randulo’s unblog

I've been into Kiva in a big way for over two years. In the heady days
when Talkshoe.com paid podcast hosts, I put all the funds gained into
Kiva. Today I've funded over 200 loans. I've given away a lot of
certificates and I'm pleased that young children are discovering with
their parents how we can help others in the world to help themselves.
 
Occasionally, I get a comment in a blog post that we should be focusing
on our own country's poor. I don't agree, nor do I see Kiva as "helping
the poor". One of the most beautiful aspects of Kiva is that each loan
helps a business grow, which in turn usually will help a lot of people
including the beneficiary of the loan, possible employees but especially
the family they are supporting and their entire community. I don't see
this as a possible result in the United States for various reasons
including the relative size of such communities.
 
Kiva generally works best with groups of people: 8 women who know how to
sew, for example. These women generally promise each other to be
responsible and pay back the loan, in effect vouching for each other.
Again, I don't see this happening in a big way in the USA. Last time I
looked at the microlending site Prosper.com - which is currently closed
waiting for SEC approval - many of the loan requests were frivolous, a
new TV compared to a new cow on Kiva. Because we have the choice of who
we lend money to, I'd choose the farmer or the ladies selling their
sewing skills and I'm happy to get as interest the potential goodwill
or, if nothing else, the knowledge that I've made a small difference.
Kiva's slogan is no exaggeration:
 
Loans that Change Lives
 

 
Now back to my erratic memories.

I love doing live conferences. The ones I do are available as podcasts
through Talkshoe and can be downloaded, but I prefer the live part.
Plus, because I know they can be downloaded, I tend to want to edit
them to sound a little less idiotic. Fortunately, I'm also very lazy,
so I rarely edit unless something happens that needs to be rearranged.
Last week, Tom Cannavan got cut off for a bit and I did edit and
reorder things, removing the wait for him to call back.
 
Two years ago, Talkshoe CEO Dave Nelsen worked with me on producing
the first live 24 hour Kivathon, which was a terrific success,
bringing a lot of awareness to what was then not very well-known.
Since that time, Kiva has become so successful, you literally have to
wait in line to loan! Oprah and Bill Clinton's book are largely to
thank for that. Dave and I both very much enjoyed the fact that we
were able to have fun and pay back some of the amazing and wonderful
things the Internet has brought us.
 
Anyway, talking with a few friends about the whole Talkshoe thing made
me go take a look at the statistics for the conferences and I was a
little surprised to see that for the New Wine Consumer, which has few
live participants, the average download number for a particular
session is around 800. This is a small number compared to popular tech
casts like TWIT, where at least 200,000 people are hearing it each week. On
the other hand, those 800 unique IP downloads measured by Talkshoe are
people who actually listen to the recordings. We know that to be
motivated enough to click on listen or download, people are interested
in the subject on some level, whether professional or amateur.
Remember, those page views you see for your blog have plenty of chaff
with the wheat, lots of robots, lots of people wandered there by
accident but are not interested, lots of everything but your target
audience.
 
For the VoIP Users Conference (running 2 years since March 2007) we
have a highly focused group with an average of 30 live callers each
week. When we had Asterisk creator Mark Spencer on and simulcast in
video, we had about 100 live. I also did a live session with Chris
Brogan for his Grasshoppers initiative and there too we had over 100
people. The conference has not one but several sponsors.
 
Advertisers haven't come around in droves yet to understand the
podcast paradigm, although Leo Laporte has more than proven its value.
When a site is mentioned live on TWIT, it usually brings down the
server almost immediately.
 
I think we are still waiting for the easy way to join the
conversation. Twitter proves that "if you build it easy, they will
come". I am trying various methods to allow Skype with its millions of
users to call in to our conferences. One of these days I will find a
way to make this work reliably. If, in the meantime the applications
for iPhone etc begin to work well, things like Gizmo5 and iPhone Skype
app, the whole thing may be an enabler. If and when this happens, I
will be looking for communities to help make use of this technology
and I have the experience and ideas to make it work, I hope.

Incidentally, speaking of Gizmo and Skype, Michael Robertson is our guest
this Friday to talk about Gizmo5 and OpenSky.

I discovered and joined Talkshoe in late 2006 along with Twitter and many other new web sites. While I was on a web site spree, I discovered http://Kiva.org, which is more important to me than most. Kiva is a subject I can go on and on about so I happened on the idea to do what I believe was the first 24-hour live podcast, called the 'Kivathon'.
 
One of the great things about many companies on today's web is how easy it is to contact them. (The notable exception is Ebay, who has the absolute worst contact system ever devised.) I emailed Talkshoe's CEO, Dave Nelson on a Saturday morning and he answered saying I should call him right then on his cell. Dave was on board immediately with the idea of a 24-hour live Talkshoe for Kiva and we set the date as March 18th, 2007. I believe the name 'KivaThon' was his idea. We then recruited enough hosts so each would take about one hour around the clock. Chris Brogan gave us a push from his corner: http://tr.im/kivacb and I was able to get some high Google visibility in press releases, etc. Most of the hosts blogged about it.
 
 
One small incident marred things for a few minutes when some MLM jerk went into a long infomercial about his show. A quick mention would have been fine, but this went on to the extent that we had to cut him off and take control away from him. If you're doing a podcast for a cause, the cause is the main subject, not self-promo.
 
The whole effort went very well and a lot of people, including myself, learned about how Kiva was started. We interviewed some people from Kiva, notably founder Matt Flannery (his Kiva blog: http://tr.im/30b3). Awareness was raised and a lot of us put more money in. Talkshoe also invested in the fund. At that time, Talkshoe was revenue sharing, and all funds from all of my Talkshoe activities went into my Kiva account. As of May 2008, that was suspended, but I've continued to add funds when I can, and spread the word.
 
Awareness of Kiva.org got two big bumps later that year: a mention in Bill Clinton's book and the biggie, Oprah. Oprah's reach is like about 10 Twitter memberships so when that happened we started seeing the situation as it is today. There are currently times when loan requests are not available at all. Follow 'microactions' on Twitter to get alerts on available loans, mostly Kiva but apparently they do other things as well.
 
I know that all of us who participated in the event are proud to have been a part of it. Nothing is more gratifying than paying forward some of the benefits of the new connectivity.