Tim Keller

It was August 2005 and I bunch of us had gathered on someone’s Relto in Until Uru. The topic of the night was how we should go about starting a podcast for the Myst/Uru Community. Back then, the idea of a podcast was a little more foreign than today, and plenty of time was spent arguing about what the hand-crafted RSS feed should contain.

Fast forward almost 5 years and The Cavern Today, spurred on by the return of Myst:Online Uru Live (again), has decided to “reboot” and start at Episode #1 again after months of non-production. Have a listen to our latest episode entitled, Something Old, Something New.

My role since the beginning has been to looking after the servers, forum software, and website. this February, I began a major redesign of the website using Wordpress.

Initially, I was sceptical of Wordpress’ applicability to podcasting, but I was soon proven wrong. With the addition of a couple of simple plugins and a good theme, Wordpress can be a podcasting powerhouse!

A couple of tips for using Wordpress to podcast:

• Create and use categories from the beginning. In this way you’ll be able to publish multiple feeds, and therefore, multiple shows.
• Choose/Build a simple theme which shows off your content, gives the visitor easy access to an MP3 download, and offers an iTunes Subscribe button.
• Get a plugin to take away the audio-file management headaches. We use Blubrry PowerPress.
• Choose one of the many Twitter plugins for Wordpress to auto-tweet when you publish a new episode.
• Allow comments! The whole point of podcasting is to build and serve a community. Allowing comments means instant two-way communication with your community.

Happy podcasting!

Its a fairly old article, but I found it on IGN.com and thought it interesting how verbal Rand was on how Ubisoft ditched Cyan without even giving them a chance to success… or fail for that matter.

IGNPC:How have you handled the transition from the cancellation of the project to its resurrection under GameTap?

Rand Miller: We poured everything we had into Uru back in the day. We worked on Riven and consulted on other projects but our main focus was Uru. We were convinced that providing content on a regular basis would keep people coming back. It took a lot of time and money to make that happen. We didn’t have enough to do it by ourselves so we had to hook up with somebody bigger.

So we partnered. Whenever you partner, there are risks. Companies’ directions change. We ran up against one of those. At one point there was a great partnership and then just prior to our launch, directions changed and things fell apart. Failure doesn’t crush us. It’s not getting a chance to fail that demoralizes you. If you’ve got a great idea and you get it out there and it doesn’t fly, you gain some insight from that and can move on. It helps a lot of people including yourself. But when you don’t even get a chance to launch, that’s tough, especially when you’re so close. 40,000 people signed up for beta and we’re ready to go and we don’t take a dime from anyone. That just hurts.

It’s not what you know; it’s who you know. We had a relationship with Turner for years. Never did anything with them but there were people we knew there. Oddly enough, the failure of Uru and the launch of GameTap by Turner seemed like an interesting combination. Talks began. They started getting smaller games and began toying with the idea of doing something larger and more exclusive. We fit into that very nicely, filling holes in both the MMO category, the exclusive category and the episodic category. It seems like a perfect match.

[Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/747/747605p3.html]

Click the image to listen to our latest podcast! I think its one of our best!

It is indeed a wonderful to be an Uru fan, well wonderful week! Sorry for the delay in blogging! I’ve been here and there and kinda busy everywhere. *ahem* Yes… Uru:

I think Cyan World’s CEO Ryan Millar sums it up in his press release:

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