Date: March 12, 2009

Title: 365 Days of Astronomy Update

Podcasters: Michael Koppelman, Pamela Gay, Nancy Atkinson

Organization: 365 Days of Astronomy IYA New Media Working Group

Description: Some of the people working behind the scenes here at the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast get together to provide an update on how this IYA project is going so far.

Bio:  Besides working on the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, you can find Michael Koppelman at Slacker Astronomy, Dr. Pamela Gay at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, as well as at her blog Starstryder and the Astronomy Cast podcast, and Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today and Space Lifestyle Magazine.

Today’s Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Deborah Rosenthal on behalf of Dr. Pamela Gay in appreciation of her amazing and inspiring explanations of complicated material that helped turned idle curiosity about astronomy into a passion.

Transcript:

Michael Koppelman:  Hello welcome again to the 365 Days of Astronomy.  I am Michael Koppelman from Slacker Astronomy.  I’m here with Pamela Gay and Nancy Atkinson.  How are you guys doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Life is good.

Michael: Sweet. Pamela you’re in Oxford I hear.

Pamela: Yes.  I’m out visiting Chris Lintott and other contributors to 365 Days of Astronomy.  We’re also working on building projects for Galaxy Zoo.  We’re working on the International Year of Astronomy, media same old same old.

Michael: Fun and are you someplace as cool Nancy?

Nancy Atkinson:  I am just sitting at my home office and that’s where I am in the cold of March.

Michael: Me and you too.  I guess it is March 12th for our listeners and it’s actually almost March 12th for us speakers. We just wanted to touch base with you guys about the podcast, how it’s going, and some stats for you and some other updates.

You know we have 365 days full of good podcasts and we haven’t really had a chance to talk to you much about it.  That’s why we’re here today.  First of all I think interesting statistic is that our total downloads as of this moment in time is just almost exactly a quarter million. People are listening to this podcast.

Pamela: It’s really amazing.  I get e-mail messages, we see twitters, our servers went down for one day and it was like all of a sudden everyone is “where is 365 Days of Astronomy?”  It’s been absolutely tremendous feedback that we’ve been getting from everyone out there listening to all the different shows.

Michael: From the same stats from Libsyn we’re seeing about 5,000 downloads a day and in my opinion that’s a fairly good measure of our listenership because while I might not listen every single day, I generally go back and catch up to the days I’ve missed.

I think other people do that too so we’re just bubbling over the 5,000 downloads a day mark which if my math is correct since we’re about a quarter of the way done, we should beat a million downloads on this project for sure if not much, much more if it picks up steam.

Pamela: So everyone get out there, get your friends to subscribe and let’s see how quickly we can hit that one million download mark.  There’s no reason we have to wait a year.  Let’s do it in two months. [Laughter]

Michael: There has been some great podcasts, I don’t know if you guys have any favorites or if we even want to go down the favorites path, but I’ve been really super impressed with the quality of the podcasts.

Nancy:  Yes, me too. I think everybody is doing a great job of covering all sorts of different topics and doing them all in a very interesting way.  There have been some funny ones and some serious ones, just a whole wide variety of things.  People are doing a great job.

Michael: So keep it up everyone.  We’re looking forward to what is it, about nine more months of great podcasts.  We’ve really barely just begun here.  Nancy do you want to let us know how we’re doing on the whole sign ups.  Have we filled up 365 Days of Astronomy?

Nancy:  We have.  We’re very proud to announce that the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast calendar is now completely full for 2009.

Michael: Hooray!

Nancy:  Yeah!! It’s actually been full since about the first part of February.  Then we asked people who had several dates scheduled throughout the year (10 or more) to consider giving back a day or two so that more people could participate and contribute.  Many people were very generous enough to do that and give back some days and those days that became available were very quickly filled by a waiting list that we have.  Now we’re officially full.

We still do have a waiting list with a few names on it. We have that in case anyone backs out.  So, if you’re still interested in joining in we can put you on the waiting list.

There’s also another option which comes with no guarantees, but we’d like to have a few spare or what we call emergency podcasts on hand that are recorded in advance, uploaded to us and ready to go.  These would be ones that are able to be used on short notice in the event that another contributor fails to deliver on their podcast.  So that’s another option for anyone wanting to participate.

I also have just a couple of reminders for people.  We do need a transcript and the transcript should be as verbatim as possible to your actual recorded podcast, not just an outline.

We have the transcript available for anyone who isn’t able to listen to the podcast for whatever reason and in the one or two podcasts where we haven’t had the transcript up in relatively short order we do get e-mails about it.  So, people are taking advantage of having the transcript available and they miss it when it’s not there.

Another reminder for all of  you contributors, please, please get your podcasts and transcripts uploaded on time which means 30 days ahead of your scheduled air date.  Things run much smoother for us if everything is here on time.  Since most of us who are working on this project are doing it on a volunteer basis, we really would appreciate it so that we’re not scrambling at the last minute to get everything up and ready to go.

Because some technical things happen that are out of our control like what happened the first week in March when our web host was down, if the podcast hadn’t been delivered to us on time so that we could produce and pre-post them, the podcasts wouldn’t have been available via the RSS feed.  People wouldn’t have been able to listen to the podcast during those days that the website was down.

So, please get your things in on time.  I will be the person e-mailing you and getting on your case if they’re late, so you don’t want that.  It’s not pretty, so please get your things in on time.

Michael: Help Nancy out on that.  She’s doing a great job, Emily Lakdawalla was in her shoes before that.  It’s a lot of work that they’ve been doing and if you can make their jobs easier, please do so.

In very rare cases we have had to bump a podcast that didn’t get their materials in on time.  We don’t cancel them, we just kind of trade some dates but we’re asking people to get this in early.  You knew that when you signed up so please – and most people are – so we applaud all the great collaboration and cooperation we’re getting from everybody.

Nancy: Yes, we actually have a couple submitted, one that is already in that is scheduled for July and another one for December so Kudos to those extreme early birds.

Pamela: And Kudos to Preston Gibson our wonderful producer who has been going through and putting together all of these different shows.  This is a community podcast with the contents coming in from all over the entire world but it is getting centrally produced by students basically.  We have Preston Gibson who is a Mass Communications student at SIUE.  We have Kortney who is the person who is putting together everything on the website, pulling the pieces in.

We really have a great team that I don’t think Michael and I can thank them enough for all the hard work they’re putting in to take your content and share it with everyone out there listening.

Michael: I’m amazed and proud that we’ve been able to pull this off and the only reason we have been able to pull it off is all the great collaborations we are getting from everyone out there so thank you.

I also want to thank George Hrab who does our theme song.  There is an interview with George up over at Slacker Astronomy that I have been meaning to post over here at 365 Days of Astronomy but my days only come like once a month and I haven’t had a chance to get it in yet.

The theme song is great and if nothing else it invokes strong emotions.  We’ve gotten e-mails from people that love the theme song; we’ve gotten e-mail from people that are over the theme song. I really appreciate George’s hard work on that.

Pamela: If you go over to George’s website he actually has a full-length version of the song that has multiple different verses and what you hear at the beginning of the podcast is actually just the chorus of the song.  He’s even put together a music video that I think you can find on his Face Book profile.

Michael: Yes and we cross-posted that over on the 365 site which is one other little announcement type thing I wanted to say.  We did have this down time recently. We were down for a couple days through no fault of our own.  We also have sometimes problems with the feed.

We’ve had a few problems along the way so my point being you should maybe check in at the website every so often or subscribe to the RSS feed because if we can give you technical updates about if a show is late or if a feed is messed up or if there is any other technical problems, we do post over on the 365daysofastronomy.org website. So, take a look at that.

We’re glad you e-mail us if a show is late.  We do run into problems sometimes and it is good to get sort of confirmation when things are messed up.  We also appreciate your patience when we don’t get a show up first thing in the morning.  I don’t think we’ve missed a day this year have we?  Have we missed a show yet?

Pamela: No we haven’t missed a show.  Everything has managed to make it up just sometimes a few hours later than expected.  We also have a twitter feed so check us out on twitter as well.

Michael: Yeah and that was a lifesaver when this media temple thing was down because really you couldn’t go to the website.  The only way that you could really reach us was over twitter because even e-mail we weren’t getting because of the media temple problem.

Pamela: So its 365DaysofAstro is where to find us on twitter.

One of the things that is making this show work in addition to all of the wonderful volunteer efforts, all of the contributions that all of you are sending in, is we are paying our production staff.  We are paying the students who are putting this website together.

We’re not making any money.  Nancy, Michael, Stuart, Rob Simpson, Davin, everyone working in the background is doing this as a labor of love.

But we do have these two undergraduates who are really putting the pieces together at the end of the day and we have to pay them.  What makes this possible are the donations all of you are sending in.

We’ve been doing 25-dollar a day sponsorships and those are almost taken.  Thank you so much to all of you who have taken the time to contribute.  This almost covers the show.  What it doesn’t cover is random things like backing up everything that we do and to make it all the way through the year without having to worry about any extra hours that end up coming in at various points. We could use a few more sponsorships beyond just these 25-dollars a day.

We’re going to be putting together a website that links to the show so if you’re interested in contributing and maybe not at the 25 dollar level or even not worrying about sponsoring a specific episode we could use your money.  All of this is tax-deductible.  We’re a 501(c) 3 non-profit through Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and you are really making this happen and helping feed two undergraduates which is truly a noble pursuit.

Michael: I wanted to add too that originally we had one major sponsor that was going to sponsor the whole year of the podcast and then sort of late in the game they dropped out so we had to come up with this daily sponsorship idea and get that working.

That’s kind of why we’ve been sort of harassing you trying to get people to sponsor the podcasts and why we started the podcasts with this sponsored by no one message because we literally can’t do this if we can’t pay some of the people that are working on this literally everyday.

We so appreciate those people that have donated and further donations are needed.  We’re not in the black yet so you don’t have to sponsor a day; you can just go to the site, click the button and donate some money just because you’re enjoying the podcasts.

Pamela: And if there are any companies, if there are any angel donors out there that do want to just say “hey, tell me what you need to get you through everything else,” we’re here to talk.  Thank you to all of you. We wouldn’t be where we are without you.

Michael: info@365daysofastronomy.org  www.365daysofastronomy.org Nancy, thank you.  Pamela, thank you.

Nancy: Thank you Michael.

Pamela: Thank you.

Michael: And the 365 Days of Astronomy continues….

This transcript is not an exact match to the audio file.  It has been edited for clarity.  Transcription and editing by Cindy Leonard.

365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.