As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I’ve done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I’m rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn’t able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I’m definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain some of my worst impulses to fidget, and kept me from moving out of the frame too much. It did restrict my ability to talk with my hands, though.
Of course, talking with my hands wouldn’t be all the beneficial, given that you can’t actually see the other person. This makes the whole experience a little surreal– I’m taping my half of a telephone conversation with a webcam, and I see video of myself on the screen, but I have no idea what Jennifer is doing. She can’t see me gesticulating, either. The individual video files are then stitched together by the folks at Bloggingheads.
I think this went reasonably well, given that I’m new to the form. We hit a pretty wide range of topics, though sadly, the big planet-imaging results didn’t hit my RSS feeds until after the taping. That would’ve given us something much more topical to talk about.
Anyway, it was fun. I hope it came off well enough for them to invite me back.
Its weird isnt it? Like having a conversation with a mirror 😛
I kept interrupting PZ when we did this cause I couldnt see him ‘about’ to talk, and I was just using my iPod earbuds (we did Skype, much better than cell/land lines!).
I advertised this entry, and your blog, on Steve’s blog. You only owe me 20% of your profits over the next year.
Seemed to go pretty well, despite the sound problems.
And yeah, it might have been better to have a few big items to talk about decided beforehand (aside from the book, of course) — but then on the other hand the John & George duo have their conversations which seem to be made up entirely of tangents, so perhaps that’s just me.
It is nice to see some variation over there anyway, and I’m looking forward to the next time.
So far i never used this kind of communication. I think this is comfortable form of the contact with someone. I would like to taste this.