1: Why another podcast?

Unicorn Meta Zoo

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a brand new podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio.

Participants

We’re talking about why we’re doing a podcast. (I believe this is the traditional podcast pilot topic.) It’s not intended to replace Stack Overflow podcast, which is on hiatus. For one thing, our audience is much smaller. If you are reading this post, you are one of the super-engaged users we want to talk with. For another, I pitched this as a quick-to-produce podcast. It takes less than an hour to record and edit.

Links

• I mentioned the Meta Stack Overflow announcement, which includes a link to my UserVoice request (archived in the WayBack Machine).
• Abby’s go-to site is Worldbuilding.
• Jon has a soft spot for Biblical Hermeneutics.
• Juan is a fan of Stack Overflow en español.
• This episode was sponsored by the Ask Question Wizard.

Meta

For recording we use Zencastr which has a free plan that allows up to three participants. Each participant channel is exported to an MP3 file when the recording session ends. In order to merge the three channels into one channel and add the intro/outro, I wrote a script, edit_podcast.rb, to create FFmpeg commands. Juan M wrote and performed our music. Cover art was generated by balpha’s excellent Unicornify script. For the moment, we’re serving the files from a GitHub repository and you can grab an RSS feed there. It’s not terribly useful just yet, but when we have more episodes, they’ll be delivered automatically to your podcatcher of choice.

We mentioned that we might invite Jaydles to be a guest. We’d recorded the episode well before Jay left the company. I’d still be interested in having him on the show to find out what he’s up to and get his thoughts after being away from the company for a while.

What do you think?

Take a listen and respond in the answers below.