latest in podcasting - coming of age

Wired News: Podcasting Gold Rush Is On

"Independent podcasters don't have the assurance of a built-in audience whose demographics they can rely upon. In fact, they struggle to even accurately count the size or makeup of their audiences -- information that advertisers covet. Some have rough ideas based on e-mail responses, site hits and, if they're lucky, download figures, but they say they can't tell how many people are listening through Apple's iTunes service, which doesn't share its statistics.

That's frustrating for folks like Cinecast's Hallgren and Kempenaar, whose show has been featured a couple of times on iTunes' homepage. The duo believe that iTunes is caching Cinecast on Apple's servers, and while they're grateful for the attention, they say that as a result users who subscribe to the podcast aren't downloading the program from the Cinecast server, making it impossible to accurately count the audience.

Denver-based Barefoot Radio co-host Paul Saurini, who is trying to gauge listener demographics through an online survey, is similarly delighted by the exposure Apple provides, but frustrated by the company's coyness."

this wired article came out last month, but it's a good one for pointing out the latest condition effecting podcasting, it's coming of age - however, it's not jumping a shark as some have speculated, or only for egomanical bloggers - it's simply crossing a chasm - a very normal trend when looking at the adoption of most any technology as it scales...

from the earliest days of podcasting, prior to august 04, even before it was actually called podcasting, the technology enthusiasts, who could be both listeners and producers, had a variety of backgrounds, themes and motivations - some came from radio, some were technologists, some just wanted an outlet to vent, some wanted to hack better production, distribution or aggregation code and some saw that ultimately a new use case for multimedia based information, communication, entertainment and education (maybe even business models) could be possible...

but again these were the original enthusiasts - the earliest of adopters, the innovators helping to first build the capabilities and then spread the evangelical word to anyone savvy enough to listen, literally...

now, this is open to argument of course, but i think the technology enthusiast phase started sometime in mid-2003 and then extended up through august 2004 - that's when we crossed over into the visionary phase - when adam posted his applescript, dave slusher added his own code snippet to the mix and then some of the other early podcatchers started to iteratively mature from those early examples...

as the podcatchers became better, the number of podcast feeds grew exponentially to the point where there were plenty of genre specific shows available for any taste conceivable very rapidly, say by early 2005, and a couple of pretty good directory options available to locate new ones, though most relied on podcasts that were recommended by other podcasts - mainstream media and industry in general was still minimally involved at that point...

the new listeners spread the word to friends via blogs as well as traditional media outlets started to pickup on the buzz as we went through the winter and into spring of 2005 - many interviews of both early enthusiasts and newer visionaries occurred - which in turn broadened both the listening audience as well as added new producers of shows - some minimal and some highly polished, but all joined the visionary phase helping podcasting grow and progress...

so we crossed through the realm of the visionaries - both diy and established folks no matter what funding if any they had behind them proceeding along - folks who got the concept and knew they both wanted to be a part of it and in whatever way possible influence the direction - some pushing in a commercial direction and some purely because of their passion for the medium...

lots of advancements occurred within the visionary phase - odeo came out with a great user interface approach to a directory, podshow was formed - signed with sirius - got funded (who knows what they'll do with it), apple woke up (finally) and modified the webobjects ecommerce engine within itunes to allow podcasts to be directly available, yahoo released media rss (mrss), etc (lots of advancements - no disrespect meant by leaving anyone out)... - to many to list, but the bottom-line is that podcasting was still niche - commuters, geeks, ipod lovers, indie musicians and those who love them - earlier adopters where still the primary participants...

but recently, at least to me, as we enter the fall of 2005, it appears that we are crossing the chasm, crossing over into the pragmatists phase - we are seeing a lot more mainstream involvement, both on the production and listener side of things, as well as more funding and much more established industry types, both consumables and media seeking a way to get involved...

now i've read and listened to the various points of view: that podcasting should stay diy and non-commercial, that the podcasting networks springing up all over the place will hurt the little guys, that advertising kills, that no one will pay to subscribe, that the only podcasters who'll stick around are those that are commercial and professionally produced, that citizen produced podcasters will lose interest and fad away either because they run out of things to say or they are to hard to find among the big branded high traffic shows - basically that whoever has an opinion that is opposite of mine is wrong and vise versa - well it's all baloney, every podcasting pov that tries to be authoritative in a single direction is wrong...

podcasting is about diversity - pure and simple...

there is no definitive use case for podcasting, nor should there ever be - it can be just as right for the individual podcaster talking into their pc about their daily life as it is for some of the world's biggest companies, whether they're in the media industry or making cereal - it's the capability and distribution not the payload that matters - that was the key to crossing the original chasm from technological enthusiasts to visionaries, and for the next chasm it simply gets broader adoption because of easier tools and techniques to produce, distribute, subscribe and participate - plus there is much much more content for every podcasting taste imaginable, it's easier to subscribe and as always if you don't like something, unsubscribe - and podcasting is not just about audio, but video too - it's literally able to fulfill every part of the tail...

this is a good thing, a very good thing - enjoy the pragmatics phase, my guess is we'll be in it for quite a while and be able to listen and watch some very interesting things via some very interesting talent on some very interesting devices - podcasting is coming of age, enjoy it...

Comments

[Michael W. Geoghegan]

Mike,

Well said! I think you have nailed what is happening. Everything from the personal "daily thoughts" podcast to the biggest "corporate" podcast. It is all about diversity and choice. Enjoy.

[Greg]

Great crossing the chasm analysis of podcasting. That seems to be the biggest challenge of many of the new technologies (e.g. RSS, tagging) out there now. Podcastings seem like it with be a successful crosser.

As you point out, arguing over what content should be podcast is missing the point. Podcasting is just distribution, not content. But it does enable all types of great content.

[Rob S]

Right on! Podcasts (both audio and video) are a natural extension of blogs. The tools for publishing and subscribing to text content came first and created a social media revolution. Now we're seeing the same thing with audio and video. People have something to say, the tools are out there and off we go.

[Cameron Reilly]

Nice work Mike!