Yet another minute of fame

This actually happened a few days ago but the show was broadcast today. As many of you may already know I am a big fan of Tech Podcasts in general and Digital Planet in particular. I generally download this to my iPod and listen to it in the car when travelling back and forth to clients'. When I started playing around with Facebook, about a year ago, I noticed they had a system for creating discussion groups and there weren't any dedicated to my favourite show. I therefore created the Digital Planet Listeners' Group on Facebook. This was mostly an experiment to see how these groups worked on Facebook in comparison to electronic groups I already work with and managed on Yahoo and Google. It actually turned out to be quite fun and caught on quite quickly.

One of the really fun aspects of this group is that the presenter of the programme,
Gareth Mitchell, joined and even uploaded his photo. It was actually quite a strange experience to finally see what he looked like. I had been listening to his programme regularly for about a year by then and had developed a blurry idea in my head as to what he looks like. Of course he looks nothing like my idea. This was driven home even more strongly when his co-presenter, Bill Thomson joined the group and put his photo up as well. He looks nothing like I imagined!

Just last week, all of a sudden and from out of nowhere, I get an e-mail from Gareth Mitchell. They're doing a story on the programme which he thinks is relevant to our Facebook group and he wants to interview me for the programme. Luckily it was an e-mail and not a phone conversation as I probably would have fainted. I was a bit leary remembering my last experience with BBC radio and how my replies were taken completely out of context and with new voiceovers. But I felt almost as though I know Gareth and could trust him. We wrote back and forth for a while and finally set up the interview using Skype. I was first impressed with the quality of the sound over Skype and then realised just how strange it was to hear Gareth Mitchell's voice coming through my telephone. It's like listening to the radio in the telephone. It was very strange. The interview itself was absolutely perfect and went very well. I then had to wait several days for the programme to be broadcast and then uploaded as a podcast.

Finally it was released and there was a mention on their web site. I immediately downloaded the Podcast, listened through and was actually quite pleased. He used our interview exactly as it happened. No extra comments, no out of context mixing, no superfluous editing. It sounded just like our conversation. Agree or don't agree with what I have to say... that's not important. Let me express myself frankly and honestly without modification is. I played around with the MP3 file and came up with a smaller (1 minute) version you can download.