Some of these radio appearances involved getting up around 5am (which, for the record is hours before noon, a time I consider far more suited to coherent conversation). Virtually all of them were about an article I'd written in FrontLine Security Magazine called "The Dark Side of Social Networking". It's a worthy read and it got a lot of on-air media attention.

Back in the mid-1990s, I'd done a bunch of radio after my book, The Flexible Enterprise came out. But then I stayed off the air for probably 13 or 14 years. I was definitely rusty. But when Where Have All The Emails Gone? came out at the end of 2007, it became clear I'd have to dust off the pipes and get ready for some more on-air time.

The thing is, while doing radio is fun, it also requires some degree of skill. And that skill requires practice. The more radio you do, the better you'll be at it. And the better you are at it, the more often you'll be asked back by hosts and the more radio you'll do.

So, while one way to get good at it is to simply do more shows, there's another way that can provide an enormous benefit (if you can handle listening to yourself). That's using the i-Sound Pro recorder (great product) from AbyssMedia (terrible name).

Here's what I do. Most radio stations webcast their programs as well as broadcast them over the air. But most don't offer the ability to download the broadcasts after they've played. If, like me, you tend to do radio all across the country, there's no way to record the broadcasts off the air. But you can record them off the Web.

And that's where the i-Sound program, shown in Figure A, comes in.

FIGURE A


Use i-Sound to record Web radio. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The i-Sound program records pretty much any streaming audio that your computer can play. I have a computer set up in the ZATZ lab that has iSound on it. Before each program, I go into the lab and launch Internet Explorer. I specifically use IE for this because many on-air radio stations have really terrible Web sites and while they stream audio, they do so with some of the nastiest plug-ins you might imagine (almost all of which like IE and stall intermittently in Firefox).