Wiki Podcast Production Experiment
As anyone who reads this web site knows, a while back we started up shownotes.info as a resource for podcasters and vidcasters to keep their program “show notes” in a community editable way. The main user of this site has been Adam Curry with his Daily Source Code production. The way this has worked is that he will post an episode of the DSC, and then subscribers (such as myself) will listen to it and make notes accordingly. For the most part the first contributor to that day’s page starts from scratch (although lately Adam has been posting a brief text outline of the show on his web site) and just type in what we think appropriate.
But now, with my own podcast, I’m trying something different. I am in the process of softly launching Showbiz News – Online which I plan to be a weekly news roundup of..yes..entertainment industry news. So during the course of the week I try to follow what’s happening in the industry, what’s being reported in the trade press, and then at the end of the week I’ll go through and select the top stories to include in the podcast.
The “normal” way to handle this would be to keep paper clippings and notes, or perhaps keep a text file or even a private blog post about what I’m following and what is going to make the final cut. But, with Showbiz News – Online I’m going to do something different. It’s an experiment. I don’t know if it will work. But I’m going to use the show notes wiki as a preproduction tool.
Every week, after I release the current podcast and post my initial (subject to later editing of course, since it is a wiki) version of the show notes, I’m then going to immediately create the show notes page for next week’s podcast. Then over the course of the week I’ll add to it as I find stories I want to consider covering. And since it’s an open wiki, my listeners (should I happen to have any) will be able to add stuff that they are hearing about. Then at the end of the week when it’s time to make the show, I’ll go back through the wiki page and there I’ll have a pre-made outline.
One possible effect of this that I can envision is that the program will be come more of a collaboration as listeners point me to news stories I might otherwise miss. And they’ll have a “heads up” on what’s going to be covered so if there’s soemthing that’s important to them that I may not know about or have thought was all that important, they can bring it to my attention. I can see this scaling better than the traditional email feedback loop that most blogs and podcasters use. With a large active subscriber base, it would be easier to check the wiki page on a regular basis and see all updates rather than going through each e-mail individually.
I’m not aware of anyone using wikis in this way, and of course for a lot of podcasts it wouldn’t work. But I think with a news program it may. We shall see!