I've received a lot of feedback on my blog over the past year. Sometimes people send me emails saying my content is great! Others have had "constructive criticism" about what I'm doing. For example, I added MP3 and iTunes feeds based on the feedback that not everybody listened to WMA file formats.
However, the question that I get asked the most is "Why can't you spell podcast right?" and a close second is "Do you know you have a typo...it's spelled PODCAST without the "R"?. To explain why I call my sessions "prodcasts", I need to take a step back and give you some background.
Internally at Microsoft, we have these monthly windows media audio recordings called "Drive Time" which allows us to learn about our products while in the car or on a plane. They've been around for years...basically it was podcasting way before podcasting became popular. So I always thought we should provide similar materials to our customers, giving them another medium to explore our products and solutions. However, our internal materials aren't really suited for external consumption and the Drive Time team didn't have a charter to create customer-ready versions of their content.
So I decided to create my own audio sessions for customers to hear overviews of our products. When I started this initiative last year, I wanted to come up with a catchy name for the project. My goal was to provide content around the products that I personally cover in the personal productivity space...Office, SharePoint, Exchange, LCS, etc. Somehow I came up with "Productivity Broadcasts" or "prodcasts" for short. The name worked well for me, because my content wasn't exclusive to iPod's so Podcast didn't quite fit. And this was well before Microsoft's Zune player came out (Zunecast doesn't quite have the same ring to it).
In my eyes, this project has been very successful. To date, I've recorded over 50 interviews with product and program managers covering the numerous products Microsoft has in the information worker division. I get roughly 30,000 visitors a day (that's visitors, not hits) and now that my materials on the Microsoft.Com website, my traffic is steadily increasing. I've even gotten the opportunity to interview Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Chris Capossela.
Anyway, that's why I call my sessions "Prodcasts". If you'd like to provide feedback or ask me a question, you can always email me directly at TheIWC at Microsoft.Com
Thanks for listening.
Shawn