Rusty's Blog

• Ever wondered how many historic markers are in Georgia, and how many of those are Civil War-related? Downhome Traces has you covered:

  Keep watching to see a neat idea for a cell phone application.

• The white boy with the black press has a new e-zine. Boyd Lewis, an excellent journalist from 1969 through 1997 in Atlanta, will send out his Tales of Old Atlanta e-zine once per week as a Powerpoint. I’ve converted the first edition, about Piedmont Park, to a PDF for easier downloading. If you’d like to subscribe, drop him an email at boydlewis90@yahoo.com and be sure to visit his website. You can also check out the interview I did with him on Mostly ITP back in 2007 if you’ve got 22 minutes and 1 second burning a hole in your work day.

• Learn about the origin of the Junkman’s Daughter sign. It’s a cool story written up on the AJC Insider blog by Jamie Gumbrecht. Also, related to the recent Paul McCartney concert in Piedmont park, she pointed to a great story about how an Atlanta hifi store pioneered a sound engineering technique in the mid-60s that is widely-used today. I dump on the AJC (Perimeter Journal Constitution? PJC?) frequently, but I love when they do features like those.

I’d like to think I learned something during three years running a site which hosted several hundred audio podcasts, some of which have been heard by thousands of people. By running, I mean co-running, along with Amber who will be writing a post similar to this one soon.

Sometime during the next year we’re going to convert the site to a static cached archive for posterity which will require little effort and expense to maintain. Once that’s done, that will mark the end of our experiment.

What follows here are a few random things I’ve learned. Much of this will sound negative, but really even the stuff that went wrong I view as positives because I’ll know what not to do next time. There’s a pretty good chance I will read this over a few times and want to write a “totally super awesome positive stuff” post later, because this certainly isn’t a comprehensive overview of my experience. To use a word old people would use, I treasure the relationships and experiences that came from running the site, and greatly appreciate all the work people put into it.

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A few of you may have noticed PodCamp Atlanta had a really kickass first year in 2007, and then nothing happened after that. Why? A few reasons, I think:

1. Amber did almost all the organizing of the first one herself. She moved on to organize Sex 2.0, and organizing PodCamp Atlanta 2 apparently was more work than the person who was supposed to do it anticipated it would be. So it languished, and the dates kept getting pushed out. The next one is supposedly scheduled for sometime later this year or in 2010, but I’ll believe it when I see it. And lest it sound like I’m just throwing this one person under the bus, I should note that not much of anybody else in the community stepped up to help her out when it was clear she wouldn’t be able to handle it on her own.
2. The first PodCamp Atlanta happened when there were barely any cheap or free social media events/tech events of any size in Atlanta (other than SoCon, I can’t name one, but it’s possible there were others I wasn’t aware of). So there was pent-up demand. Not long after, many such events started popping up. Barely a week passes now without a similar event. Perhaps as it should be, demand for a new PodCamp would depend entirely on people with an interest in podcasting, which leads us to…
3. Podcasting is sooooooooo 2007. Which is to say, the hype around podcasting and the curiosity about making podcasts among people who weren’t already making them has waned. Contrary to the (insert tech that’s more than a year old) is dead meme that inevitably goes around, podcasting is actually more popular then ever. But I posit it’s a different kind of popularity: that of a familiar commodity, not one of an emergent new technology.

I mention all this for a couple of reasons.

First, someone at Georgia Tech offered a venue and some administrative support for another PodCamp Atlanta. The offer was made on the Google Group to anyone who would grab the reigns and do a little work to make it happen.

My belief is PodCamp was something that was great for Atlanta in 2007, but its time has passed and that the time and energy at this point would be better spent on something else. I think if the demand was truly there for a sequel to this event, that the community would have stepped up and made it happen already. It didn’t.

However, neither Amber or I would be doing any of the organizing, so our opinion doesn’t count any more than anyone else’s. If you think I’m wrong (or if you think I’m right for that matter), please say so.

In the short term, if you have energy to burn, volunteer to help Derek and Swoopy with the Dragon*Con podcasting track. Even if they are past needing help with anything this year (don’t know, you’ll have to ask), they probably wouldn’t mind having new contacts to keep in mind for next year.

Second, you may have also noticed our podcast production of Mostly ITP has slowed down, and that there are fewer active podcasters on the Georgia Podcast Network now than there were a year or two ago.

The site has been running on Drupal 5 ever since the redesign from a little over a year ago. I could write a lengthy screed on the positive and negative aspects of running a website with Drupal, but unfortunately for this question I have to focus on one glaring negative: modules are not compatible from one major version to the next.

That means when you upgrade a site running Drupal to a new major version, it can be a serious undertaking if you have a bunch of custom modules like we do on the Georgia Podcast Network. Drupal 7 is coming out soon, and once that happens Drupal 5 will eventually stop getting necessary security patches.

So, we have a decision to make sometime in the near future:

1. Do a lot of work to get the modules running on Drupal 6 or Drupal 7
2. Move to a different system
3. Shutter the site completely/convert it to an archive of static pages

I’ve done a little preliminary research, and it would actually be pretty easy to port the data out of Drupal and into Wordpress MU. It would require me to build at least two Wordpress themes though (one for the front page/directory, and one customizable theme for individual podcasts), which wouldn’t be a trivial amount of work. So what I’m trying to decide is whether it’s worth the effort to either port it to Wordpress MU or to upgrade the modules, or whether it’s time to move on. I would love to get some honest feedback from people who use the site.

If you have a podcast on the site, don’t worry yet, I’m just thinking out loud. If we were to decide to shut the site down, you’d get all your data and we could set up redirects to your new hosting so search engines and iTunes/RSS subscribers wouldn’t miss a beat. We would make sure a transition went as smoothly as possible. And there’s still a strong possibility Mostly ITP would live on hosted on a separate site somewhere.

Amber and I visited Fitzgerald, Georgia this past weekend. We were told about 800 wild Burmese chickens have taken up residence there as a result of a DHR program in the 1960s. It’s quite a sight to see chickens walking around on nearly every block in a settled area. The locals hold a festival every year to celebrate them, which we unfortunately just missed this year.

Be on the lookout for a chicken-related episode of Mostly ITP in the next couple of weeks. We’ve already talked to the director of tourism in Fitzgerald, where we go into more detail about the chickens. We plan to talk to The Chicken Whisperer and some folks at the Oakhurst Community Garden soon as well about urban gardening and raising chickens in urban areas.

The folks in Fitzgerald hold a slightly different view of raising chickens in urban areas than I expect the others will, which has helped me think of what I hope are some decent questions to ask on the remaining interviews.

I’ve been trying to make good on a goal I set more than a year ago to record more family history. My mom and I went to visit my Great Aunt Jane this past Saturday to shoot video of her telling stories about her life. We knew she had been a nurse, but we didn’t know until Saturday she had been a night supervisor at Grady Hospital in Atlanta on December 7, 1946, the night of the Winecoff Hotel Fire.

The Winecoff Hotel Fire was the worst in history at the time, and remains the worst in U.S. history, with 119 fatalities. In this video, she recalls her experience working in the morgue.

More information about the Winecoff Hotel Fire:

• Winecoff.org
• Winecoff Hotel Fire Documentary
• Winecoff Hotel Wikipedia entry
• Firefighter411: The Winecoff Hotel Fire

This is the third video episode of Mostly ITP. To get embed code for the video, click here.

With the economy in the crapper, there are going to be a lot of online services folding or cutting corners to survive. This is a good time to make sure you are keeping local copies of any work that is important to you.

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Last year on Aug. 1, I posted my podcast interview with Screaming Sports CEO and co-founder Alec Peters. The show notes I wrote were clumsy (particularly the lede asking about VC funding) and didn’t entirely convey the point I wanted to get across. Lance Weatherby wrote a post yesterday which I think better reflects what I was trying to say about Atlanta start-ups at the time:

So there is a group [of] companies that are out there playing in the consumer space.

But to many [this] does not seem to be the case.  Perhaps because not many of them make it big.

It’s not that they don’t exist or haven’t attained a degree of success, it’s that there’s not a Twitter or a Facebook or something else that’s gotten really huge you can point to and say “there’s this city’s post-bubble success story.” Kaneva is the closest company to that, and I don’t think it has the mainstream recognition that would meet that admittedly nebulous criteria.

Lance said he plans to write a follow-up on why he thinks nothing has taken off at that level, which I’m looking forward to reading.

Also, if this sort of thing interests you, you should listen to the second part of my podcast interview with Bobby Blackwolf of All Games Radio where we discuss Atlanta’s video game development scene.

In the second episode of Sub-Optimal Beer, I join host Tony and panelists Garrett, Griftdrift, Seth, and Thomas at The Highlander to discuss Walmart and Target, a.k.a. Embev Light and Miller-Coors Lite, a.k.a. Bud Light and Miller Lite. We try valiantly to find something interesting to say about these kings of marketshare.

Thankfully, Tony shows greater editing restraint than I would have, choosing to remove a tangent on NASCAR that cuts the length down to a pretty reasonable 25 minutes. I was buzzing pretty good by then, so I don’t quite remember most of what was said about NASCAR, but I do remember a part that went something like:

Me: I only really watched NASCAR for about a year once. I had a guy who lived next door to me who was a huuuuuuge Dale Earnhardt fan. So I rooted for Jeff Gordon just to piss him off. I used to ask him, “how many races has Earnhardt won this year?” He hadn’t won any, of course. Then I’d say, “Yeah, Gordon won like seven already.”

Griftdrift: You deserve to have your ass kicked.

For the uninitiated, Earnhardt fans and a lot of other fans view Jeff Gordon as an effete, rich pretty boy who only wins because he can buy the best team, not because he’s the best driver.

You can listen to what did make the cut by clicking here or using the player below. You’ll just have to listen to get the absolute Zima reference from the title.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Maybe when we record the third episode tonight (about hipster/douchebag beers) we can talk about Toby Keith.