Weekly Podcasting

Most folks who will read this already know I run a weekly podcast, but not everyone does so… Now you will know all about it. J

The podcast is called DDOCast. You can find it on iTunes and Zune as well as other places including our file host, Cyberears. We’ve been doing it since late 2010, around 30 weeks or so which translates to around 30 shows or so. It’s about two hours long, I’m the host, Anne is the producer (meaning she runs the show and handles the technical aspects), and we have various guests and contributors that do short five to ten minute segments for us. The show is about the game Dungeons and Dragons Online and features news, commentary, and game strategy. We record the show live on U-Stream and then edit and publish the recorded podcast.

The show started years ago by a fellow named Jerry Snook who now works for Turbine. It was landing that job that forced him to stop hosting the show, and we volunteered to take over (after some serious deliberation). Jerry logged almost 200 episodes and pretty much did one every week for many years. I had always been amazed by his steadfast regularity in getting it out there. Now that I’m doing the show I can see how that happens. I expected to be less consistent but it gets to be a kind of rhythm to doing it and overall it’s a fun process.

Each week we spend some time gathering news and stories to feature on the show. We write up a set of notes that outlines each story or topic. Folks send us their segments to play and we get them set up in a folder along with whatever other files we need. Anne makes a quick screenshot picture for the show from something we did that week in game. Anne gets the software needed set up (it’s pretty complicated). We do sound checks and if we’re having a guest we get them in on our Skype call. We perform/record the show. Anne edits the show and writes up show notes in the podcast ready format. We upload it to cyberears and make a post on the DDOCast site and on the DDO Forums. Anne also keeps folks updated via our Twitter and Facebook accounts dedicated to the show.

It’s lots of work, but it’s fairly fun work and the fans are universally kind and helpful so there is very little to discourage doing it. I think we skipped only one week so far and a couple times did a recorded rather than live show due to our schedule, but beyond that we’ve been running like clockwork on it. By far the hardest weekly activity is editing the recorded show. Anne is a stickler for quality and tries to make everyone on the show sound good by chopping out mistakes or mouth noises. The other folks that do segments are always great and I love the team feeling.

I don’t generally look at the audience figures but Jerry built the show nicely and it’s the most popular show on our file host with weekly audiences in the one to two thousand ranges. The live show generally has only a dozen or so listeners but it’s a fun way to record it because listeners can talk to us via a chat room and create comments or questions for us while doing the show.

If you like MMO games, I’d recommend DDO and if you like DDO or are interested I’d recommend listing to our podcast if you don’t already. For everyone else… it’s probably not going to be very entertaining. Our sister podcast, DDO Cocktail hour may appeal to general geek types though. It’s still about DDO much of the time but drinking and movies often play a big part of their discussion and they are somewhat dedicated to not being serious or educational if they can help it.