Yesterday I mentioned the latest episode of The Weather Report covered the discussion about how VARs can survive in the cloud and the controversy over cloud billing. Well, you’ve flooded my inbox: What is The Weather Report?

Well, a few years ago I had a wildly popular podcast called SBS Show. It had thousands upon thousands of subscribers and covered the emerging world of the SMB IT consultant. Community had matured past the need for an hour long show so we started doing the SPAM Show, covering the events and developments for MSPs – but after about 20 episodes we all got too busy and it became apparent that putting together these podcasts was a full time job.

This gave birth to Looks Cloudy, a blog focused on getting the VAR/MSP into the cloud. There are so many things to consider and stay on top when it comes to the cloud – with everyone spending money and riding the hype train, being able to competently recommend it is quite difficult. Own Web Now wanted to help but my time was too scarce and I became too unreliable to do it.

Enter Kate Hunt (kate@ownwebnow.com) – she is now running the blog, organizing podcasts, recording quick weekly shows to keep you and your staff in the know.

We got a lot of feedback about what you could use and what you needed. We wanted to provide that.

So tune in. Tweet about it. Blog about it. http://www.LooksCloudy.com

Most of all – if you know someone that needs to be on it that knows a lot about our business and VARs – let’s get them on the podcast.

We do a lot for our community. This is just one more thing. Hope you enjoy it.

When in Course of IT events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the marketing budgets of larger companies which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the free tshirt, the separate and equal station to which the cost of Stuff We All Get entitle them, a decent respect to the weight of carryon luggage of mankind requires that they should pillage the expo wisely.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to The SPAM Show:

www.facebook.com/ExchangeDefender

Now sure, I talked about it yesterday, but really the whole point of the IT community is that you learn from your fellow peers and if you’re lucky, form some great friendships. I have been blessed to make many friends around the world through my work and we are letting you in.

You can call me a liar if you do what I’m about to tell you and don’t laugh.

So you don’t like podcasts. Maybe you don’t like geeks or business. Maybe you have better things to do. But let me ask you… how was your day? Pretty tough, right? I want you to ignore all that you could learn from me and my friends. I want you to even ignore how much money our collaborative efforts can make you. I want you to even ignore everything you know and think of me. I just want you to allow me to make you laugh.

SPAM Show #11:

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10 minute outtake at the end of the show, covering the strategy for collecting swag.

Enjoy. If you like it, please blog and sneeze it.

Brought to you by SMB Books.com, MSP University.us, SMB Virtualization.net and ExchangeDefender. And the community evangelist without whose participation none of this would be possible.

Recording podcasts can be a lot of fun. Things tend to build on one another, conversation carries on… and one sure way we always knew it was time to wrap things up was when someone said something so suggestive that any comment, response or further conversation would get us all in trouble. Bringing the show to a new low with a little humor always let our listeners walk away from it with a positive feeling, no matter how difficult of a topic we were discussing.

Autotask Conference Promo (Last 60 seconds of the show):

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Last Friday we recorded a podcast with the usual characters and really the folks you would pay hundreds of dollars to hear speak at a conference. The topic? How economy is affecting the MSP market. Things are either going great or they are going terrible, and taking sides in that conversation can be dangerous.

I’ve included the last 60 seconds of the podcast (player above, if you don’t see it please navigate to www.vladville.com) in hopes that it will give you an idea of how we turn a difficult topic into an educational and entertaining one.

All in all, I just hope we’re still invited to the Autotask conference. You can’t buy publicity like this

SPAM Show is Own Web Now’s official podcast, meant to improve communications between OWN and our partners. Hear anything interesting? Call us, email us, twitter us, find us on Facebook, etc, etc..

Earlier today a few of my closest advisers in our business got together to record a podcast: Karl Palachuk, Dave Sobel, Mark Crall, Stuart Selbst talked about Microsoft, Apple, MSP, marketing, top 100 lists, SMB strategies, etc.

This is perhaps the most valuable 1 hour I’ve spent this week because these are the folks I seek out when I go to a conference. Just about the most connected, most social bunch of people I know and talk about a great sounding wall. Now I can keep in touch with them and evaluate all the developments in the space that I may not be in. Today I found at least one successful marketing strategy that we need to be working on, plus all the real stories behind the headlines and what’s really going on.

Karl did mention smbbooks.com once or twice or..

And damn it was hilarious.

We’ll have SPAM Show #3 online early next week at www.ownwebnow.com, if you’d like to keep in touch with these community podcasts sign up for the blog feed off the main page or just listen to it on the right.

-Vlad

One of my most critical failures of 2008 has been my role in the perpetual growing pain that is Own Web Now. The moment we had enough servers, we were again over capacity. The second we finally finished training the new staff, the new stack of resumes showed up. The moment everything worked just remarkably we added more hardware or added new features that caused new issues.

Thats life, thats business.

But it takes a toll on a man. So about two months ago I decided not to allow my business to run me an my agenda. There are weeks of my life in 2008 where I can honestly say I did absolutely nothing but keep the machine up and running, or as we say around the office: “I have been holding Internet together all day and my arms are tired.” When I did get the little meandering tasks in check I was so disoriented or had so little time before the next meeting that I never even got back to my agenda. So I made a lot of changes and the productivity went up. Took about two months to perfect it but now I’m ready to talk about it.

Tune in (really, it’s a podcast baby!) tomorrow on vladville.com and hear all about it.

P.S. Going to come back to the Mic in 2009 Most of my close friends have told me that I don’t come off as great on the blog as I do in person so let’s see if I can throw in some extra entertainment value your way.

Did you see the return of Terminator: Sara Connor Chronicles last night? The Terminator franchise is back in the pop culture.

And while the Skynet might be a little bit away, it’s predacesor in KPE is alive and kicking. Next week, while Karl is doing his presentation with Dave in Chicago, same other Karl is doing a live podcast with his genetic duplicate about zero downtime migrations during business hours.

(ask about the cloning how-to)

OWN Partner Call 4 with Matt Makowicz served as a bit of a wrap to the festivities in Houston. If you haven’t heard any of the OWN Partner Call podcasts so far you might want to start with this one as it gives a nice sum up of the change in tone and attitude at WPC this year.

Huge thanks to Matt, Dean, Vijay, Scott and Mark for helping me bring you some of the WPC atmosphere at the convenience of your desk. Most people miss conferences and there is always that lingering question of “just what did I miss out on?” – I hope this helped fill some of the void. I got a lot of thank you emails, one very moving email from someone struggling in a tough market and downsizing that couldn’t afford to be there.. all I can say is thank you for tuning in and thank you for doing business with OWN.

Oh, and here is the RSS feed for your iPod. Submitted it to iTunes but that takes a little while.

Gmail really needs a massive reply feature – let me can some text and send it to everyone that asked the same question.

I want you to know that I have heard the grumbling over the lack of RSS feeds for the OWN Partner Call and I intend to do something about it tomorrow. Yes, I know that if it doesn’t sync to your iPod it may as well not exist. I will fix it tomorrow.

I have one more call in the queue with Matt Makowicz who makes a pretty good case for why you’ve heard and seen far less “rah-rah” from the Microsoft WPC than usual. After that one is out, the RSS feed will come.

The OWN Partner Call has done so many fantastic things for OWN in the first three days that it has been alive and I hope that I can continue to use it to promote the people we work with because they are just fantastic.

Take it with a grain of inspiration if you are trying to do something nice for someone else too. The OWN Partner Call started as a last minute mass-mail to eight of my friends (who also happen to do business with OWN) asking them if they wouldn’t mind helping me let my partners know what Microsoft is up to. Four phone calls and maybe two dozen emails later, close to ten thousand people got to hear what WPC was like for people that feed me. You can make a difference, if you try.

Again, thank you!

Dean Calvert and Vijay Riyait are folks you’ve heard about on this blog before, they were kind enough to explain what the PAL program is and how it works. They are also partners of mine in OWN so you know they aren’t pulling any punches.

Today they were nice enough to give me a ring live from the Microsoft WPC conference and explain the impact of the new announcements on their business. What did they think?

Click here to find out..

I’ve spent the past three days recording podcasts and really trying to build a professional system around it so that call quality is exceptional and consequently edits and delivery take a whole lot less effort. One of the most frustrating parts of podcasting is the setup. If you don’t try at all, it’s very easy. If you try, its complicated beyond belief and the costs are astronomical unless you are collecting trash from eBay.

So to help a bit with the frustration, here is my recording setup.

Core of the system is an Alesis MultiMix 8 USB mixer (sub $100) that allows for realtime mixing and volume adjustment. This is absolutely necessary as the podcasts can have multiple callers and some callers have a loud booming voice and others need an amplifier to even register a dB. The mixer bridges the VoIP interviewing system and the recording systems – laptop PC running Audigy (free) and an iRiver recorder ($20) with a line-in. Primary recording is to the laptop, the secondary output is just there as a backup “in case of Vista”

VoIP system is the other core of the podcast. It is based on Asterisk/Trixbox (Sorry Microsoft, I wanted to try ResponsePoint but seeing how I haven’t even read the manuals yet it didn’t fit into the schedule) with my cohost dialing in from his VoIP phone in the office (anonymous SIP call feature allows us to dump the call into an extension without actually establishing an extension for him on our side). For international callers we have an extension in the Asterisk box programmed in so they can use SJPhone or X-Ten lite softphones available for free – just need a headset. As a failover to that (blocked SIP calls or whatnot) there is a direct dialin number for the conference so it can be hit from a phone if the Internet connection goes down or via Skype if the recording is international.

I’m using a Samson C01U condenser mic and about $20 worth of foam padding from Home Depot. My office has wood floors, high ceilings, and nothing to absorb the echo so foam padding was a must. It rolls up quite nicely and stows away into a drawer.

The results… amazing. I only have one improvement coming up – I am sending people that will be making appearances SIP phones (Grandstream Budgetone 101). The voice quality is just spectacular when compared to POTS and the investment is $50 + shipping (3 day in USA is about $6)

Do Skype recordings still float? Not really. Yes, in 2005 when we started this, but in 2008 the expectations are for a far more professional production and frankly it shows when something is halfassed, which is why most the podcasts you see out there happen to have 6 listeners combined.

Anyhow, if your future calls for podcasting… hope this helps.