Suggestions

[Inferno]

Excellent, I've been waiting for this sub-forum for some time now, thanks AW!

I would suggest the following things:
1) Get someone with a better upload to host the show. (The beginning of the show was slow from an upload point of view.)
2) Try to fix the connection problems. (Sometimes people drop out or the show crashes or people suddenly can't hear sound for w/e reasons, etc.)
3) Do it a bit like the Atheist Experience: Have maximum three people total on. (I believe they have two? But since DPR acts mainly like a moderator, it should be alright.)
4) If you do 3), you might want to think about bringing in special guests, as soon as the show is going properly. And I'm thinking about cdk007, ExtantDodo, myself , etc. (Maybe even PatCondell, EdwardCurrent, etc.)

Thanks for the show mate!

 

[StardustPrimate]

I think DPR should only act as a moderator. This time he had a go at almost every Q before any of the others got to answer it. He even put in the last word on many of them.

 

[Inferno]

Well DPR's answers are very valid still. However I agree that the roles of Moderator/Panel should be clearly defined.

 

[JustBusiness17]

Excellent, I've been waiting for this sub-forum for some time now, thanks AW!

Yes, thanks AW

This is less a suggestion as it is an offer. If you have any questions related to business and marketing, I'm willing to help (pro bono). I'm not sure if you're looking for or considering revenue streams, but I have a few ideas regarding the subject. Of course, that decision is entirely dependent on your vision, something I'll talk about next.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that marketing is nothing more than creative advertising (including a good percentage of the students in my program). The truth is that marketing starts by establishing a vision and works backwards in order to create a long and short term strategy for achieving that vision. As a matter of professional integrity, it would be irresponsible of me to provide any significant advice/suggestions before I understand what your long term vision is. Further to that, if you want to receive quality suggestions from the rest of your audience, it's probably worth stating that vision publicly.

My program specializes into 'Entrepreneurship' (or 'Intrapreneurship' depending on the situation) next term and I've had a long term passion for business development. I may even go further to obtain my BBA, but I can't make that decision right now. If you're serious about the show (which it seems you are) a business professional (like myself) could help you achieve your goals in a much faster time frame. I'm sure there are plenty of business and marketing professionals in your audience who could help so if you find me unappealing for whatever reason, it would definitely be worthwhile to broadcast a "help wanted" message in one of your upcoming shows (and here on the forums, naturally).

Either way, I'm easy to contact and fully support what you're doing... Even if I have an odd way of showing it

 

[AndromedasWake]

Excellent, I've been waiting for this sub-forum for some time now, thanks AW!

I would suggest the following things:
1) Get someone with a better upload to host the show. (The beginning of the show was slow from an upload point of view.)
2) Try to fix the connection problems. (Sometimes people drop out or the show crashes or people suddenly can't hear sound for w/e reasons, etc.)
3) Do it a bit like the Atheist Experience: Have maximum three people total on. (I believe they have two? But since DPR acts mainly like a moderator, it should be alright.)
4) If you do 3), you might want to think about bringing in special guests, as soon as the show is going properly. And I'm thinking about cdk007, ExtantDodo, myself , etc. (Maybe even PatCondell, EdwardCurrent, etc.)

Thanks for the show mate!

Inferno, thanks for posting your suggestions here. If you know anyone who has criticisms, please direct them here as I'm guaranteed to read them that way.

I will respond in the order you have suggested them.

1) Yesterday was rather buggy for me. It wasn't just the upload, but the actual signal coming through skype had frequent drop-outs. My laptop, which is capable enough, hijacks the skype audio stream and pipes it into BlogTV. Things improved somewhat when dpr dropped the call and Aron picked it up, so it may be that someone other than dpr has to host the call as well as the show. In all probability, Thunderf00t will be hosting both next time, because we're trying to get a video stream going as well. Going to be experimenting with that this week.
FWIW, I don't think the upload speed was the problem - my netgraph displayed throughout a usage of about 10kb/s total, including uploading my audio to the skype call, and uploading the skype call and slide-show to BlogTV.

2) This is a tricky one. Currently, we are hosting from 5 completely different locations, then inviting someone from a 6th to join. It is difficult enough to identify where the connection problems even are, since everyone's audio sometimes goes through the bitcrusher or sounds underwater for a bit. I suspect it's just the consequence of doing it the way we are (and the way we are forced to in order to get everyone involved.)
Unfortunately, we cannot all go to the same studio a la The Atheist Experience. If someone wants to pay to fly us all to the same place every fortnight we wouldn't say no though! :mrgreen:

3) This is a very good suggestion. I also believe that trying to cram in too many calls is killing off the 'discussion' aspect. We will definitely reduce the number of callers, and promote more 'one on one' disucssion between the caller and the panelist assigned to address them. For this to really work however, we NEED more creationists/theists willing to try and substantiate their claims. I really feel that the lack of creationist callers is exposing a group spinelessness myself. TruthfulChristian had the guts to call up, but the oh-so-confident NephilimFree and FranksVoice are too chicken, despite their frequent assertion that all scientists are idiots. For them, it's a win-win. If they get a fair fight, they'll beat us according to their own convictions. If they don't, they can announce themselves martyrs. On behalf of the panel, I can say that we genuinely want debate and have no intention of cutting off or censoring any creationist who brings something forward.

4) Yes! We have already thought about this and even contacted various people we would like to have on the show. We will even be reaching out to a certain squidly blogger among others. Pat Condell and Edward Current are not really community players by any measure though, so personally I wouldn't invite either of those two.

I hope this addresses your points to some degree. Once again thanks for the suggestions, and for posting them here where others can chime in too. Later today I'll begin trawling through 2.5 hours of recordings. :shock:

 

[AndromedasWake]

I think DPR should only act as a moderator. This time he had a go at almost every Q before any of the others got to answer it. He even put in the last word on many of them.

I'm working on a device which will administer an electric shock to dpr through his headphones every time he forgets his place. :mrgreen:

In all seriousness though, I agree and I think he probably does too (just got carried away). To a degree, I have no objection with him jumping in - he is possibly the most knowledgeable person on the show when it comes to stories from the bible, and of course if it ever comes to law, we'd rather he take it.

I will try to break it to him gently that we all hate listening to his ridiculous voice, and would much prefer if he'd kindly shut the cone up.

 

[TheApe81]

Once the show has the format and technical aspects sorted out it would be excellent to introduce a podcast of the show. Having an international audience makes for limited chance for many people who would like to tune in. Being from Australia I tend to be fast asleep when the show airs.

Also i agree with the general consensus of having a more defined role for the moderator. Someone who can field audience questions and then delegate them to League of Reason panel members whilst muting the incoming audio from others. Would certainly go a long way to removing the auditory clutter.

 

[Doc.]

there already are many changes you have to deal with and i don't want to add you guys more work, but anyway try to consider the following: there have been about 6-7 questions yesterday, most were about atheism and rather random/boring. questions about science however, were much more interesting and were the only ones I could memorize. if you agree, would it be possible to somehow regulate the question subjects, the first thing that came to my mind is to make people calling, to include subject of their question in the skype message they send, so afterwards the moderator could choose the most interesting ones instead of picking randomly.

 

[JustBusiness17]

I am considering cutting down the number of 'callers' and spending more '1-on-1' time with each in more of a discussion format.

How much time was spent with each caller and how much are you thinking is appropriate? If you increased it, how do you plan to allocate the extra time (hosts or caller)?

A word of caution, I watched AE after your show and monitored the chat rather closely. It seemed like the general consensus was that too much time was being spent with each caller. At one point, so many people were complaining that I posted "Everyone say: HANG UP!" and the chat room was flooded with the message.

Another thing to consider on that decision is the trend in broadcast media. There was a study done a couple years ago that examined the changing lengths of news segments over time. The average number of stories per hour had skyrocketed in the most recent years. I seem to remember them citing shorter attention spans and declining interest for in-depth reporting. I haven't found a source yet, but if you flick on your TV its pretty obvious how quickly the images flicker to keep people's attention.

The real question is, would you rather thoroughly debunk a few calls or quickly run through a variety? If you're worried about thoroughness but don't want to slow the show down too much, one option would be to address arguments relatively quickly on the show and then direct people to the forums afterwards. You could set up an individual thread for each caller so if there are any remaining questions, everyone here could clear things up.

From an atheist's standpoint, I've heard most of the arguments before so I'd rather hear a bunch of them so I can laugh at all the logical failings. I'm not sure what your demographics are but I'd assume you attract more atheists than theists. If they're anything like me, the feeling is probably fairly uniform. Thinking of it from a theist onlookers perspective, handling more callers quickly and easily could help demonstrate just how strong the atheist position is on these things, especially if you invite uncensored, open debate after the fact.

The beauty of BlogTV is that you have immediate access to your viewers which makes market research ridiculously easy to do -Especially if you use the 'poll' function in the chat room. A quick survey could help you collect information directly from the people that matter while simultaneously increasing audience participation. You could even ask the chat room how to proceed in real time during the show. Whatever you choose to do, keep in mind that the stream of text rolling through the chat is a goldmine if you know how to dig. I noticed Whitney poking around the chat but he didn't really get very involved. I would personally put someone in charge of manning the chat room, interacting with people and directing conversations. You could even rotate the hosts on this duty so that everyone gets a little access to each of the youtube celebs. If its possible, keep digital records as well because you might want to mine it for data at some future date.

 

[JustBusiness17]

3) Do it a bit like the Atheist Experience: Have maximum three people total on. (I believe they have two? But since DPR acts

3) This is a very good suggestion. I also believe that trying to cram in too many calls is killing off the 'discussion' aspect. We will definitely reduce the number of callers, and promote more 'one on one' disucssion between the caller and the panelist assigned to address them. For this to really work however, we NEED more creationists/theists willing to try and substantiate their claims. I really feel that the lack of creationist callers is exposing a group spinelessness myself. TruthfulChristian had the guts to call up, but the oh-so-confident NephilimFree and FranksVoice are too chicken, despite their frequent assertion that all scientists are idiots. For them, it's a win-win. If they get a fair fight, they'll beat us according to their own convictions. If they don't, they can announce themselves martyrs. On behalf of the panel, I can say that we genuinely want debate and have no intention of cutting off or censoring any creationist who brings something forward.

Sorry, I didn't see this before posting. I thought there would be all sorts of people wanting to take you guys on

The one thing I would caution is not to become too much like the Atheist Experience. If you can differentiate and find a niche that they aren't filling, its better for the both of you.

 

[UltimateYEC]

3)For this to really work however, we NEED more creationists/theists willing to try and substantiate their claims. I really feel that the lack of creationist callers is exposing a group spinelessness myself.

How can you say this will I sent 5 messages trying to get on the show and you didn't feature a single Christian caller when I was right there waiting for you the whole time.

And you are trying to call me spineless. No wonder Nephilim Free called you guys Chickens and didn't bother wasting his time with you last night.

 

[australopithecus]

And you are trying to call me spineless. No wonder Nephilim Free called you guys Chickens and didn't bother wasting his time with you last night.

It's kind of redundant calling someone else a chicken if you're the one who refuses to show up. Neph has had 2 oppotunities to debate. Once with DonExodus and once last night with Tf00t and the rest of the LoR panel. He chose not to, therefore he was the one who chickened out. Thougn I imagine that's because he knows he wouldn't last 5 minutes in a debate where he has zero room to edit the outcome to suit his needs.

I saw you in the BlogTV chat, my conclusion remains the same, you're a troll, a bad one and quite probably a Worldquest sockpuppet.

 

[australopithecus]

The only suggestion I can think of (because otherwise I felt the show was awesome) is that personally, as well as the Q&A perhaps time set aside to announce interesting news in the general science area with each host contributing news in his field. I try to keep up with science news but sometimes I miss things and sometimes I need stuff spelled out and explained

 

[UltimateYEC]

And you are trying to call me spineless. No wonder Nephilim Free called you guys Chickens and didn't bother wasting his time with you last night.

It's kind of redundant calling someone else a chicken if you're the one who refuses to show up. Neph has had 2 oppotunities to debate. Once with DonExodus and once last night with Tf00t and the rest of the LoR panel. He chose not to, therefore he was the one who chickened out. Thougn I imagine that's because he knows he wouldn't last 5 minutes in a debate where he has zero room to edit the outcome to suit his needs.

I saw you in the BlogTV chat, my conclusion remains the same, you're a troll, a bad one and quite probably a Worldquest sockpuppet.

Why's it redundant to call someone a Chicken when they publicly challenge Christians to show up and then don't allow them to appear on the show when they call in? Since you saw me there it proves that I am telling the truth.

 

[australopithecus]

Why's it redundant to call someone a Chicken when they publicly challenge Christians to show up and then don't allow them to appear on the show when they call in?

Mostly because everyone was told before hand that if you call them, then you wouldn't be answered. That went for everyone. You want to ask a question then make sure you get it ready before the show, not during. The rules apply to everyone.

Since you saw me there it proves that I am telling the truth.

If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit.....

Just because you were in BlogTV chat doesn't mean you are telling the truth, less so seeing as the questions were being asked over Skype and not BlogTV. I couldn't care less how many times you asked, the rules were made clear well in advance of the show, if you couldn't understand that then how do you expect to last if you actually had got through?

 

[nasher168]

We will even be reaching out to a certain squidly blogger among others.

Oooh! I like.

Why's it redundant to call someone a Chicken when they publicly challenge Christians to show up and then don't allow them to appear on the show when they call in? Since you saw me there it proves that I am telling the truth.

My understanding is this: when people sent messages asking to come on, they were acknowledged and put into a queue by dprjones. They were then called when the panel were ready for them. If the queue was filled up, you of course couldn't come on because they would have had to change the queue and remove people from it to accommodate you, and that wouldn't really be fair and would mess around those others.

Do this right now:
-Go on skype.
-Add LeagueOfReason as a contact. Say who you are, what your position is and that you would like to come on the show next time.
-Make sure you are online when the show is on again in two weeks.

Not guaranteed of course, but that might improve your chances of getting on. If I understand correctly, FranksVoice (AKA FrankDMCA) is going to be on the next show.
I highly doubt anyone on the panel has any intention of fleeing from an argument, indeed I think they would relish it. Unlike a certain giant-headphone-wearing creationist we all know.

 

[No1Mensan]

Guys, this individual thinks that the Earth is flat, Noah's Flood was caused by a tidal bulge created by Pangea and thinks that scientists believe that Dinosaurs had bones made from limestone, so I's be amazed if he can figure out how to use Skype.

 

[australopithecus]

thinks that scientists believe that Dinosaurs had bones made from limestone

Just when you think you've heard everything....

 

[No1Mensan]

thinks that scientists believe that Dinosaurs had bones made from limestone

Just when you think you've heard everything....

This Guy's been trolling me on Youtube for the last couple of months, and he's been spitting his dummy out over my Bible on Trial series.

 

[Inferno]

AW, I feel honored that you would reply to me.

I would agree that you shouldn't try to be too much like TAE, find your niche. However they do have experience at what they're doing so (@ JustBusiness17) I'd suggest they steal their technical part but with the content/callers/panel/etc. they (LoR) find their own way.

Also, IF you get "only" three people on the panel (including moderator) then I think the time per caller will increase while at the same time you'll get through more callers.

I'd also suggest that you create a whole new E-Mail address or something of that sort and accept questions beforehand so that you can decide who you take on the show without things getting too problematic. (That way you wouldn't have the problem that UltimateYEC raises: That some creationist/theist comments get lost in all of the comments and/or that people can't figure out how to send you questions on skype.
You may also think about (for people who have no microphones) to respond to some E-Mail questions directly.

And with blogger: Do you mean PZ? *drool*

Doc also raises an interesting suggestion I think: Include some news/discovery/information from your field of science in the beginning of the show. (Roughly 5min per person) This is something the "Skeptics Guide to the Universe" does, but they don't have people calling in. So basically you'd be in between TAE and SGttU.

About TheApe81's problem with the time zones: You might want to
1) Record the whole show? Is that possible? I know that podcasts were suggested and SGttU is about as long as your show but the podcast is only 27MB or so.
2) Set up one American show and one European/Asian/Australian/African show. One set at 3pm US time (same as now) and one at 3pm Greenwich time. That will give people from Asia and Australia the chance to call in. (Obviously you'd have to find a different panel for that, which would help you with cutting down on people.) And then you could have a big(ger) show every month. <-- This would probably divide the panel a bit, set up competition and be more to handle but I think the pros outweigh the cons.

I'd also like to get back to JustBusiness17's point: What do you want to achieve with this show? In the opening of the first one you have all agreed that you wouldn't be able to "convert" the die-hard YEC's and Theists like Neph but that you are targeting the "sheep".
However, TAE already deals with Theists a lot and IMO is very good at the whole Bible debunking stuff but you guys are scientists, I think you really shouldn't deal with stuff like:
"Which verses of the Bible say this and that" or whatever
but you should rather be focusing on stuff like:
"The Ark was X meters long and Y meters wide and Z meters high, would all the animals fit on it" or "How exactly do we know carbon dating is real" or "How will we be able to find the Higgs Boson" and whatnot.
But then again it really depends on your goals with this show.

To UltimateYEC: Like I have mentioned, the guys on the show are probably getting a lot of messages and the sheer mass makes it impossible to read them all.
Therefore: Make it possible to see directly (without having to read the question) if the question is theist/YEC or not, so you can open/look at those instead of combing through all of them.

Done.