That’s right, 14″x10″, 100-page, full-color glossy coffee table books.

Imagine the wasted tens of thousands of dollars for:

• the designer
• the writer
• the photography
• all the reviewers
• the printing
• the mailing list
• the postage

Couldn’t all that wasted money and time have been used more wisely to actually help make someone’s life better?

It’s a frivolous waste of money at a time when companies should demonstrate fiscal responsibility.

Am I right? Please share your opinion. Thanks.

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This parody video just made me sick to my stomach…. because it’s spot on. I’ve heard every one of these excuses so many times during my career. It’s incredibly frustrating and demoralizing how some people undervalue the expertise of others.

• “I want the highlights. But can only pay for the trim.”
• “I don’t want you to work for free. It’s just a test. You can roll the cost over next time.”
• “I’m not making any money either. You gotta work with me.”
• “We’ll make it up on the next one.”
• “I can cover your hard costs. But that’s as far as I can go.”
• “We need you to show us how you make it so we can do it in-house next time.”

My advice is to stick firmly to your position and don’t give it all away. Sure there are times you may want to barter or there could be some tangible benefit. But there’s no reason to be bullied into giving your skills away especially to someone who obviously has no respect for you.

What are your thoughts? How do you combat this behavior in your day-to-day business relationships?

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How Large Is Too Large?

As a content consumer, I subscribe to dozens of podcasts (i.e. marketing, technology, Mac-centric, parenting, TV/movie fans). Audio files for a 15-45 minute show are generally in the 12-50MB range, depending on compression and format.

It’s great that content producers are discovering the ease of publishing video. But I’m noticing an increasing trend by producers to push out files over 150MB on their feeds. Over the past week I got several ‘ginormous’ screencasts and a 628MB presentation. These files are passively downloading in the background while I’m working. But that kind of bandwidth consumption can clobber users like myself who regularly find themselves moving to various access points and connection speeds throughout the week.

Rather than publishing a heavy video file on the feed, how about posting a smaller audio file version? Better yet, edit that video down to a three minute highlights video. Then notify listeners that they can watch a streaming optimized version of the full length video at the publisher’s website.

Respect Your Audience

While content quality is important, it’s about time for content producers to seriously evaluate what they’re publishing.

• Edit for length — Invest a bit of time to the key points across.
• Choose the right format — Is video of a one-hour presentation really necessary? Or, simply a nice-to-have when audio will suffice?
• Is it really important? — I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by short videos that are just not really useful. (i.e. “I’m messing around with new screencasting software.” or “I’m trying out my new Flip video camera and thought you’d like to see my dog.”)

I enjoy being a podcaster (mainly audio) and I tend to be very sensitive to the file sizes I publish. I’ll noodle with compression options to balance audio quality against reasonable file size. I don’t always succeed, but nevertheless I do try before I hit ‘publish.’

So don’t let your enthusiasm get the best of you. Try to always put your best foot forward. It’s more respectful to the audience that’s investing their time with you.

What are your thoughts on that? Please comment and answer the poll below. Thanks in advance.
-Roland

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Podcasts are a wonderful source of education and entertainment. Generally speaking, ordinary people like you and me decide that they have something to share and publish it online for others to enjoy. Community participation is what motivates podcasters to continue to publish content on niche topics.

Podcasts come in audio and video formats, covering most every subject imaginable. If you haven’t done so, I suggest you take some time to explore the breadth of content and creativity out there.

To get you started, this brief video tutorial (7 min) explains the basics of how to subscribe to a podcast. You’ll learn:

• The fancy buzzwords.
• Podcatching software to make subscribing and organizing easy.
• How to subscribe to any podcast.
• How to find RSS feed links you need.

I hope you find this useful. Enjoy!
-Roland

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Here are the videos that inspired the commercial:

• The “Some U.S.-Americans don’t have maps” gal, Miss Teen South Carolina
• The “Leave Britney Alone” guy, Chris Crocker
• The “Don’t Tas me Bro” college student, Andrew Meyer

As entertaining as it might be to see all these people get an additional 15-minutes of fame, it might be hard to measure the recall value to AOL. AOL News isn’t even mentioned until the end – sixty seconds in. I would argue that most people won’t even recall this video was for AOL News.

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