For a while I’ve been doing the Fedora Weekly News Out Loud podcast in English, spurred on by the inimitable Messrs. Chung and Canniot. But when FWN came back on line last week, I felt my momentum had ebbed, and I didn’t cover either issue 61 or 62 (yet). This was due to spending extra cycles on the FC6 release (docs side of the house, natch), which left me a little short on time and energy.
But even before that happened, I had been having some misgivings about simply reading the news aloud. Was this really me helping the community, or just a vanity project? (No slight intended to anyone, I’m selfishly only talking about me here.) After all, we already have the excellent (if somewhat sporadic) Fedora Reloaded.
I showed that I now knew how to record and publish a podcast, but wouldn’t a screenreader accomplish the same thing, more or less — albeit without the music backing track and gunpoint participation of my lovely wife? When I went to archive.org to find out download statistics, their summary screen showed a measly 1-3 downloads per episode. Hardly worth the time I was expending on the project, unless their stats are not showing the true audience. So what would give this work an ROI?
I decided that I didn’t want to re-aggregate blogs and other published stories, which is much more effectively handled by the Fedora News site. I would rather do something a little more off-the-cuff, even if it ends up being less polished, less about me practicing my elocution and more talking about all the cool stuff taking place around Fedora.
I’d like to create a worthwhile Fedora-oriented podcast for the community — but what else, if anything, does the community want to hear?
I thought that the news round up was good. You can spend hours a week reading, or you can spend 10 minutes listening to the podcast and get the goods. A great service – I’ve been missing it!
That’s not to say that whatever else you decide to do won’t be good too…