Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Ah, the tireless excuse of the slow and lazy. If I had a penny every time someone said the above to me about the SBS Show I would be bigger than Time Warner. I'm gonna try that line with Steve Ballmer next time we talk "Hey, I was going to build a multi-billion dollar conglomerate but you beat me to it"

But this is not a rant. Quite the contrary. My PR Agency, Tim Barrett & Associates is going to be vlogging concurrently with me. He's serious about it too, he even bought a Mac. He showed me his first episode last night, far more impressive than what I have in terms of production quality but he is not sexy enough for a widescreen yet. Great audio too, I am not brave enough to stand that close to the camera. According to his blog he will be focusing more on screencasts and helping people with the bits on pieces of SBS and related technologies.

I will hopefully remain the Paris Hilton of the tech conference scene and focus on the IT Pro lifestyle. It's a great source of entertainment for me – I get to talk to some amazing people, find out what drives them and what makes them successful. Let's face it, you can always buy a book to figure out Exchange, well over a 100 options. But you will lilkely never sit down with the guy that owns the entire SMTP stack and see the excitement about what he is working on now. Sometimes its more fun to find out why things are the way they are instead of how they are put together and sprinkled with marketing. I've been fortunate to meet some remarkable people in this business and it has changed the very core of what I believe as the definition of success, hopefully I can bring the same to you. Then Tim will show you how 🙂

I'm very happy to see this. The response to the two episodes on Vladfire has been amazing so far and it is empowering people in a whole new way. No, we have not forgotten about the SBS Show, this is just a whole new way to tell a story. Both will continue. At the end of the day it feels great to know that even your hobby can make a positive difference in someone elses life. Thank you, thank you, thank you for hundreds of emails and comments on just the first 3 episodes. I think I got more feedback than downloads, I am very happy you like them so much.

Ok, so I succumbed to presure to try and release the vlog in a .mov format. Let me know what you think, it is encoded as streaming with Fast Start so it should play almost immediately. The downside? It takes quite a bit of horse power to encode, this almost ran for two hours on a 3.0 GHz PC with 2GB ram. Also, not compatible with the old versions of Quicktime so hopefully you have a new one. On the bright side, it is almost the third of the wmv file.

Click here to start streaming

By the way, still going through the emails. I really did not expect this level of response to the first two videos. So far the favourite word seems to be "You made my day" 🙂 Thank you, thank you, thank you. As for the tilted head – The camera itself is tilted so I try to compensate for it (unintentionally) and even seem to talk out of one side of my mouth more than the other. I've never really paid much attention to my mug until now, it's interesting to be self-conscious about the way I am at home. Should I shave? Do I need a haircut? Does this shirt look dirty? Weird.

Anyhow, the biggest complaint so far – enclosures. Considering that I haven't picked the default format yet doing enclosures would have been difficult. I create the enclosure feed for the SBS Show by hand so I am not 100% sure how to do this yet. Learning process folks, takes a while to nail down the distribution end of things but as usual, its all about the message.

By the way, set this beast up on the vlogmap . I'm node #1314 🙂

Hit the image above to download the movie or click here.

Susanne, Chris and I wanted to give you an idea of what it’s like to put together the most successful SMB podcast. Enjoy.

Update: Sorry about having to download these, I’ll publish the .mov/Quicktime later tonight to enable streaming – not 100% sure how to embed wmv (Windows Movie) into a player against WordPress but I’ll do the Quicktime.