Friday, March 21, 2008

msb-0277 The Carnival of MS Bloggers

msb-0277 The Carnival of MS Bloggers

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intro

Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!

MSBPodcast is "not" any kind of a medical podcast.

It is by and for MSers.

Its purpose is to keep us entertained, to explain our symptoms, to remark on our discoveries, and to raise the general consciousness about our disease.

The path to illness is shadowy, murky and rough strewn.

The path to wellness is lit by the lamp of knowledge.

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Feedback comes first, so...

Herrad may be coming back to the podcast. "Yea!" She's had quite a struggle with her MS lately (and an even worse one with her idiot of a neurologist.)

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My stats are looking great. I'm showing month over month growth. I'm reaching more and more of us.

The new stats package is great.

AJAX performance is truly impressive.

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I'm about to install MediaWiki on a server that I have access to this week-end.

Why do you care?

Because it not just for me.

Wist me luck because if this works, we'll have a place that will be accessible to any and all MSers on the planet to get all kinds of MS Chapter News and events, calendars, with Google maps, and any YouTube videos of the events.

Information about events will be set up using a simple and easy to use form so that anyone will be able to describe their event (with pictures if any, with a Google map to the event, with YouTube videos of the event, if any) for a given language, country, zip/postal code, as of a given date. and it will be accessible by location, by event, by event type, by chapter (basically, whatever we've provided.)

It will be updateable by anyone who sends me their chapter info. (There will be a form on the wiki to fill out for update access. Nothing too onerous but it'll keep the "viagara" and "replica Rolex" pushing spammers "off" of the site.)

I'm going to be using beta testers to see how detailed I need to make the update instructions.

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I admire thoroughness, like the thoroughness of the linking of research scientists in the YouTube video attached to the front of this episode's blog entry, and the linking at "The Carnival of MS Bloggers" is certainly that.

That is a list of MS Bloggers as thorough as any I've ever seen in all my years.

Lisa either has way to much time on her hands or she must have some means of organizing them all and the links from one to the next.

Like "Wow!"

What do you think got me off of my butt to create the MSers wiki? :-)

---- "carnival" by: "henning ohlenbusch" http://rockumentary.net/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: "charles at MSBPodcast.com"

---- "The Carnival" by: "Jennifer Avalon" http://www.jenniferavalon.net/

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: "charles (at) MSBPodcast.com"

---- "a funeral will follow the carnival" by: "the pet ghost project" http://www.myspace.com/thepetghostproject

"Thesis:"

I could sing peons to/for/about "The Carnival Of MS Bloggers".

Lisa has managed to list a whole buch of Bloggers (182 of them as of 2008/03/15) but that is only a very small portion of the MSers one there (I've had hits from all over the planet and from a whole lot more than 182 bloggers [heck, its had hits from almost that many countries] because, as exhaustive as her list is, its limited to those who are rich enough to afford the technology, and bold enough to write and to speak.)

---- "Carnival" by: "Jerry Criner aka Cryout" http://unemploymentrecords.tripod.com/

"Synthesis:"

Though Lisa's List is admirable (frankly, I'm a little awestruck,) it does not represent us in any way shape or form.

The ratio of 182 blogggers to the estimated 5,000,000 MSer (themselves a 1 in 1,200 ratio of the estimated 6,000,000,000 people on this planet) works out to 27,473 people who have MS for every one of those who blog about their having MS. (About 23 times fewer than even have MS in the general population...)

Okay, we know we computer literate are a scarce commodity, but there are about 50 million iPods out there world wide still in use. (We've probably all bought more than one since they first came out. [I own three of different vintages and different capacities and my wife owns one too.])

That means that there in a shi... uh, a whole bunch of MSers who can benefit from having a podcast (If we apply the 1 in 1,200 guesstimate of the MS society, that works out to over 40,000 MSers from the general iPod using population. [Since the majority of people {5.9 to 1} aren't even using an iPod to get these show episodes, the 40,000 is quite likely to be an underestimate and gives an overall population size of 236,000. {Which means that I still haven't reached but 1 out of 20 or the merest 5% of them.}])

This show is aimed at "them", the rest of us.

---- "Carnival Days" by: "Phil Ayoub" http://philayoub.com/

"Conclusion:"

The 182 bloggers is a start, but there are over "five million" of us MSers on this planet.

Most of those five million will never even talk to anyone about having MS, never blog, (many of them don't even know about blogs, [they don't have the chance {and it is "chance", and don't you forget it,}]) certainly never podcast, though perhaps, they might not fear a microphone as much as a keyboard, (at least until they discover how "different" they sound. "That" is truly shocking. :-)

Let's get ourselves used to hearing about us and from us...

"That" is the aim of this podcast.

---- "Carnival Funhouse" by: "Seve vs. Evan" http://myspace.com/sevevsevan

Outro

Oh, for all of you people who hear me on the web without having iTunes, or maybe you've got rid an an old episode and would like to hear a song again, you can send me an email about it and I'll gladly, gladly play a song again.

Heck I might even feature all of the music from an old show all over again. (I keep everything so if you've it played once, you can hear it played again.)

2 comments:

Miss Chris said...

I too am awestruck at Lisa's list of bloggers! Dang, that girl sure is motivated. I wish I had that kind of drive.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

Yes, its an awful lot of work on her part.

But did you notice the YouTube video at the front of the post?

It can be pretty easy if you use a computer to wade through all that data.

The problem is one of A not knowing about the existence of B.

That's why I'm setting up a wiki.

But not just any ol' wiki!

I'm setting up something that we'll all be able to look at and update with text entries, calendar of events, Google maps audio files (like my own podcast), videos (like the YouTube one and the ones at icyou.com (I've been in touch with Manon Husman of ICYou. That's coming up in next Monday's episode.)

Because it an accept entries from all over the planet, its essential that we tie it into Google maps.

This way, you know at a glance what events you can attend and:
• what events are going to be happening in a given area,
• what organizations, chapters and facilities are available in a given area,
• what products, goods, services, etcetera are available in a given area.

The possibilities are huge.