Now Available on Podcast

When I was young(er) man, I was concerned with propagating my genes.  Now the carriers of those genes have all left home.  As an old(er) man, I find myself propagating my memes.  Today the Internet is the primary place where live ideas (and some brain dead ones) meet, greet, and breed.

This blog, Fractals of Change, is one part of my meme propagation.  It’s fun to watch subscription numbers grow.  It’s exciting to be linked to by people I respect and by absolute strangers.  It’s challenging to be corrected and criticized in near real time.  And it’s a joy to write in a multi-dimensional medium which includes hyperlinks, pictures and graphics.

The novel whose first draft I’ve just completed is another outlet for memes.  Won’t reveal much about that except that it is an historic murder mystery set in the late great Internet bubble.  The book will be available both online and in printed form.  The Internet version will inevitably be richer in some ways than the paper version and will certainly offer more opportunities for reader interaction.  On the other hand, traditional books are still better suited than computers for the three b’s of recreational reading – bed, bathroom, and beach.

Publishing a book is a little like starting a business.  First you have to get the URL (we’ve done that).  You need a team of people with various skills like editing, layout, etc.  You need a target market (since you read my blog, you’re part of that).  You need to think about marketing, distribution, production etc. etc.  And you need to think about all those things not only as they’ve been done historically but how they now SHOULD be done on the Internet.  As in almost everything I’ve done over the last twenty-seven years (genes AND memes), my partner in this venture is my wife Mary so the book is bound to be well-marketed.  It’s my skill as an observer, novelist, and mystery writer that remains to be beta-tested.

Now I’m trying podcasting of my blog.  VON radio is my host and the first installment is available for download to iPod, computer or whatever.  For the first installment, I recorded my first post, the one you may or may not have read about why we need bubbles.  You can use any feed-aggregation or podcasting service to subscribe to a feed of all podcasts on VON radio with this XML file.  Soon you will be able to subscribe to individual contributors.

By the way, if you’re not a downloader of podcasts but do want to listen to me or anything else in podcast format, just click on the URL and it’ll play in Windows Media Player, RealPlayer or whatever you use for listening to audio files in MP3 format.  Don’t even worry if you don’t know what MP3 is; just click and the right thing is likely to happen.

The initial plan is to do two podcasts a week of the posts that seem to make the most sense as audio.  Don’t know whether podcasting is a way to reach a new audience or another way to reach those already reading Fractals of Change.  I’m dependent on your feedback to tell me this and to let me know whether there ought to be more, less, or different podcasts and/or blogs.