Well really a lot of new things. I have not been keeping up with this blog lately, but I am going to work on getting better at that, and honestly I have not had a lot to talk about in the last few months. Now I am ready to talk, and talk I will.
If you have been paying attention at all there have been a number of new things going on with Great Hites. We have have started a discussion forum so everyone can talk about what they think of the stories. There you can talk about how you like the stories but don't like the host or how GH is falling further and Further behind in getting the actual podcasts out. I am really working on that one and I will address it a little later in this post. the next new thing is that I have joined this century and joined face book. I don't share lots of gory details about my life on my page, so if you want to friend me, mostly what you will get are updates about what is going on with Great Hites. There is also a Great Hites Fan page that will only have things that pertain to Great Hites if you don't want the occasional thing that I put on Facebook that are about me and not the podcast.
There are a couple of other things that have been going on, you have may or may not have noticed depending on if you listen to the show of read it, we have had a number of guest hosts. I am going to try to keep that going. I would like to have a guest host say once every couple of months. This is less of a break for me, and more of a way to keep other people interested in the show and maybe bring in some new blood. This month's guest host is the lovely and talented Philippa Ballantine. I want to say thank you to both Arlene Radasky and Philip (Norval Joe) Carroll who have also guest hosted recently, helping me while I was traveling. Also more on that later.
Some really new things, as in thing that I have done today, have been going on. First, in the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of talk about the value of free. This is really in reference to giving your work away for free. All I am going to say about this topic right now is that there is a lot to talk about it out there and I don't need to rehash what people have said. Well Maybe I will but not in this post. One of the things that I thought about when this topic came up was should we (GreatHites) be paying some of the writers. I talked about this with the secret council, and the answer I got back was really, "no." No? I said and then I listened to their arguments and they were right. They echoed my fears about where would the money come from and how would we keep it up if the donation dried up, and last of course was that in the beginning at least, the most likely people to give would be the authors and then why not let them just keep their money. So in the end I scraped the idea of excepting donations. However, GreatHites has started giving one book away a month and we will have that expense, and as much as I would like to say that I can pay for that all out of my pocket, I can't always. So I found a compromise. If you look on the site (any of the sites really) you will see a little ad for a thing called swag bucks. If you follow the ad and sign up and then use thier search engine a few times you can earn points. The points you earn can be used to get things like gift cards and prizes FOR YOU. The benefit for GH is that since you clicked on the link from our site we also get the points that you earn and it allows us to buy prizes in the form of Amazon or iTunes gift cards or even Books. Really it works out for everyone and I don't have to be an accountant to keep track of who gave what. That works better for me.
The last thing that is new is the Great Hites voicemail line. I have set up a voice mail line using Google voice. The number is 585-205-UNIX (8649). So if you have thoughts or comments or questions just pick up the phone and give us a call. I can use the recording or the text (because Google is so cool and transcribes the audio for me) as feedback. So yeah another way to leave more feedback for GreatHites.
Alright, so there is a lot going on in this post, and I promised more things but I think I will save some of those for the next post, which will be coming soon. There will be some more new things going on. There are going to be some changes, and hopefully these will all be good things in the end. Thanks To everyone for sticking with me for the last few months while things have been so crazy.
-Jeff
