Waxxi: Chatting with the World

It was good to see Robert yesterday.  He is doing quite well, all things considered.  He started a beard, which I like and I hope he keeps. He was visiting because we were slated to be the subjects of the first-ever Waxxi broadcast.

Robert sat at my dining room table on his TabletPC and my wife's landline phone.  I was in my office with similar equipment. At the given moment, we were introduced by interactive podcast pioneer Tracy Sheridan and then Robert and I started responding to questions coming in from people by online chat and by phone.  Because Robert and I could see the chat questions, we were faster to respond to them. Tracy had to interrupt us when there was a call-in and afterward there were some complaints from a couple of people who were on hold waiting to talk to us for over an hour.

We're sorry about that part, but this was a first-ever form of interactive podcast.  It will get better.  I think Waxxi changes the definition of podcasting, making it much more conversational and that is breakthrough in relevance.  Robert and I worked a while ago with Brian Oberkirch from Weblogs Work who has made some baby steps in this direction, but this was a great leap forward or so it seemed to me.

To be able to sit here at home, with a phone at my ear and a computer n front of my eyes, chatting with people everywhere, all at once, is a joyful experience.  It is the next best thing to being there, something I plan to do this summer as well.

Thanks Tracy.  Thanks for moving podcasting forward.  Thanks for letting Robert and I be the first to use it.