I wanna be a DJ. The Mac Show actually started by accident. “I was working as a Mac consultant for an Internet service provider here in Vancouver, and they had a Real Audio studio,” says King, who has always been told that he should be on radio. (When you hear him, you’ll understand why.) “So I said to the people running the studio, ‘I see you’ve got some extra time on Saturday afternoon. Could I use that just to play around?’ They said, ‘sure go ahead.’”

A confessed information junkie, King reads constantly. “I hit almost 100 web pages a day and read 30-40 magazines a month,” King says, “so I’m constantly absorbing information. With my customers here in Vancouver, I found I was telling each one individually the same thing, over and over again. That gets kind of tiring after a while. I thought, doing a radio show would be kind of cool.”

Stream, baby, stream. King started out broadcasting in Real Audio, then switched to QuickTime. “With Real Audio, doing the show was more difficult, requiring a bit more configuration and tuning. With QuickTime, we can literally do the show from an iBook—just set up anywhere we like and start broadcasting.”

A PC friend of King’s involved with the show can’t believe how stress-free QuickTime 4 streaming really is. “The company that we broadcast from is a web design firm, so Scott (a.k.a. PC Whipping Boy) knows all the hassles they go through with Real Audio and Microsoft Player,” says King. “He’s completely blown away by the fact that we sit down once a week and within a half an hour, we’re up and ready to do QuickTime. Now he’s saving for a Mac of his own.”

Audio quality has increased significantly since King switched to QuickTime, and his audience has noticed the difference. “A lot of folks ask me how we do this,” says King. “They assume you have to be some big broadcast company—ABC News, FOX, ESPN. And I tell them, no, it’s just me and my little G3.”

A star is born. Broadcast every Wed from 6-8 p.m. Pacific, The Mac Show includes two hours of interviews, news, games, chat, phone calls and almost anything else you can do on the Internet with a Macintosh.

A thousand people tune in for the live stream, and 20,000 more access the archives each week. “These are not huge numbers for real radio,” admits King, “but for the Internet, we’re doing pretty spiffy. The best part about it is they’re all Mac users. Our chat rooms are very interactive and vocal about what’s going on in the Mac community.”

So what qualifies him for this role? Absolutely nothing. “I’m not a journalist, I don’t consider myself a journalist, I’m just a guy who likes to talk, and it just so happens that there are some folks who like to listen,” laughs King. “It’s a complete fluke.”

Roots in User Groups. Shawn is also president of the Vancouver Macintosh User Group. Most of the folks in King’s group are regular Mac users—dentists, carpenters, college students, lawyers, doctors, pipe-fitters who like to play games on the Mac, housewives who use Mac for their home businesses. Only ten are serious computer geeks.

“It’s an interesting, dynamic group,” says King. “We have about 100 members, with 50 folks coming out regularly to the meeting. We have a 15-year old all the way up to an 85-year old gentleman, and the technical range is the same—brand new users all the way up to grizzled old tech veterans like myself.”

“Making the effort to go once a month to a group meeting is really worth it,” King adds. “You meet a bunch of nice people, make new friends, learn about software, learn about new hardware, pick up tips and tricks and maybe take home a CD or floppy disk.”

Get involved. Find a user group near you. To learn more about creating and streaming content live over the Internet, attend QuickTime Live.