This season's 361 Podcast: Blandford's going to love it

Have you been following the 361 Podcast at all? I know I’ve been banging on about it now and again here on the blog so regular readers will have a limited awareness I’m sure.

This is the podcast that myself, Rafe Blandford and Ben Smith setup ages ago. Rafe is the world famous Nokia blogger. Or more accurately, the blogster-in-chief covering Symbian. His All About Symbian (and All About Windows Phone) websites pull in millions of readers every month. Ben is the blogger-in-a-suit who founded Wireless Worker and who, when he’s not managing the purchase and installation of hundreds of millions of telecoms technology, is a real mobile geek. 

We got together to record our perspective on the mobile world and the culture around it — and we’ve done it nicely, if we do say so ourselves. Well, it’s actually down to Ben’s fastidiousness with sound quality. He really does go nuts if you touch your microphone during recording. And we put in quite a bit of effort to try and keep each episode on time and relevant.

We’re now in our 11th Season — which is quite unbelievable for me. It seems like only yesterday we were standing on the beach in Cannes on the French Riviera talking about the possibilities of Nokia and BlackBerry — with the upstart Apple and Google still at risk of being nailed by a resurgent existing player. That obviously never happened, but it’s been fascinating to listen to what we were saying and how we felt at that point. 

Anyway the first episode goes live tonight. And we’re changing things up a bit: We’ve add a support feature. You can now opt to show your support for the podcast using our Patreon listing. The default option is $1 per episode. You can start and stop at any time and there’s zero commitment. We pay for the whole production ourselves and the podcast will always remain free of charge. However the opportunity to invite listeners to help contribute to our costs is particularly exciting.
It’s exciting not because we’re looking for megabucks. No. We’re fine. The very small #firstworld issue we’ve got is based on the fact we already pay the costs. It’s quite difficult to justify doing slightly more exciting things — not least to significant others wondering why we’re bothing using up our evenings and weeekends to record and produce the episodes. 

For example we’ve been discussing taking Blandford to Helsinki for a day to get him to re-live the good old days with Nokia. I like the idea of getting a tour around some of the factories, offices and event spaces that hosted some of the big Nokia launches. Perhaps maybe a few interviews with some old Nokia executives? Maybe even a current one? Who knows. Arranging and recording abroad or doing an excursion like this is quite a commitment for us. So it would be particularly exciting to have a little bit more resource to play with.

So a full season of 361 Episodes — approximately 10 episodes plus a bonus — would represent $10 support. 

What could we do encourage listeners to think about participating? 

We had an idea.

In the last season we were talking about Urban Massage, a mobile app that lets you book masseur(s) to come to your home, office and hotel. Really smart. We thought it would be quite cool if we did this ‘live’ during a recording and got a therapist to come to the studio and give Blandford a treatment. 

The discomfort and horror on his face was a true picture. He objected in the strongest possible terms. That was last season. 

This season — as you’ll hear in the first episode — Rafe looked on in sheer panic as we brought up this topic as a reason to help support the Podcast.

So there you have it. Blandford will get a massage ‘live’ during one of the episodes if we hit a $100/episode target.

I think he’ll find it quite difficult to object if the listeners have voted with their dollars. What do you reckon? 😉

Find out more on our Patreon listing here: patreon.com/361podcast.

You can subscribe to the 361 Podcast easily — search for us in almost any Podcast-compatible app, or listen online via the website at www.361podcast.com.