Cephalopodcast - The Ocean Podcast

Continuing with the notion that this 30 Days business is something more linearly sequential than chronological, here’s my next entry. This one is supposed to be about cleaning up the About page, but I thought I’d work on my backstory instead.

Origins

Somewhere early in 2005 I got an iPod shuffle (thanks Aunt C!). Like a many men my age, I was still on dial-up and had a meager selection of CDs, most of which I did not like and hardly ever listened to. So what use was this new little nugget of technology? Fortunately, Apple soon added podcasting support in iTunes and I had more random audio than my one little gigabyte of portable media storage could carry. I quickly added broadband, a Mac mini and a 5G iPod (with video) to my home (how’s that for a halo effect?). Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that my first podcast experience was something technological. Later I added things like science and the oceans to the mix. And somewhere during that time I became convinced that this was something that I could do*, despite a history of mild stage fright and and an overdeveloped sense of self-deprecation.

It was not until August that I woke up with a headache and the name of the show rattling around in my brain: The Cephalopodcast. It seemed more clever at the time, but I’ve since learned that there are a disheartening number of people who have never heard the word cephalopod before, much less know how to pronounce it or know what it means.

I knew I couldn’t have a podcast without a companion Web site, so I registered my first domain, found a hosting service, figured out how to install MySQL and Wordpress and wrote my first blog entry. It was not until December that I recorded and posted my first show (when RSS was not so simple) and it has been a middling success ever since.

What is this blog all about?

The tag line for the Cephalopodcast is science edu + ocean info. It is about:

• science
• education
• science education
• marine science
• marine science education

You might notice a little overlap in those subject areas. Diagrammatically, it shapes up something like this:

However, this is not a complete picture. If I am honest, there is actually another factor at play here, and a more accurate formula might look something like: (science edu + ocean info) x tech. Adding the tech multiplier might seem self-evident if you are reading this blog or listening to the podcast but I mention it for completeness sake. Also, there is an environmental variable which is sometimes thrown in to balance the equation.

*I mentioned my rationale for being here in an earlier entry.