over-saturated and people can find streaming video very easily. It's hard to justify the work when you're struggling to get even twenty people to listen. But if I do more Podcast Ping episodes it will be because I want to listen to them. And Podcast Ping is sufficiently established that I could get a decent sized audience. But I will have to spend some time writing poems and I've been busy with other writing lately so it could be a while. If I can sit down and crank out a few hundred poems it won't be hard to put episodes together. And I expect I will need that much because it would only really be worth doing if I was doing them weekly; monthly shows would not likely hold a large enough audience.

As the year comes to a close, so does Podcast Ping. This is the final episode of Podcast Ping, although it's not the end of the feed. I will eventually have some new things posted here, but I explain more in the podcast. http://www.archive.org/download/PodcastPingsWrapUpShow/PPWrapUp.mp3 Podcast Ping is licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0. My online toy shop can be found at http://patrickjmcnamara.webs.com.

Day 25. Christmas Day! http://www.archive.org/download/PodcastPingsChristmasCalendarDay25/ppcc25.mp3 For this show I have something special. Some people might find the song I chose, “Rainbow Christmas” to have a little too much “rainbow” in it. But it's the sort of song that makes for a big production number that closes out a show and I felt it suitable for that. It's been a long run starting back on December 1st of 25 shows, and there was a lot of work that went into making them even before that. The biggest job was in coming up with enough poetry to fill the shows. And since I only had about five or six Christmas poems, I had to write about twenty. Now writing twenty poems isn't that difficult, but having to make them all tie in with a theme like Christmas--while still keeping them from sounding too much alike--is. This last poem, “How Jamie MacPherson Saved Christmas” is one I wrote some while back. And to make it extra special I decided to have the cast of the Blue Hot Gossip Comedy show read it. Part of this decision was because I had just come off of doing the Halloween episodes and was sort of in a mood for it, but I also wanted the poem to be a little more than just me reading it. Some might notice a similarity of approach as with “A Pickle for Christmas,” the poem I wrote for the Podcast Pickle Christmas skit a couple years ago. I likely would have used this poem for that, but there wasn't enough interest. And in some ways it works out a little better since I know the rhythm of the poem which is thrown off when trying to get a number of people reading it. I've been fortunate that there's not been any major outages with Internet Archive or Blogger. And even though Mininova, where I post the torrentcast, changed over about a week before I was to start, it's turned out to be a big benefit since I'm seeing much higher download numbers than I've seen before. The 24 posted episodes so far have exceeded 42,000 downloads with many individual episodes exceeding 2,500 downloads. It might not be cash, but it helps to make the work worthwhile. This post finishes Podcast Ping's Christmas Calendar. The next one should be the New Year's episode, provided I can get it done. It won't be a regular episode, but I'll explain that more then. Podcast Ping is licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0. My online toy shop can be found at http://patrickjmcnamara.webs.com.

Day 24. Christmas Eve. Just one more sleep until Christmas--unless you're Santa Claus. http://www.archive.org/download/PodcastPingsChristmasCalendarDay24/ppcc24.mp3 Christmas Eve is often a quiet time around our house. Most of the real celebrating--and noise--comes on Christmas. And with Christmas falling on a Friday this year it seems to make for a short week. Nobody works on Christmas Eve, even if they have to. Next year it hits on a Saturday, so the week will feel more normal. The following year it it falls on a Sunday, which as kids we use to like because it meant only going to mass once in the week. I'll most likely get to the early mass on Christmas Eve, which typically means arriving up to an hour early just to get a seat. But there's something relaxing about coming home afterward; it feels like I'm starting Christmas early. Podcast Ping is licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0. My online toy shop can be found at http://patrickjmcnamara.webs.com.