In total around 120 people attended the three webcasts and around 60 questions were asked. In addition I know that quite a few people shared PCs, so I’m quite pleased.

I said that I’d document the questions and answers as FAQs and I’ve just finished putting them into HTML. That was pretty tedious, I tell you.

Next step is to make the blog look a bit less vanilla and to put the FAQs up on it.

And Stew and Colin.

Phew. I needed a beer after today.

Some of you will say I told you so, but hosting a live video and audio webcast is not very easy or stress-free. At least not the first two times.

Stew acted as Producer and Colin did the QA. I also need to thank Stew for the loan of his Sony Eyetoy and headset. I’ll post about the Eyetoy later, maybe.

Around 40 people attended the first webcast from places as diverse as New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vienna, Frankfurt, Brussels and, of course, London. It went reasonably well with loads of questions being asked online (and answered adequately, I hope). The thing that we learned from this webcast was that we needed the phone conference facility as backup because the audio droppped several times.

For the second webcast, therefore, we asked people to dial in to the audio conference and put the details up in the Breeze meeting. Around 60 people attended the meeting (including family!) and it went more smoothly than the morning one. The only snag was that the recording of the meeting didn’t have any sound.

Two down one to go!

Ok. I’ve finished most of the stuff I can do beforehand. The presentation (with my commentary) is up in a standalone form as well as in a Breeze meeting just in case.

The last thing that I needed to do was to put in place an audio-only alternative. I thought long and hard about whether or not to do this (I’d really like to force people to listen via their PC only) and in the end decided that it would come in really handy if something with Breeze broke.

“Breeze break?” I hear you ask. Well, yes. There have been a couple of times when the server has disappeared and so a contingency plan is needed.

I plumped for Premiere Global. The neat trick with them is that they integrate with Breeze so that the audio is pumped from Breeze into the phone bridge and phone attendees show up in Breeze as attendees. Very neat, in fact.

That said, it nearly wasn’t very neat. If it wasn’t for Barb Tomines in Colorado who took my details over the phone so that my UK credit card could be used to activate what is a US phone conference facility I might have been stuck.

I don’t get why seemingly online businesses put silly barriers in place like preventing you from using non-US credit cards and pointing you at a EU-based sister service instead. Especially when they all go home at 18:00.

Sounds like it could be a product…

I heard back from Adobe and they’re a bit confused.

Although I have an option on my Breeze account to upgrade from a trial to a pay as you go, our account manager said that this option was only available to US customers and that I would have to pay a per month fee of around £300! She did offer to extend the trial limit to allow 25 attendees, but I’m kinda hoping that that won’t be enough. Just before she dashed into a meeting she offred to host the meeting for me on her account, but then remembered that she wouldn’t be available on Wednesday to do so.

Never mind. Without another viable option for a live webcast, I decided to see if I could get a pay as you go account set up. Bingo! That was easy to do.

One of the neat features of Breeze (it has lots of neat features) is that you can upload a Powerpoint presentation along with audio commentary recorded using a Breeze plug-in for Powerpoint. This presentation can then be saved to a Breeze server or (so I can keep it longer than the Breeze account) locally.

I’m planning on using Adobe’s Breeze (formerly Macromedia’s Breeze) to produce the webcasts and it isn’t turning out to be such a breeze.

We use Adobe’s ColdFusion for our website development and rather efficiently I got an e-mail back from our account manager asking if I needed any more info about Breeze when I set up a 30 day trial account. That was about as efficient as she got, though.

Breeze uses Flash (which is apparantly installed on 98% of desktops) to display video and graphics delivered from a server after having been uploaded in (near) real time from a desktop. It’s a neat concept and it seems to work pretty well for small groups.

Now all I need is a call back from our account manager to be able to try it out for real with more than the five attendees that the trial allows.

This is the first post in the blog that will follow progress on Project Red Stripe.

This week I’ll be hosting three webcasts (one was added on Friday 22nd September so that newspaper editorial people could watch without it getting in the way of their publishing schedules).

These will be on Wednesday 20th September at 08:00 UTC and 16:00 and on Friday 22nd September at 13:00 UTC. Login information etc. is here.