The BlogTalkRadio Blog

As more and more people visit our site, listen to a show, read a post or speak with someone who has been introduced to Blogtalkradio, quite naturally we get the question; “What is Blogtalkradio?”

I have pulled a few excerpts from our FAQ :

BlogTalkRadio is a platform that extends the blog, allowing any individual to host a live blogshow online. Our service is free to all users, whether you host a blogshow or listen in.

The blog has changed the face of media and communication. But unfortunately, it has its limits. Primarily, the blog does not allow for real-time interaction between the blogger and his or her readers. At BlogTalkRadio, we extend the blog to allow such live interaction, as well as allow users to generate and consume content in audio format as well as in written format.

The Brief Story

A little less than one year ago, after a family illness, I decided to create a blog. Prior to this, I had read a bunch of blogs, but I had never started one from scratch. Anyway, I headed over to blogger and in 5 minutes (of course) my blog was “live”. How cool!!

I am an inquisitive individual and as such I headed over to Technorati and Google Blog Search, to check out this “blogsophere” thing. I was blown away with the size, scope and diversity of this living breathing entity. At the time there were 50 million blogs, growing at a rate of 200k a day. Many bloggers spends hours and hours a week researching topics, posting their thoughts and linking to others blogs with the ultimate objective of cultivating a vibrant, engaged and growing audience.

While blogging is a two-way conversation, to me it seemed a bit limiting. So I posed the following questions?

Can a blogger or anyone else engage their audience in a live real time manner? Can it be done without the need of a downloaded client? Is it free? Is it open to anyone who wants to use the platform or do they have to be “approved” by some editorial board? Can those conversations be recorded as a podcast with an RSS feed?

As we learned back in the summar of 2006, the answers to these questions was no. Hence Blogtalkradio was born.

We are not a podcasting company. Our hosts produce their episodes using any type of phone, Skype or other VOIP platform. There is no need for expensive digital recording equipment or mixers? We call it “Podcast 2.0″. To me, generally speaking, traditional podcasts are a bore. They are canned, edited, audio files. Unlike blogs, which are easy to produce, viral, free and open to anyone, podcasts are anything but. Is it any wonder that the space is struggling to find itself?

While our service does not have the pristine quality of a well produced podcast digitally mixed, to me the key thing is the conversation. People love to talk and they love to talk to one another. Check out our programming guide and you will find hundreds of shows covering politics, sports, entertainment, or whatever else you’re into.

Pure and simple, Blogtalkradio empowers and enables people to have this conversation and while the word “blog” is in our name, our service is not only used by bloggers. Anyone can host their own on line talkshow using BTR.

I want to thank the thousands of people that have chosen Blogtalkradio to host these conversations and the tens of thousands more that have listened to them.

Check out our programming guide and you will find hundreds of shows covering politics, sports, entertainment, or whatever else you’re into and come join the conversation.

Alan

My fellow BlogTalkRadio host, Lowell Feld, and I have signed a contract to write a book called “Netroots Rising” outlining our experiences in politics in the 21st Century. Lowell and I are like many thousands of other ordinary Americans who got involved in politics and have made an impact because of the Internet.

Things like email listservs, web sites and blogs have allowed millions to participate who had been shut out in the previous, top-down TV era of politics. BlogTalkRadio is an exciting part of that transformation — a great new way to allow bloggers like Lowell and myself to add real-time audio dialogues with our audience to our communications mix.

Therefore, it made perfect sense to do some of the interviews for our book using the great BlogTalkRadio format. Have a listen as I talk to some of the activists who helped take down Tom DeLay, a titan of a previous era of politics, who never quite knew what hit him in the Internet era.