Dave Slusher recently took on a topic that I've been bothered by as well. He pointed out how often people flatly state how long a podcast "should" be and how seldom that's based on anything other than their own interactions with podcasts.

Basically, people who have a 30 minute commute insist that they should all be about 30 minutes. Those who listen in short segments throughout the day often want them in 5-10 minute chunks.

This is something I see often and is pretty much arguing from anecdote. It drives me nuts. It happens whenever you use just yourself, a couple of people or a small subset of the population at large and act as though its representational of the entire group. Unfortunately, on the modern web, you can get what *seems* like a big group and think you're looking at a good sample. 10,000 people on the web is NOT necessarily representative of the whole.

I saw it again today when someone posted "the" 7 levels of site revenue.. He put Adsense as the lowest level. However, because he included his revenue per 1000 page views (CPM), lots of people reacted just like I did. See, he stated that Adsense only generates $1 per 1000 page views.

I actually had to read that twice because of how far off that is from the numbers I've seen. Of course, my numbers aren't representative either, but I'm not claiming they are. However, I've seen more than once where someone was told not to bother with Adsense because of those kinds of numbers.

This is all a problem because of something I'm guilty of as well. It's a technique for commanding authority when you make statements. You just remove all of the indications of doubt. "I think X is the best way to do Y" becomes "X is the best way to do Y", "My results with program Z was to net 123" becomes "Program Z nets 123".

Basically, when you just state your opinion as fact, most people will just accept it. That's hugely powerful and terribly dangerous. However, if you just insert the disclaimers into those statements, you can take them with the appropriate grain of salt.

In the case of Adsense numbers, pretty much *everything* you hear is anecdote. Google prohibits sharing the exact numbers you earn and aren't sharing any aggregate data with the public. As a result, everyone who is making proclamations about how much money people are making is pretty much basing it off of the few people they've talked to. That's highly likely to be a group of people in a very similar target niche or similar demographic, etc.

On the podcasting side, the entire podcasting market consists of early adopters at the moment. Basing long term format decisions on anecdotes at this point is pure folly. Consider how different TV is today from what it looked like 20 or 30 years ago.

As I've been putting together slides to spark discussion on Saturday for the RESTful web development session at MinneBar, I've been going back through a bunch of my bookmarks related to giving presentations, writing and communication.

In those links was a set of video clips from Ira Glass. For those who don't know, Ira Glass is the guy behind the radio show, This American Life, which has recently branched out into TV on Showtime with the same approach.

Both shows are all about telling compelling stories. After you've listened to or watched a few episodes, you'll likely experience the surreal disconnect of finding yourself amazed that you're so interested in a story that *shouldn't* be that interesting. Recently, someone sat down with Ira Glass and asked him the right questions, to get him to explain, in some GREAT detail, what it is that makes for that compelling storytelling experience.

While I definitely have a LONG way to go to integrate the principles he describes, these 4 video clips are something everyone who produces creative or communication content needs to watch. The things he says, resonate and match up really well with my experience.

I especially liked his discussion of the gap between taste and your skills. That's one of the things that's kept me from getting back to working on the podcast. He's right, though, that you just have to power through until that gap closes. I'm thinking I may need to retool the podcast a bit after the conference and see if I can get that thing back on track.

At any rate, give these a look. You won't regret it.

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I've been using an iRiver MP3 player and a stereo Giant Squid microphone for recording meetings and some in person discussions destined for some eventual podcast episode. It was a nice, compact setup that I could just keep in a jacket pocket.

I took it to Washington DC in November (and actually had some audio of the tours we went on stored on it). I packed it in my bag for the return trip and checked the bag. When we got home, I discovered the wonderful little note from the TSA baggage folks that they had inspected my bag. Unfortunately, someone on their end also apparently decided that my bag was a better source of an MP3 player than their local Best Buy. The bag contained no trace of the iRiver or the attached microphones.

The really sad part is that I'm willing to bet the person that took it thought the Giant Squid mics were actually headphones, so those really decent microphones (worth more than the iRiver) are probably in the trash somewhere.

At any rate, I've been looking for what I can use to replace the setup ever since. An obvious choice would have been a straight replacement. However, all of the iRivers that had the right microphone inputs have been discontinued. Given my aversion to using eBay (mostly due to the fact I won't go within 100 miles of Paypal), and not wanting to rely on discontinued technology for my podcast going forward, I rejected that option.

I looked at Minidisc recorders and more sophisticated portable recorders. The Minidisc setups bothered me because they record in their own format on discs that only work with that technology. The other portable recorders generally record in WAV or MP3 format and use either Compact Flash/SD, etc. or a hard drive. That appealed to me, but the $500-600 price tags, most decidedly did not.

I looked around casually for a while, thinking that I'd use any money I got for Christmas to buy this. With the holidays over, I started thinking about it again. Then, last week, the Yahoo Group for podcasters erupted in yet another argument about this exact technology choice. In the midst of the arguing about iRiver vs. Minidisc, Stephen Eley mentioned the Zoom H4, which I remembered seeing back in October on Gizmodo.

So, I took a closer look at it. This thing is loaded. First was the built-in stereo microphones (though that makes this thing look like a taser) plus 2 combo mic input jacks (XLR and 1/4inch). I don't want to *need* an external microphone, but I *do* have them. This blend is really nice.

Then I started reading through the features like a built-in mixer, that it can serve as an external sound card, a tripod mount, runs on AA batteries or an AC adapter, included windscreen, etc. and the fact that it came in under $300.

I ordered one from zZounds and it came yesterday. Digging through the manual, it's clear that this thing has more features than I'm likely to use in the next 2 years. That is to say, I already love it. It's clearly one of the best bang-for-the-buck gadgets in portable audio. Unfortunately, it's going to be 3 more weeks before I can buy an SD card for it without the impulse tax on it.

I'll be trying it out tomorrow at breakfast and we'll see how well it does recording during the meal and conversation.

Well, it took me a couple of weeks from recording the conversation to actually putting it out on the site this morning before leaving for work, but it is finally up. This is the first podcast I recorded with the split channel setup in PowerGramo. This simultaneously let me fix some things that have been a problem in the past, including noise from the side of the conversation where the person is being silent and overlap due to cellphone lag and caused some problems of its own. I spent too much time trying to fix stuff and probably missed glaring problems while getting lost in the minutae.

It also wasn't as easy to cut this conversation down as others have been. In other episodes, I've just cut whole 20 minute segments out because it made sense. In this one, I cut out 30 of the original 60 minutes in lots of 1 minute chunks and 3-10 second slices. I'm much happier with many of the new bits, but still want to make improvements on future episodes. I also need a better way to end these recordings. It's all just a process and I'll just keep moving on.

Episode 7 of The Glass is Too Big is an interview with Dave Gray, who is the CEO of XPLANE, the visual thinking company.

Show Notes or Download the MP3

Photo: Julian Rodriguez Orihuela

I wasn't planning on this episode, but when Ed Batista from AttentionTrust asked if he could chat with me about my attention experiments, I took the opportunity. Since Ed was having difficulty recording the conversation, I asked if he'd be OK with me recording it and we'd dual-purpose the audio. He could slant the conversation to the purposes he needed for AttentionTrust and I'd edit toward explaining AT to listeners and focusing on Ed's portion of the conversation.

So, Episode 6 was born unexpectedly, but I'm pleased with the result.

At any rate, it was a pretty good conversation and Ed makes one of the more concise explanations of the different dimensions to attention that I've heard. I'm definitely considering attending the Attention Conference in San Francisco that he's putting together for this fall.

This one's just over 30 minutes (I'm really pushing hard to keep episodes relatively short) and can be grabbed over at GlassTooBig.com.

And, if you've been digging the show, head over to AmigoFish and give the show the big thumb's up.