Last night we recorded the third episode of the WinCustomize SkinCast.  From what Spencer is telling me as he edits this one, it's the best so far and I think we're finally starting to get a hang for recording these.  Technical issues aside, it took about 45min of recording to get the 20min of quality content.  Most of the 20min cut out is just us laughing anyway.

So with three episodes in the can, here are some random thoughts on creating a podcast for a community site:

1. When nothing is going on of note, it's really hard to come up with a topic
   The idea behind the SkinCast is to react to what's happening in the community.  Sometimes though there isn't much happening.  For episode 2, as an example, there were very few new skins that week.  It was a lot of logons and bootskins, but no much that we could get a discussion going about.  The forums were also particularly quiet that week so there wasn't even a topic of controversy to go over. 
   
2. You Can't Rely on Community Involvement
   We asked for questions, feedback, ideas, volunteers etc and only came up with a small handful.  Only three shows in and we know we'll have to largely generate the content on our own.  We hope to establish a set rotation of guests and co-hosts to keep things lively instead.
   
3. You can't poke fun at the absurdities of a forum thread or particular skin
   Unfortunately, we do have to watch what we say.  There are some hilarious threads that come up on the forums that are funny for all the wrong reasons.  But we have to be careful about what we say to avoid singling out users and making fun of them.  So instead we joke about them off the air rather than on.
   
4. It is actually hard to make a show under 20min
   We picked "15-20min" as the time limit mostly because we thought it would be easier to record a short show than a long one.  But it turns out that even when you don't have a lot to talk about, you still have a lot of misc chit-chat going on.  So we have to be conscious of what we're talking about and how long we're talking, and even then a lot get sliced out in editing.
   
5. Glib, flowing conversation is actually hard to manage
   Partially because of time limits, partially because we have to be careful about what we say.  The natural flowing conversations you have when you're talking to a friend go away when you have to think about what you're saying the entire time.  We manage pretty well overall, and we're getting better, but when recording it feels a bit awkward sometimes when we stumble. 
   
6. Walking into a recording session with no plan is a bad idea
   15-20min should be easy right? Sign in, start talking about whatever, edit post and done!  Nope!  That just results in about an hour of going back and forth trying to figure out what we're going to talk about.  Though to be fair, we only need to come in with 2-3 bullet points to chat over and we're good.
   
7. Skype is wonderful.  I love Skype.  Pamela is a killer recording utility.
   We handle calls with Skype, and record with a utility called Pamela, which is only like $40 for the full version.  Barring our own stupidity, these two tools have served us well so far and given us great recordings.  It records us in stereo too with me on one channel, Spencer on the other.  This makes editing a lot easier for Spencer.

Like I said, these are just a few random thoughts after doing 3 episodes of the SkinCast.

I actually just finished listening to the final edit on the May 5th episode, and it came out great.  Can't wait to post it on Monday