Articles

No Six Pixels Of Separation Podcast This Week

Posted by

Well, it was bound to happen.

Yesterday, I had an amazing conversation with Mark W. Schaefer from the Grow Blog that covered topics like the power of Klout and the evolution of Marketing, Communications and Blogging in 2010. We even pushed out into the coming year and discussed creativity, analytics and what might be in store for Social Media. The Skype line that we connected on sounded great and I used Audio Hijack Pro to capture the conversation (as I always do). It lasted about 45 minutes and I thought it was the perfect bowtie ribbon on a great year of Podcasting.

But then…

When I went to record the show tonight (intro, outro, music and shownotes), something truly strange happened. The audio on Mark’s side was perfect, but my voice came out about two octaves lower and to make matters even stranger, there was a delay on my side of the conversation, so I would hear dead air, Mark then speaking to something I was saying and then my voice coming in after. In all of my years of Podcasting, I am stumped. I don’t think it was Skype and I’m baffled as to how Audio Hijack Pro could have messed up the audio recording in this manner.

It really does suck.

I’ve missed a couple of shows over the years, and I tend to not publish/talk about it, but this really upset me, mostly because I now feel like I wasted Mark’s valuable time (especially during the holiday season when we were both taking some well-deserved time off). It also sucks, because the content was great and I really wish you could hear it, but it’s just not listenable. I considered just putting it "out there," with a warning that the audio was wonky, but I couldn’t even listen to it because it sounded so… weird. I hope Mark understands and can accept this apology. I’m hopeful he and I will record a lot more this year… and for years to come.

Until then…

If you’re really starved for an episode of Six Pixels of Separation, please allow me to recommend that you take a listen to SPOS #159 – Digital Marketing All-Star Roundtable. This episode featured a roundtable conversation I conducted on behalf of Marketing Magazine with Seth Godin, Charlene Li, Shelly Palmer and David Weinberger in June of 2009. If you haven’t heard it yet, I promise it won’t let you down.

Next week, we’ll (hopefully) be back with our regularly scheduled programming.

UPDATE: Mark was kind enough to re-record a fresh episode. We made it happen and it will be published this coming Sunday. I hope you enjoy it… I think it came out great (and yes, it’s better than our first attempt).

33 comments

  1. Mitch, you rarely, if ever let us down. I also know that the quality of SPOS is super important to you, so,….I’m saying we trust your decision 🙂 Disappointed to miss Mark’s interview, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to use it somehow.
    Happy New Year!

  2. Mitch: I think is is a clock problem and may have something to do with audio processing on your local machine. Make sure you check the rate 44.1 (etc) rate of your audio. My guess is that your side was picked up directly from your mic and the Skype side was fed directly to your software. I’ve had this problem when moving DAT to Sonar due to clock issues. Toby

  3. Uhm Klout has no power. In fact while we all love the employees and the idea behind it, we made fun of it today and it went semi viral. Not just me…some people who have a lot of street cred. I blogged about it 2 weeks ago proving it has a long way to go. I snipped screen shots of people who were huge in marketing with highly read blogs, thousands more Twitter contacts than me, podcasts and books, with the same Klout as me.. a solo person agency trying to get over $1k in billings per month. Yet I had the same Klout? Chris Brogan said I had Klout in places he didn’t…”uhm Chris…not online…that is why I don’t follow you on twitter or read your blog.” But yes Chris in real life..I am sure I have more Klout in some places like Music and Art than you do. Its ok..but not online!
    I know Mark blogged recently about social commerce. But I was shocked because currently its a bunch of hokey nonsense. And he is a realist vs someone who gets snow jobbed aka Mashable readers all the time. I really like Mark and yourself BTW. But glad I do not always agree!
    So I will task you Mitch to prove me wrong here. And yes maybe you wrote in this post about Klout in a way that misrepresented your viewpoint. But it would take a lot to change my mind. Klout has done great work with Branding but they have been screwed by bloggers and the Mashables into being portrayed as delivering about 3 magnitudes greater than they can. Not their fault. Very hard task they undertook.
    With only maybe 2-4% of the US on Twitter regularly, 80%+ of Facebook accounts 100% private, Klout has major challenges since most of communication is blind to it.
    BTW Happy New Year! =) Sorry to be negative just timely! =)

  5. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times, and hit 714 home runs. And how do we remember him? Happens to the best of us. You’ll just have to be brilliant again next week.

  6. The audio may be salvageable. If you post the source files, I’d be happy to download them and see if I can get you in the correct octave and back in sync.

  9. I’m outraged given how much I pay for this blog. 🙂
    Sorry to hear it crapped. I love your podcasts and they’ve inspired me to start one in my own niche.
    Having once been a musician, gear is always a weak spot. Nothing worse than being on stage and strings break on the guitar or amps fail. I guess this is the equivalent in the blogger’s world.
    PS – why don’t you change your spam filter word to “vectors” just to throw us off. ha ha.

  10. Same as Rob Wolf – I think about some sports figure stats that show they FAIL# a huge percentage of the time – missing the shots they take.
    I think you sometimes miss your mark slightly, but we all do (a lot more than slightly, myself!) and so we continue to appreciate all of your efforts!
    That particular piece of content wasn’t meant to be posted today [frustrating!], but I’m confident the rest of the thinking/conversation sparked will get to us eventually, in whatever format, even better than it would have tonight!

  12. Howie, Maybe withold judgment on the Klout thing until you hear the podcast. I think it would be naive to think that klout or something like it should be ignored as a legitimate marketing trend. Even if it’s a statistical piece of crap, if Pepsi, Disney and Virgin Air are using it, it has my attention.
    I have not advocated any particular scoring system and probably never will. I’m simply pointing out that the ability to grade people and post it in a public way is an important 2011 trend, whether it is klout of a succesor.
    Thanks for the comment!

  13. Mitch, Considering the number of recordings you have done, it is a shock that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more than just a few times as you say… I have already had two flubs in just 27 recordings… and I know how bad it feels! Thanks for the “replacement” tip… and @Mark : kudos for the attitude… it is funny how, since it’s live, one always feels that it “could be better”… that is part of the wonderful magic of being live… I am sure you were already brilliant…

  14. Ouch, that’s a real shame!
    I would suggest recording a back-up in future from your audio-out line into a digital recorder like an Edirol or Zoom H4N. It would also double as a portable recorder for those round the table discussions you do.

  15. Mitch
    I hope you can salvage or even re-record the podcast because your discussions with Mark W Schaefer are always great to listen to. The past two (The Ghost Blogging Debate and How to Win Friends and Influence People (on Twitter)) have been excellent.
    Nevertheless, as Joe Sorge pointed out, you rarely let us down and there may be a way of fixing it. Unfortunately, I know NOTHING about podcasting or audio editing although many of your other followers do, so hopefully they can help.
    Happy New Year!

  17. I’m not sure I’ll be able to start off my weekly properly without the 6 Pixels podcast. Is this the first time in 200+ episodes where something like this has happened?

  18. You do great shows regardless, and I’m just throwing this out there, but I work with a Podcast Consultant, who is also a full time podcaster, and his audio quality is excellent. You may want to check him out.
    His name is Cliff Ravenscraft, and can be found at http://podcastanswerman.com

  19. I’m interested what’s causing the audio to scramble like that. Please let us hear what caused it if you might actually be able to identify it.
    If something happens to me like this, I always get a bad feeling before it does happen.

  20. Mitch,
    “You always get a first chance to make a second impression…”
    There’s a moral in there somewhere about your podcast this week.
    Secondly…
    Over the break, I re-read your book and ended up with a blog design/appearance question :
    When/where do you use/recommend ‘Read More’ on a blog’s front page ?
    Your front page publishes the complete content of the five newest articles, then ‘Read mores’ for the next five most recent.
    Have you tried other combinations?
    Is 5 and 5 the way to go?

  22. Mitch, have you thought of releasing it as text instead of audio (just this time)? It’s not the same nature, but the content must be invaluable. And I think with help of audio transcription software/service it could work pretty well.

  23. this explains a lot.. I have to admit, barely find time to read a blogs out there. but I just love to download your podcasts and listen to it while going for a walk.
    and I couldn’t believe that you haven’t recorded this one. so at least it was a “success” in away for you. +1 one traffic to your blog 🙂
    have a wonderful 2011 with good conversations! get the conversation started.

  30. I’m not sure that there are any hard and fast rules. I’m a big fan of being able to dive in and read. Because my posts tend to be a little longer and I’m taking more of a Journalism approach, we wanted people to just be here and read.

Comments are closed.