Author: Burt Lum
24hrs to Blastoff
Finally the day has arrived. Ryan and I completed our dry runs, we met all the staff, we got our picture taken and were written about in the Hawaii Public Radio newsletter. Now we just need to Go Live! That will be in about 24 hours. Thanks for all the interest and support. Especially from all our Twitter friends. While radio can seem like a one-way broadcast, we always intended this to be a two-way conversation with you. There are a number of ways we can keep the conversation going. One of course is to call in during the show. Just call 941-3689 (from O`ahu), 1-808-941-3689 (from the Mainland) or 1-877-941-3689 (from the neighbor islands). We will try our best to answer your questions. If it is really tough, we’ll have our guests answer them. Ha! You can also Tweet us on Twitter.com. You can find me at @Bytemarks and Ryan @Hawaii. In the future we will incorporate an email and voice mail section of the show with listener feedback. Our voice mail number is 1-808-525-6409 and email can be sent to bytemarks@gmail.com. We’ll also be posting the shows as podcasts on the Hawaiipublicradio.org website as well as from this site. Let’s talk tech and make a difference in Hawaii!
Raw and Uncut
Over the weekend while chatting with Neenz, we thought it would be fun to get Roxanne Darling on the line with us and do a quick interview about Podcamp Hawaii. I sent Rox a DM on Twitter and she got back almost immediately. Ryan and I have been using Talkshoe to practice with so I gave Rox the number to call in and you can listen to the resulting 10 minute interview here. Nothing fancy, just chatting on the phone and straight to record, no post production. It might not be as polished as what you might hear on the radio but it’s about as real as it gets. We hope to be doing more of these short interviews once we go live. Just look for the Raw and Uncut versions.
Third Dry Run
The Aug 6th debut date for Bytemarks Cafe is getting closer. Ryan and I are spending these open Wednesdays in the studio with real guests running through our routine as though it were live. Beth-Ann Kozlovich is our executive producer and is freely giving us tips and critiques on how to improve our show. I’ll be honest with you, it is nerve wracking. I have a new appreciation of any of the NPR talk shows and especially tech podcasts like This Week In Tech and Buzz Out Loud, which aren’t NPR but great nevertheless. The past week we had John Chun on. He’s a telecom product manager working with video over the Internet products like IPTV. We covered everything from streaming video to your computer via YouTube to high end delivery like Vudu and Netflix/Roku. It was a fun conversation but listening to it later, I could tighten up my delivery. Glad we got a couple more weeks to go. I can practice a bit more.
Second Dry Run
Since our go live date got moved to August 6th, we have a couple more chances to do practice runs. The main thing we wanted to focus on for this run through was sequencing of the show and making sure we got the intros and outros coordinated. I think it was a good improvement from our first dry run. Originally, Angela Keen and Ian Kitajima were to be our guests on our inaugural show. Since they were already scheduled, we had them on anyway. They were gracious enough to help us out. Angela is the consummate pro and Ian’s enthusiasm comes through no matter what he is doing. The subject was near and dear to all of us. I’ll give you a hint: @hawaii, @ikitajima, @angelakeen, @bytemarks. I’m not teasing I just don’t want to totally give it away. Why? Because the conversation was so fun, we plan to reprise the subject on our first show.
New Start Date
I just got an email from our show producer Beth-Ann telling me that some of the dates to the new shows were pushed back a month, including Bytemarks Cafe. The bottom line is we won’t start our first live show until Aug. 6th. At first I was a little disappointed over the delay. You get psyched to start only to find out you have to wait another month. In reality, it’s more time to get ready and you can never be too ready. Ryan and I did one dry run and we will probably do a couple more before the August start date. I’m finding honing down the right delivery takes a lot more on Hawaii Public Radio than on college radio. it’s a work in progress. These dry runs will not go to waste as they will go up as podcast as soon as we are official.
Dry Run
We just did a dry run of Bytemarks Cafe over at the KIPO studios. It was just like an actually one hour show but used mainly to give our producer, Beth-Ann Kozlovich a chance to critique us before we go live. I was joined by my co-host Ryan Ozawa and special guest Aaron Dragushan. Neenz Faleafine (@infinitypro) was also on hand to give us moral support. I’ll be posting show notes later and even have the show available as a podcast but for now it is under raps until the official roll out date of July 2nd. Hawaii Public Radio will issue some press release about Bytemarks Cafe so until then it was just between you and me. If you know Aaron, then you know we talked about Ask500people.com.
Bytemarks Cafe going online!
Welcome to Bytemarks Cafe, the online version of the radio program on Hawaii Public Radio, KIPO 89.3 FM. Starting on July 2, 2008, Bytemarks Cafe will run every Wednesday afternoon from 5:00 to 6:00pm. You can check back here for show notes, links and archived podcasts of the show. We are always interested in your suggestions and feedback, so please leave a comment or shoot us an email at bytemarks [at] gmail [dot] com.