Thank you for the feedback — good and bad
Posted by ChefTD on Dec 13, 2004
Just wanted to take a minute and say thank you to the folks who have responded to our most recent show and in particular to the negative comment left at Podcast Alley. If you have listened to our show and haven’t yet rated the show, then please do so at your earliest convenience.
One listener to the show, Joe, commented that he felt we “kinda dwelled” on the one negative comment. Joe, if you’re reading, then you are absolutely correct, we did dwell on it. I put a link up here for Jowl to see it and I know by his response that it really bothered him. That’s life being a webmaster as a hobby and profession. Some people just aren’t going to like what we are doing. This website and the radio show is sort of a perpetual work in progress.
Actually, I think the one negative comment we’ve received to date (and I’m sure we’ll have more as time goes on) was a positive thing (and that’s why we spent more time on it, Joe). Will we do this for every negative comment we receive? Nope. The first one is special, just like the first positive comment is special and therefore, IMO, this warrants more detailed discussion. We spent time talking about podcat so we should similarly identify Sam’s comment just to balance things out.
You see, we aren’t just trying to cover the technical, behind-the-scenes stuff in building a website, we’re also trying to explore the community and mental aspect of doing the website work. This is one area I’m worried about with Jowl because while he has demonstrated the technical skill and knowledge pretty good to date, he is definitely having difficulty with the motivation to do the work to build the site on his own.
Jowl clearly had his feelings hurt and I’m sure that’s something every webmaster goes through at one time or another (I’d be lying if I said this never happened to me in the past) and it can have a negative impact on a webmaster’s motivation: that the stuff we spend our time (spare time in Jowl’s case) building and working on will be shot down in flames by a relative stranger online. It’s all part of becoming a good webmaster (cooking a good webmaster stew), developing a harder shell against the things which get in the way of continuing to work on your website.
What’s sort of ironic to me, and I’m pretty sure that I mentioned this on the show, is that Sam thought we are actually trying to be some sort of comedy team.
Webmaster Cookbook is primarily a serious show, and though we may cut things up once in awhile in order to break through some of the serious info (I’ll tease Jowl in a friendly, fatherly, loving way), the overall format of the program is meant to be just like a cooking show with a clear cut purpose for each show — and it’s real, not rehearsed or even planned beyond my writing the menu for each show. Jowl often doesn’t even see the menu before he comes into our “studio” for each show.
That’s one of my concerns actually, is that Jowl doesn’t get more involved with the show each week prior to the show (and I’ve mentioned this concern on air to him several times). So what comes out is really what happens on the day of the show live. This spontaneity could be viewed as “amateurish” by some, I suppose, but I mean it when I say that this is about the most real reality show you’ll ever hear.
For those who listened to our last show they heard about how we’re going to be including in some future shows bonus secret prizes for listeners of both the live show and the recorded show (details can be heard in show #19). And this is open to every listener: the people who love the show or hate the show or haven’t made up their minds about the show.
Thank you for listening!