Talking Walking has been marking its tenth anniversary this year.  We have had the delight of reconnecting with several of the walkers we interviewed over the last decade, learning about what they’ve been doing and where they have been walking.  When and where we can, we have been updating their pages on the Talking Walking website.

We have been struggling however, to overcome the technical issues we have with getting Talking Walking re-instated on the iTunes Store – our first 26 episodes were accepted but none since.  In the ten years since we started podcasting, the tech for distributing podcasts has changed considerably and the audience has grown dramatically.  No longer is it unlikely that you will see people walking about with headphones on their heads, even when out in the country.  And when we first started out, the majority of people were still on dial-up modems with little chance of downloading anything much larger than a 10MB mp3.

Intriguingly the tech for publishing podcasts is not that dissimilar to what it was 10 years ago – mp3s are still the most prevalent and popular format, and although downloads from broadband are considerably faster and computers and mobiles more capable of handling far larger volumes than 10MB – mp3s remain the dominant format.

More and more smartphone users are trying their hand at recording and podcasting themselves, merely using their mobile, on which they record, edit and publish.  In the summer, we ran a podcasting tutorial on foot for London National Park City* Week, with fellow podcaster, Rick Pearson.  I had come across Rick’s intriguing podcasts in which he climbs to the highest point in each London Borough in the company of a ‘local celebrity’,  and invited him to be an interviewee on Talking Walking, and in turn he invited me to be a guest on his Londons_Peaks podcast.  Our walk got me thinking how we could devise and deliver a podcast tutorial…..

Tim Ingram-Smith, creator of the London Spiral Walk being interviewed

Author Peter Fiennes being interviewed by rookie podcasters

So what’s the ‘100 days to‘ title all about?

Dare I say it but it is almost 100 days to Christmas, and just a few days more until the end of the year – our tenth anniversary year for Talking Walking.  With almost 100 interviews published, and sufficient numbers still ‘in the can’ to reach that target, we are going have some fun listening again to earlier Talking Walking interviews, and writing about them in this All About Walking blog.

This will take some discipline on our part – each day another podcast to which to listen, each week another blog entry to write about the seven interviews to which we have listened.  As the nights draw in and the turn of the year approaches, we hope you will join us in our “#100daysto” challenge and listen along to Talking Walking podcasts.

All about walking blog posting is unpredictable – if it’s raining biblical downpours then a blog post is more likely to appear, in most other weather conditions we are out walking and not blogging on a keyboard…..