For the first two years of their excellent Internet adventure, Rob and Dana Greenlee, co-founders of Loudvox, an Internet radio and audio production company, were on a regular weekend regimen.
It started around 8:00am every Saturday with putting on the coffee and adding the finishing touches to a radio show script. 10am: Drive over to KLAY, a small Tacoma business radio station, which served as the local on-air host and studio mixing console for the local broadcast. 11am: Put on headphones and cue the engineer to roll the upbeat musical intro to WebTalkGuys, a weekly radio program presenting the personalities, predicaments and predilections of the Internet world. 11:15 a.m: Welcome the show’s special guest. In over 150 interview segments to date, the WebTalkGuys (and WebGal Dana), have spoken with leaders from Netco’s all over the map, from companies like Microsoft, Real Networks, InfoSpace, Pogo.com, and Amazon.com, to Fox TV’s Lone Gunmen (Langley and Byers) and characters like Roger Rabbit (in the voice of Charles Fleischer), and ex-Amazoner Mike Daisy, playing himself.
Of course, the size of the local South Sound listening audience paled in comparison to those who listened to the show over the Internet, either the Web version streamed over the TechTalk Network or on clickable demand at www.WebTalkGuys.com. In fact, since Nov. 1, 2000, the WebTalkGuys show has streamed about 330 Gigabytes of media, (the average stream is about 6Mb) which translates to over 37,000 hours of downloading by the listening public. In one of the Internet’s most fascinating phenomenon, the biggest day in streaming for all media was Sept 11th, 2001.
After leaving KLAY, Loudvox started burning the show on CD inside its own studio. The show is encoded in both streaming RealMedia and Windows Media for download.
Beginning next week, WebTalkGuys will go prime time as a newly featured program on the CNET Radio Network http://www.cnetradio.com. On December 22nd at exactly 10a.m. PST (Saturday) and on Sunday at 7pm PST, the show will be simultaneously broadcast on CNET’s flagship radio station in San Francisco/San Jose (910 AM) and in Boston (890 AM) as well as over the Web. The programs will also be transmitted by the XM Satellite Radio Network Channel (130) on http://www.xmradio.com
WebTalkGuys is produced by Loudvox, a Tacoma company which was an early producer of Real Estate Radio, Cycle Radio on KLAY, and the Inform Harry radio show on 100.7 The Buzz. Two of the original backers of Loudvox were Scott Bourne, one of the two guys who started NetRadio and Mitch Radcliffe, a former anchor for the On24.com multimedia Investor network and Ziff-Davis editor.
Rob Greenlee, the show’s founder and co-host, knows his way around the Internet. His years of extensive experience include consulting for companies (in their heyday) such as ShopperBox Networks, FreeInternet.com, LoanTek, and PayByCheck. Prior to Internet life, he was a consumer products marketer for several fortune 500 companies such as Chiquita Brands, Conagra and worked with the Florida Citrus Industry promoting and marketing Florida Citrus products such Tropicana, Minute Maid and Fresh Florida Citrus. He is also a Guinness Book of World Records Holder, for building the World’s Largest Glass of Orange Juice! A life long resident of the state of Washington, Rob has been working on the web since 1996, when he built the first Florida Citrus Industry web site for the Florida Department of Citrus at www.floridajuice.com.
While the Internet radio industry is still in relative infancy, Rob sees the medium as one that is just finding its position in the communications mix. He observes that ‘on-demand’ net radio programming is actually better than live because “you’re playing to peoples’ convenience.” “I think what you’re going to see is everything shifting over to on-demand media,” says Greenlee. “With streaming [on-demand] media, common wisdom tells you to keep it less than five minutes long, but if they feel they are listening to a radio broadcast, even on the Net, people have a different attitude, and they’ll listen to the same thing for its entirety, up to an hour or more. How you position the content on the site really affects what the listener does with that content,” surmises Greenlee.
Photo (above): WebTalkGuy, Rob, and Web girl, Dana, Greenlee in the studio.
