Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
Apologies to anyone who was trying to access the Steve Rubel interview in the last couple of hours - the PermaLink was 404ing - I re-posted the interview at a new address (http://www.tomrafteryit.net/steve-rubel-interview-podcast/) and it seems to be working fine.
If you have any problems with this - please let me know,
Tom
I did an interview with Steve Rubel yesterday (Saturday) - Steve was great - he was full of interesting insights, enthusiasm, and good humour. I can see now why he has become such a successful blogger.
The interview was recorded from a Skype call so the audio quality is waaaay better than the previous interviews which were done recording landline to landline! I would have done Skype calls sooner, had I known (and saved myself a bundle in transatlantic call charges too!).
Thanks to Alan O’Rourke of Spoiltchild Design for coming up with the funky signature tune for the podcast.
Here are a list of the questions I put to Steve and the times in the podcast that I asked them:
Who is Steve Rubel? - 0:33
Why use social software in traditional PR campaigns? - 1:07
How do you qualify which companies should blog and which shouldn’t? - 4:42
What size organisation is Cooper katz? - 5:23
How does that compare to the rest of the PR industry? - 5:35
Are more and more PR firms following your lead into blogging? - 6:16
Do you know how many subscribers and unique visitors you have per day? - 9:19
Why should businesses in Ireland blog? - 11:42
If a company is thinking about starting a blog, how should they start out? - 14:38
How do you see RSS changing the face of business in the coming years? - 18:39
How many feeds are you subscribed to? - 21:59
Why did you decide to branch into podcasting? - 25:18
Podcasting and blogging are very different media - do you need to take a different approach to their creation? - 26:32
What podcasts do you listen to? - 29:11
Do you unplug from technology at all, do you have any non-tech hobbies? - 30:30
Do you not think that blogs are just a tool in a PR practitioner’s arsenal rather than a replacement for people given that some people will just use the Internet for email and not for joining in on the online conversation? - 34:51
What are your predicitons for the PR industry, traditional media and social media for 2006? - 36:31
Do you think that vlogging (or what ever video blogging will be known as) will be the next big thing next year? - 42:13
Are you going to the Les Blogs 2.0 conference in Paris - 48:50
What do you see coming down the line as the next big thing? - 49:32
Mac or PC? - 47:37
Why the Mac? - 48:48
What is your favourite gadget? - 50:54
You can listen to the interview podcast here (12.1mb mp3).
Hey all,
I need to work on the quality of my podcasts - the content is great, I think. This not due to me in any way, it is simply due to my good fortune in attracting great interviewees.
I need to improve my audio quality though and I also need to ‘professionalise’ the podcasts - you know, have a catchy, unique, jingle for opening and closing the show.
On the audio front, I currently record the calls using a phone recorder accessory I bought in Maplins - I connect this to my Sanyo digital Dictaphone and record. Unfortunately there is an annoying background buzzing in all the recordings. The buzzing occurs with or without the dictaphone so it seems to come from the phone recorder accessory.
Any and all help/suggestions on this front would be greatly appreciated!
As I mentioned previously, I arranged to interview Robert Scoble last night and we agreed that the interview could be podcast as part of the PR for the IT@Cork annual conference at which Robert will be speaking.
I talked to Robert for nearly an hour last night (early this morning) - he was exceedingly generous with his time. The conversation was wide-ranging, we covered the business benefits of blogging, social software (Robert’s two main topics at the conference) Robert’s job description and even the Blarney Stone (and whether or not Robert needed to kiss it when he’s in Cork to be conferred with ‘the gift of the gab’!).
In my previous post I asked were there any questions you’d like me to ask Robert and I received some good ones. I put all the questions I received to him and he answered them all - even Hostyle’s:
(I bet he won’t go near this one) Do you agree with their [Microsoft's] dirty tactics in the past and present of disposing of competitors ala Netscape, Real Media, and the latest SCO-secret-society they are funding to smear the name of Linux?
Thanks Robert for your time and the openness with which you answered the questions.
The podcast is available for download here (13mb mp3) and is well worth downloading - there is some great advice there. I am hosting it on my own server until I get server space from someone with lots of disk and bandwidth. Apologies for the mixed quality of the audio - some (most) of it is due to my inexperience recording phone conversations and some is the fact that Robert was on his mobile.
UPDATED:
Updated with the address of the podcast - feedback welcomed!
The title of this post may be a little alarmist but Sony has included Rootkit software on its music CDs recently in an effort to stop users copying music more than three times. The rootkit software was discovered by security expert Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals accidentally and he wrote about it last week. Mark explained:
Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden.
Since Mark revealed the existence of the rootkit software, Sony has issued an uninstall procedure for the software but as Mark points out this uninstall procedure requires the user to go through by two web forms, an email and an ActiveX control and the uninstaller is locked to a single computer, preventing deployment in a corporation.
Now we learn from an article in the Reg that a virus writer has written a variant of of the Breplibot Trojan which drops files into the Windows directory which are incapable of being found except with very specialised software, if you have the Sony rootkit on your PC.
Bottom line - if you are buying music CDs - check if they have Sony on the label, and if they do, don’t buy them.
UPDATE:
I see Microsoft are concerned about rootkit features in CDs from Sony and is evaluating the situation to see if any action needs to be taken
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
Recent Comments