So we have just under two-weeks left until MediaCampBucks08, I'm getting excited about it all now.

A quick mail then to mention a few things:

This is the second camp we've run at this venue and many of you will know the routine, same building, same kind of format, same places to eat on the day. All pretty straightforward and simple, nothing complex, heaps of wi-fi, tons of rooms, coolio bananio people.

MediaCampBucks08

Things You Can Do:

I'm a great believer in reaching-out to people who are NOT in the know, people who are not swimming in the same small pond as us, people who are not early adopters, and people who probably have never heard of the term social media, or new media, have no idea what a Blog is, have no concept of Web 2.0. These are the people that will benefit most from MediaCamp, not the existing practitioners.

SO, with that in mind, I encourage you to post a Blog about the event asap, send emails to your groups of friends, encourage people to take a look and think about coming. Bring people along who you think may benefit, like the local cafe, the B&B up the road, your CEO friend who needs to come up to speed on communications technology. Your friend at the local paper, the college PR rep, the school governor, you get the picture, talk to people.

Start Tagging:

Start mentioning the camp in your channels and tag it with: mediacampbucks08

Flickr Group:

MediaCampBucks08 Flickr

You can see a bunch of pics from last year's event there, join the group and add further pics.

Audio/Video Promos:

If you fancy making a short audio promo I'll play it on AC Radio this week and next week (include your own links), you can also upload them to the Wiki. Same thing applies for video, some of you are video people so how about making a short talking head video about the event and posting it and tagging it?

There seems to be some interest in virtual attendance, there is a page on the wiki. I'm more than happy for anyone to use my private island in SecondLife. should it be needed as a venue.

Sponsors:

We have enough sponsorship to cover everyone with a t-shirt, cool eh? Eaon is banging away on sourcing the cloth. We should have a size for everyone. However, we can also do with more wonga, maybe the bar bill can be covered, maybe we can get some other goodies, sponsorship is always needed: sponsors

Live Music:

Mikey 12 Casts has organised a complete evening of live music in the student union, pretty coolio bananio that will be, 4 acts or so!

That's about it for now, though be prepared for more communications in the coming days.

Technorati Tags: audio blogs bucks camp event flickr media medicampbucks08 people reach-out sessions venue video vlogs medicampbucks08 media camp bucks blogs reach-out sessions vlogs event people venue flickr audio video

Some of you already know some of this but not all of it, and some of you do not know this but may have had some clues, I have been excited at times and have been dropping hints. It’s time to “spill the beans” and share exactly what’s going on.

I received an unsolicited approach in the last quarter of 07 for a possible partnership/merger between my established distance learning portal Audiocourses.com and the global face-to-face educational provider SAE Institute.

After various negotiations we have now struck a deal and I have signed on the dotted the line, so to speak.

SAE was established in 1976 (SAE History) and now operates over 50 institutions in 21 countries around the globe. SAE has an exceptionally strong brand name in the field of sound engineering and music production, and also more recently, film making, games, and other media related disciplines. If you are a musician or budding sound engineer/studio technologist etc, this is unquestionably “the” brand, SAE is in fact also the world's largest media education provider, fact.

Audiocourses.com is a pioneering distance learning portal working at the cutting-edge of educational technology since 2000. The portal has graduated students from most corners of the English speaking world, it is a specialist e-learning internet school, with vast experience and proven results. Considerable credibility has been established and the site is dominant in most areas of its core business.

Putting these two cultures together then and you can imagine the possibilities, exciting times ahead with enormous potentials.

Personally I am very excited by this deal, it is the coming of age of my company, something I started on the kitchen table and have shed pints of sweat over, uncountable sleepless nights and all the rest of that stuff you need to get your baby going. I’m chuffed!

So what will I be doing?

Primarily I will continue managing Audiocourses.com and with that comes the integration of the SAE Graduate College. I will also be engaged in helping restructure the SAE network of websites and market the online presence of the SAE brand worldwide.

These are huge projects requiring heaps of project management along with various milestones and launches and exciting strategies. Naturally I hope to share some of this with you as I work through it.

All of this will be carried out by my new-media web marketing consultancy company Audana, which some of you may recall carried out work for Crayon and Coca-Cola as well as other great clients through 07. Audana will grow steadily and aggressively extend its client base through 08.

Watch out for the official press releases soon.

Can’t wait to get stuck in, wish me luck!

Technorati Tags: audio audiocourses.com brand deal distance learning elearning institute marketing media merger online portal sae school web sae audiocourses.com distance learning school web marketing online brand audio media institute merger deal portal elearn

Net casting (in recent years known as podcasting), started for me, way back in the 90s.

I first had a web domain back in the 90s which was an audio service catering for musicians, classical and jazz mostly, I used to record a variety of performances and make them available on the internet for download, and some of these were to “show-off” new violin builds for example, by way of comparative recordings, kind of like A/B recordings. Of course back then this was a fairly time-consuming process due to restrictive speed connections.

Around 2000 I started Audiocourses.com as a post-graduate research project, as distance learning school for music production, sound engineering, and immediately made recorded voice content avaliable for download and streaming. Most of this audio was me giving tutorials in the RealAudio format, on topics such as music production, mixing etc. Being RealAudio format meant listeners could stream fairly easily from the site, RealAudio would select the bandwidth setting automatically for the user. Incidentally these early streams are still available on the Audiocourses.com downloads section and are dated to autumn 2002!

Throughout the early 90’s I uploaded more and more audio content, including such things as drum samples, sound effects and complete 24 track recording studio sessions. I then started audio blogging, which saw me using the telephone as an audio-blogging tool, I also rolled this service out for students, which enabled them to blog their thoughts simply by using a telephone, this was very popular, was quite a buzz chatting into a cell phone back in 2003 and having the content appear on a site as an audio file.

It is since the addition of the enclosure tag in RSS feeds that the concept of “podcasting” (a misguided name, in my opinion) somewhat “popularised” the concept of internet audio and video, but in essence the only thing that had changed (albeit an excellent change) was that content could be downloaded automatically. The fact is that audio/video content had been cast over the net for many years before this.

Having been “waist-deep” in audio content over the web for a number of years I had always toyed with the idea of a “radio show” for sometime (I did a number of radio style streams back in 98/99), but it wasn’t until 2006 that I decided that perhaps a regular show might be damn good therapy for myself and provide added value to the Audiocourses.com site visitors. I’ve always been very keen to ensure clients and students have plenty of virtual community building tools, a distance learning school is all about a sense of something virtually powered, so AC Radio (formally AC Podcast) was born.

Since then I have also introduced some other audio casting services including a text to speech service on SLEDucating, and a soon to be active cast on Audana (both called podcasts, but yes I have issues with that). I also have pro-audio news converted to aggregated audio on AC.

Whilst Podcasting seems to be a current popular term I have now decided to come full circle and reject it, basically just using net cast, or radio, or stream, as to be frank 50% of my current listener’s just stream right off the websites, as they have for years. The other issue is that the word Podcasting is very confusing for non-tech people, (no pod needed). I'm not alone in thinking the term podcasting will be dropped in the future, I of course may be wrong, but Radio, or cast, is far more widespread and understandable which is my excuse for sticking with it, plus I may also actually broadcast some of my shows live, which gives some more validity to using the term radio, even though technically I'll probably not use radio waves, in the electromagnetic sense.

Recently I have been capturing sound in my car and calling these Car Casts, as well as a new fun brain dump called the Running Man Radio show, where I take a portable recorder out on my road roads.

Technorati Tags: audio broadcast casting casts ipod music podcasts radio recording streaming