paid podcasting

is anyone in South Africa (or internationally) doing PAID podcasting? not advertising driven, but charging for each podcast?

an idea would be to have your free podcasts, but once a month to sell a premium version – even if it’s R5 or R10, it would be interesting to see whether anyone is prepared to pay for information via podcasts.

And if it hasn’t been done in SA, doing it would make you the FIRST even if you don’t make money…

one harder than blogging

as a relatively new blogger, i have to be honest and admit that it’s not always easy to think of interesting things to write about or to write the posts in a way that anyone would find interesting reading.

but after being grilled by the perrors – short for PODCASTING TERRORS (as i’ll affectionately call them from now on), Mike and Dave, i’ve realised that blogging is a cinch compared to podcasting.

with blogging you get to think, write, edit, think, edit some more

when being interviewed on a podcast, you speak

when Vin was interviewed on webmasterradio.fm about a year ago, i remember thinking in the beginning of the interview, he’s taking strain…but after a few minutes he was back to the normal Vin I know – totally confident when speaking on his subject matter.

after the perrors interviewed me tonight on the “controversy” regarding the feedback strategy i tested on Mobile-QandA.com, (i sent out about 40 emails, 10 to bloggers i know, and 30 to unknowns after visiting their sites – about 3 blogged they thought the mails were spam. about 5 tried to copy the strategy!!! (including one of the Perrors)), i’ve got newfound respect for those asking the questions, (as they have questions prepared but the discussion can still go in many directions) BUT ESPECIALLY for those being interviewed live, as the podcasters get to do the editing…

(NOTE TO SELF: need to constantly remember not to take myself too seriously SO recall this still doesn’t come close to being voted SIX worst on a particular singing show last year)

Cherrypicka charging?

Springwise might have mentioned the new site, Cherrypicka.com, but why are they charging people for testing products? perhaps a lower amount than if they bought otherwise, but that’s not the point.

if merchants want honest feedback, then they should be giving test samples FOR FREE to the testers, and perhaps even PAYING them to test.

And a lot more people would be REGISTERING on cherrypicka if they didn’t have to PAY to test…

if cherrypicka don’t change their business model, it’s a matter of time before another site launches which PAYS testers or at worse gives them the products for FREE to test…

sure, you can get some products at a bargain by testing them through cherrypicka, but i’ve got a feeling that another site is going to launch soon which will allow testers to get products for free or even get paid to test.

the other gripe i’ve got is that products that are “sold out” are still displayed – and many of the offers already are taken up and “sold out”. Have them taken off as soon as they are sold out, as it’s frustrating for a tester to see products that look interesting only to find out that the test price is finished.

UPDATE:

I thought it would be interesting for people to test out the eSquared tshirts (i’m involved with the eSquared fashion shops in Cape Town and Durban) through cherrypicka and checked out the advertising options. I think i understand now why the testers are paying for the items. Cherrypicka makes it’s money by charging the testers a reduced price for the advertisers products. Basically the advertisers give the products to cherrypicka at NO CHARGE and cherrypicka decides what to charge the testers – and that’s where they make their revenue.

Fat Cactus, Blog Awards, Yid and Bloggers who take themselves TOO seriously

FAT CACTUS

I had a kewl evening at the Fat Cactus this evening. The people were interesting, (when the non Interneter starts rambling on about her exploits on facebook you realise the big I is starting to influence everyone on a daily basis), the music by the 2 piece jazz band was excellent, and the food was good….

WHEN I GOT IT.

I ordered a VEGETARIAN burger, and on taking my first bite, realised it was MEAT!!!! No Apology, and it took about 20 minutes to bring me my order, by which time I had eaten half the chips off everyone else’s plates, AND everyone else was finished eating.

SEARCHING FOR ERIC EDELSTEIN

Anyway, I was intrigued to see tonight that a large number of people are searching for Eric Edelstein on the search engines (as a large number of visitors to EricEdelstein.com found the site by searching on variations of my name). Now that shouldn’t surprise me, as a movie star with the SAME name as me is becoming more famous by the day, BUT people were searching “Eric Edelstein South Africa” and variations…

SOUTH AFRICAN BLOG AWARDS

The South African Blog Awards (Mike Stopforth mentioned they are around 9 187 in Technorati) have a HUGE commonality between judges and blogs in the final countdown. Yes, blogs can’t be in the finals of a category a judge is judging, but a large number of the finalists blogs are the Judges blogs. Are there so FEW bloggers in SA? Can’t the blog awards find some impartial judges? Common guys, get real? Get some system of voting which is unbiased or get non SA bloggers to judge – here’s an idea: Get International Bloggers to Judge? It seems like an old boys blog club at the moment…

YID

A few weeks ago I registered yid.co.za as I thought it would make a nice portal site sometime in the future. Today I got this mail…

“Dear Eric

We are looking to register the domain name yid.co.za and we see that it is registered in your name.

Please will you let me know if you would be prepared to let us have it, as we own the trademark to the name “yid” . We will pay you all expenses incurred.

Just some background on us, we run a Jewish dating website called “YID” which is short for Your Ideal Date. Its a not-for-profit website, and we have made about 33 matches.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

<name removed>”

What if i’m planning on setting up a website called YourIdeaDen.co.za? or YeahItsDelicious.co.za? or….

And asking me for the domain at the SAME time as dangling the LEGAL rope in front of me is CHUTZPAH!!!!

SERIOUS BLOGGERS

Talking of Chutzpah, SA is a small island in the huge mass of Internet activity, and the few bloggers in SA take themselves FAR too seriously!!

I’ve got a cell phone portal I run with a mate – we have great fun answering people’s questions about everything to do with cell phones. We’ve been doing it for about 2 years, and believe me, answering questions, and reviewing cell phones takes TIME!

But we enjoy it, and even though we haven’t made any money out of the site – it’s actually cost us to date – we are planning on it making money in the future (life isn’t all fun).

So I asked a few bloggers to give us some input telling us what they think of the site. And I encouraged the feedback by giving them a link back and some exposure on our home page. Viral simplicity straight out of the late 90′.

Maybe it was the 10 hours of reading blogs, that caused my emails to them to sound a little spammish, but admittedly they did. Even so, the result was a number of incoming links from bloggers that did see the value in Mobile-QandA. More interesting was the number of bloggers who spent their time lambasting the viral experiment (although some of the bloggers then went on to create their own viral link experiments). IT WAS FUN GUYS!!!

And one interesting side point is that interested sponsors have now approached us…

A few days after I set up this fun experiment, I read a posting by Vincent Maher who posted my email I sent him (and I definately was tired, coz too me it sounded like SPAM!)

I really do think his layout of his blog (into seperate sections for personal and his views on marketing) are a nice way of doing it, BUT the mail i sent him went something like “hey, your site is kewl, don’t you want to link to us”.

He had blocked out the URL and my name, but I thought i’d tell him that my intention was to get some honest feedback on Mobile-QandA at the same time as creating a viral experiment.

I jumped on the phone, and called him to tell him that I wanted him to get involved in my experiment (did he think Mobile-QandA was a good service or not?), and that i did think his site was kewl, AND the coffee invitation was genuine…at the end of the conversation, he said we should catch up next time I was in JHB.

So a good conversation (well, so I thought), until Dave mentioned to me earlier today that Vincent had done a follow up blog post AFTER I spoke to him and it wasn’t overly complementary…I’d link to it if I didn’t keep getting a “Timeout Error” on his Blog…