I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Web Axe, my podcast and blog on web accessibility, has been nominated for .net magazine’s 2008 Best of the Web awards. It’s in the “Podcast of the Year” category, the sixth category down the list. After voting narrows the candidates to three (voting ends October 13), a panel of judges decides on the winners who will be announced in December.
If you listen to Web Axe and like it (or even if you don’t!), you can vote for Web Axe on the Best of the Web site.
Here’s a quote from .net magazine about the contest:
The .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development. The 14 categories for 2008 range from Design Agency of the Year and Podcast of the Year through to the Infamy Award – a chance to name and shame those ruining your web experience.
I thought it would be interesting to post some statistical information from Feedburner on my podcast and blog about web accessibility, Web Axe. It had been several weeks since I last checked the stats, and it was a pleasant surprise to see some growth.
The stats are for Thursday, July 10, 2008 and shows one of Web Axe’s highest subscriber rates of 746 (an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period). What I find most interesting is the different types of feed readers being used and how popular they are. Google and iTunes top the list. Google feed readers (Google Reader or iGoogle) count for 32%, and iTunes for 30% (17% Mac and 13% Windows). Netvibes, my favorite RSS reader, was next at 10%.
For almost a year now, I’ve been away from my hometown of Detroit, Michigan, but my fellow podcasters there (see the Detroit Podcasters Network) are certainly still going strong. Four of the guys are getting a display table at the Motor City Comic Convention, May 16-18, and they will be promoting their individual shows and podcasting in general. They are:
Here’s more about the participation of the event from Chris:
If you would like to participate feel free to send us your promotional materials (postcards, flyers or other such items). All we are asking in return is a donation of $5 to help us pay for our costs.
The four of us, and a few others involved, are going to have a great time hanging out taking about comics, podcasting (audio and video), and conducting interviews, But most of all, promoting all of our shows. We expect many of you to take part in this cool endeavor.
The Motor City Comic Con is a fun and enjoyable event–a small town atmosphere with big city flavor. We hope you will join in on the fun.
I read numerous RSS feeds, mostly related to front-end web development. But there are a few that I read that are not tech-related…
By the way, I use NetVibes, an awesome personalized “home page” which can not only read and organize RSS feeds, but also blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and game widgets!
Just released the 2-year anniversary podcast for Web Axe, my podcast and blog on web accessibility. It’s been a lot of work, but a lot of fun too…
Here are some great tips for doing a presentation. This is a summary from an excellent WSG Meeting Podcast from last year , Presentation Mind Control by Paul Fenwick (29-June-2006).
- Use pictures.
- Better yet, use multimedia–audio, video, animation, etc.
- Make it emotional.
- Use anticipation–provide a challenge, a few proposals, then lastly a solution.
- Move around; don’t stand still.
- Perform live examples–beware of technical mishaps.
- Practice your presentation.
- Time your presentation (to stay within your limit).
- Do a Q & A–admit it if you don’t know answer–ask the audience.
So Ross Johnson and I recently did another big interview for the Web Axe podcast. We spoke with Andrew Kirkpatrick, a leader at Adobe in product development and accessibility. And a nice guy.
Podcast #53: Interview with Andrew Kirkpatrick
We used Skype to record the podcast, again, and it sure makes it easy when folks are separately geographically–I’m in the Bay area, Ross is in Ann Arbor, and Andrew is in the Boston area. Scheduling is a bit tricky because of the time zone differences and everyone’s busy schedule, but that went fine since I planned a few weeks out. It’s still a bit difficult to get the audio levels right, though, and unfortunately we experienced this problem a bit on this podcast…check it out and let me know what you think…
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