Podcast Holiday Hiatus

Our podcast will be taking the next week off and should return the first week of January.

Never mind the religious influence (or religious re-appropriation) of the season, everyone deserves a respite.

Happy holidays!

Technical Notice: Vorbis Ogg Podcast Feed Now Available

Starting with Episode 58, An American Atheist offers a Vorbis Ogg-based podcast feed in addition to our existing MP3/iTunes-based podcast feed. If this sounds like gibberish to you, don’t worry and ignore this notice.

To those of you participating or interested in the free software movement, Ogg Vorbis is a fully open source, freely distributable and patent-unencumbered audio codec. It’s very popular among the Linux community, but has playback software on the Mac and Windows, as well as numerous portable devices.

To better support that community, we’re fully supporting the format in addition to our existing MP3 podcast feed. You can find the new feed at: http://anamericanatheist.org/?feed=podcast_ogg. Please use the Contact page (linked at the top of every page) and let us know if you encounter problems or have any suggestions.

Thanks, hope you enjoy it!

Win a free copy of “50 reasons people give for believing in a god”!

As you may remember from Episode 25 of our show, we interviewed Guy P. Harrison, author of “50 reasons people give for believing in a god.” He has sent us 2 copies of the book, and we are giving them away via an email contest!

Email us via the “contact” link and answer the following question in 500 words or less.

What was the most compelling reason you used to believe in a god, and what changed your mind?

We will post our 2 favorite answers to this blog award both of them a free copy of “50 reasons people give for believing in a god.”

Please remember to leave us a contact email to get back to you if you win. All entries must be received by Dec 31., 2010 at 12PM.

Website Sneak Peek

I wanted to share with you all a sneak peek of our upcoming website redesign - there it is! (You can click the image to get a somewhat larger look.)

An American Atheist, both the blog and the podcast, have grown by leaps and bounds in its first year and we’ve outgrown our website, both in terms of how well readers can interact with us, and how professional we appear to be. We’ve been moving on fixing that front for a while now, adjusting the style of the podcast and, as you can see, working on a new site!

While the vision for the website is something best explained by its release, we’d still like to hear what our readers think, and what you think we need to do on this site. What do you like and dislike about our blog and podcast? How should we evolve / intelligently design ourselves?

(It deserves mentioning when the site is released as well, but I have no problem giving credit as much as possible: the design is compliments of San Francisco web/UX designer Michael Wang.)

New Episodes Soon!

No, we haven’t forgotten about our podcast/radio show by the same name: the short story is that new episodes are coming very soon. For those who delight in verbosity, here’s the long version:

We’re rebroadcast on 90.3fm in the Sacramento, California valley area by KDVS, the college/community radio station out of Davis, CA, and their transmitter went dead. As a good portion of our audience is over FM (we love our Internet listeners too!), and because it’s always a good idea to take a break, we took the last week off. We have a new episode ready for you and it should be posted shortly.

And thank you to everyone who enjoys listening, we very much appreciate it!

Season Two Blog Improvements

I want to thank everybody for the excellent first season we had. We appreciated reading and responding to your feedback and hope you enjoyed our first season; we covered a number of good stories, but also made some mistakes, and with your help and feedback, we’re about to move onto an excellent Season Two.

One major change we’re making for Season Two is to improve our blogging presence and increase what we had always hoped would be a community-driven, democratic response to the stories we cover, and even the panelists selected for our show.

In keeping with that spirit of openness, we will now start blogging atheist and religious critic news to this site. Your interest in the stories (read as number of comments and number of reads) will help us decide what to then talk about on that week’s show. We intend to continue covering four stories a week on the podcast and radio show, but would like to cover more than that, perhaps 8 or 10 stories on the blog each week.

This also opens up an opportunity for you, the reader and listener: tell us what you think of the stories and help shape our opinions via the comments section. If you’re interested, we’re also open to accepting new bloggers to help write stories for us. Please use the Contact page (above) if you’re interested.

Thanks for sticking with us and we’ll see you in Season Two!