PreviewCast

Hello everyone,

As you can easily tell, we have been fairly inactive on this show recently, having only three episodes in the last three months. I would like to sincerely apologize for this, but again, all of us are volunteers on this show and receive no benefits from it. Recently, we have all been dealing with a bit of apathy towards this show, and internally, we have been having a number of discussions about different possibilities for the fate of this show, along with a number of mixed emotions.

However, we have come to the conclusion that although, at the present time, it is very difficult for us to produce this show, we still enjoy having this show and being able to participate in it. However, as the majority of us are high school students, we are finding it difficult to regularly commit to the show at this time. We have also seen our show go in a number of different directions recently and we feel that we really need to find a focus for what we want this show to be about.

Therefore, today we are officially announcing that PreviewCast will be taking an extended hiatus from producing episodes for the next few weeks, possibly until the end of the year. This does not mean that we are ending this show. Although the idea has certainly been discussed by us recently, we pretty much feel that we still want to keep producing this show into the indefinite future.

When we are ready to bring the show back to life, we will be discussing making some internal changes to the format of this show so that we can handle it better and be able to truly produce a show that is both informative and entertaining for all of you, and at the same time, fun for us.

We also want to find more people to be a part of our rotating group of PreviewCasters. When Larry and I started the original series of PreviewCast in 2005, and even when we restarted the show in 2006, we had anticipated that the show would be just the two of us. It was primarily by accident that the show ended up expanding to include multiple others, until we eventually became “PreviewCast with Laurence Anderson, Douglas Bell, and Friends”, and I really think that our ability to have different mixtures of participants each episode has helped us to keep a sense of freshness and variety through the last 45 episodes, instead of the same thing every week. However, we would really like to be able to increase the number of regular PreviewCasters so that I, personally, don’t have to spend every week trying to round a few people up to be on the show, as I have had to do during recent weeks, often to no success. I am hoping that we will be able to utilize our new partnerships with the Tech Podcast Network and the Teen Podcasters Network to bring a number of new voices to the show. However, if you would be interested in being a part of this show when we make our grand return, please let either myself or Larry know.

We do hope that you don’t lose sight of us, and remind you that there’s still a lot of good stuff out there. Check out the numerous other excellent shows from our two partner networks (see above). Also, in lieu of PreviewCast coverage, check out my extensive coverage of Mac OS X Leopard, plus much more content that I am producing on my blog, Webmacster87.info, and of course also check out Larry’s infamous amacgenius.com. And, of course, why not take a look back at our 45 awesome episodes and listen through some of our archives?

Thanks for continuing to be a part of PreviewCast. Again, we invest our time and make fools of ourselves for you, the audience, and it’s primarily for that reason that we’ve been able to produce 45 episodes. It’s been an awesome road to travel. We’re taking some cool off time, but we look forward to when we’ll be able to pick ourselves back up again.

See you soon, and keep on PreviewCasting.
–Douglas Bell

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