Podcasting is definitely taking hold of the world in ways that far exceed its humble beginnings. In the last 9 months or so we’ve seen it put to use by both the Main Stream Media (MSM) all the way down to the grassroots, Citizen’s Media (CM) (or maybe it was the other way around).

In any event, today we see another brick laid in the long road to social viability: NYC’s Top 40 station, Z100, starts to release its own content. For anyone that’s lived in the Tri-State area, you’ve unlikely heard it at some point in your life. As a native, I grew up with leagues of others that had few choices BUT Z100 during our formative years.

What gets me the most excited, however, is just how many people this can reach in one shot. I remember last month driving out to Boston for some meetings. All of my iRivers were emptied and I didn’t have my cassette adaptor handy to wire my laptop to the car, so I had to tune in to Z100. I got as far as Hartford if memory serves me right. Maybe we “don’t need no stinking transmitters” but they’re pretty damned cool if you ask me.

With any luck, we can expect the level of awareness to rise tremendously in the already iPod-laden NYC. Or is this a sign of the coming of the end. More sizzle than steak? Audio Graphics has a great insight into this:

Not only is radio following the internet trend, but it’s repeating itself with podcasting. Podcasting is only a modern day version of an old station promotion: playing an entire album then urging listeners to have their cassette recorders ready “tonight at eight.”

When all this washes out, I think we’ll find far fewer people scheduling radio programs for automatic download than would record an album being tracked straight through.

Podcasting brings radio into today, while allowing it to keep one foot in yesterday. Remove the Rush Limbaughs and a few other syndicated programs, and you end up with a selection that’s not interesting when heard in the past tense. Think about it, in July Infinity starts to podcast news programs with traffic reports in them. I can only imagine the demand to listen to yesterday’s traffic tie-ups.

Source: Audio Graphics, “What Podcasting Brings to Radio”>

Very valid points. I think what’s missing though, is the celebrity factor that many metro-area stations also hold. Sure, hearing yesterday’s traffic is quite useless, but for those Britney fans out there, hearing her half hour interview is golden.

Once again, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Podcasting is definitely taking hold of the world in ways that far exceed its humble beginnings. In the last 9 months or so we’ve seen it put to use by both the Main Stream Media (MSM) all the way down to the grassroots, Citizen’s Media (or maybe it was the other way around).

In any event, today we see another brick laid in the long road to social viability: NYC’s Top 40 station, Z100, starts to release its own content. For anyone that’s lived in the Tri-State area, you’ve unlikely heard it at some point in your life. As a native, I grew up with leagues of others that had feww choices BUT Z100 during our formative years.

Next month, I will be speaking on a panel with Matt May and Eric Rice (we’re still fighting on who gets to sit next to Eric). The general topic will be Podcasting, but we’ll try and prune that down somewhat in the next few days.

For anyone who hasn’t heard about the WebVisions Conference, here’s some info:

Join the giants of the Web world to explore the future of design, content creation, technology and business strategy. From podcasting to universal usability, you’ll discover how the Web is interacting with digital devices to change the way we communicate, access information and do business.

Here’s the conference details:

WebVisions 2005
http://www.webvisionsevent.com
July 15th at the Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR

Hope to see you there!

Yesterday, Seth Godin made a quick mention about Podcasting and what he saw as some of the main challenges with the medium, namely the long times to parse and consume. Of course, this initiated a small torrent of complaints from the podcasting afficionados that came to the side of their maiden.

Of course, I was sure Seth wasn’t dismissing the medium when I first read it. How could he be? I’m still waiting for my copy of his most recent book, All Marketers Are Liars, it seems that he focuses in on the art of storytelling and authenticity in communication. There’s no way he could be against it.

In fact, he’s not. Afterwards, he posted a follow-up that clarified his stance and points to what he thinks is great. He’s even linked to the first and only Godin Podcast there is.

Of course, what I think Seth really needs is to take his story on the road. More importantly, he should get Sparkcasting on board and let us put together a “Book Talk Show”. We’ve spent the past 5 months working on how to make conversation more discoverable and approachable.

Stay tuned for the first edition.

Steve Jobs has annouced that the upcoming 4.9 release of iTunes will provide support for podcasting. Jobs, speaking at the D3: Everything Digital conference, took a quick jab at Podcasting, framing it as “Wayne’s World-like”, but nonetheless also noted that they planned on having a gated directory for the podcasts.

It’s hard to make out all the facts at the moment, but it “feels” like the podcasting tab will work much like the radio listings. Users can submit their podcast for approval by Apple for inclusion. It only seems logical that iTunes users will be able to add their own podcasts as well. The big question in this arena is whether or not anyone can get listed in this new directory.

If I’m a developer of a “iPodder”, otherwise known as a podcatcher, I’d be shaking in my boots at the moment. If you’re not, give a quick ring to the fine folks at Konfabulator for a more up-to-date example of what could happen.

The flip-side of that conversation, however, is that podcasting is getting closer to reaching millions of people. As many have pointed out, and I largely agree, one of the major stumbling blocks to the adoption of podcasting is the initial download of the iPodder software. Although it seems that large numbers of people still use the web to physically download podcasts, the automation of the process is key. The model we have now is more akin to logging in to your web mail app and then going to the actual server where the message originated.

My next question is simple “Can the medium be easily dismissable once there are millions of aggregators out there?”.

It seems the podcasting world is quickly dividing into two main camps: the artists and the capitalists. Those are gross, blatant exaggerations, but they’ll serve their purpose. I’m definitely more in the capitalist camp, though I fully can understand where the people who want to keep it “clean” are coming for. For me, it seems inevitable that the “marketplace” will bear down on us all.

With that in mind, I decided that it would be great to create a place for those that are business-minded to, well, talk business. To that end, I started the podbiz group today. It’s chartered to be a meeting place and discussion forum for anyone that’s trying to find a living in this podcasting thang. Naturally, anyone is welcome to join and participate.

I did a quick interview with Alex Williams today which should be posted as a podcast sooner than later.

In the meantime, if you are interested in building a business around podcasting please join the group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/podbiz
podbiz@yahoogroups.com

When I was in college, I was forced to take a number of statistics classes towards my degree. I’ve always been quite interested in the numbers behind the madness but also disconcerted with the way that they are often misapplied.

My professors at the time were all quite adamant about the power of statistics. Of course, they also cautioned us as to the perils of having those statistics used against you. For essentially any case, you can use the same set of numbers to prove just about anything - even the thing you think you are disproving.

Many years later when I formed Metricals and was dealing with statistics on a daily basis, the truth was no more apparent. I had found a great book, “How to Lie With Statistics” for my partners to get a quick primer on what the “business” end was like.

Today I came across a great example of the problem with statistics. Seems the folks have done their survey of bloggers once again and are presenting the results. Here’s a blurb that quotes their research:

BlogAds’ second annual survey of blog readers showed the blog audience getting a bit older, a little richer a tad more female. Most interestingly, the survey showed that the blog audience contains a very disproportionate number of influentials, that minority that drives the opinions of the majority. The audience is almost twice as likely to subscribe to Adbusters than to AdAge, but it isn’t as monomaniacally liberal as some people would paint it.

[…]

The recent fad of podcasting appears to be much overblown, with this very early adopter audience indicating almost no one actually listens to the audio readings of commentary. Three percent said they listened to one podcast per week. Two percent said they listened to a couple. The people indicating they listened to more than that were two few to make a blip on the graph.

Source: Marketing Vox, “‘Influentials’ Disproportionately Read Blogs, Podcasting Turns out to Be Overhyped”

Is that a surprise to anyone? Podcasting’s been on the block something like 7 months and both the creation and consumption processes are more elaborate/complicated. So here’s the flip side of the missive:

“In just 7 short months, the Podcasting movement has taken hold and is already starting to gain traction, even culling interest from the legions of bloggers-turned-audiophiles. As technology and tools come online that simplify and streamline the process of creating podcasts, it’s no doubt there will be tremendous growth. Looking back to the age old battle between paper and radio, we can surely expect a more entrenched dogfight in the months and years to come.”

But what the heck, I’m biased ;)

The last few days has seen quite a bit of discussion stem from the NY Times article talking about the coming of Odeo and the fledgling podcasting business. Though most are willing to half-reserve judgment, the other half are quite happy to cast the heavy-handed shadow of doubt on the quick-moving medium.

Today, Scott Kirsner has written a piece on the “growing pains” of the podcasting business. Here’s a quote from the article:

One problem is that, much like the Web before advertising and e-commerce, there’s no money in podcasting yet. I doubt we would have seen Google, eBay, CNN.com, or Mapquest emerge if the Web had remained a commerce-free zone. Ads and transactions on the Web gave everyone an incentive to produce high-quality websites, from start-ups like eBay to giant media corporations like CNN to individuals like Harry Knowles, who runs the movie insiders’ site Ain’t It Cool News.

And some of the founding fathers of podcasting — just like early Webbies — want to keep commercialism out.

[…]

When I suggested to Winer that podcasting might be supported by ads, like commercial radio, or sponsorship, like public radio, or subscription, like satellite radio, he had a quick comeback. ‘’The assumption is this must be exactly like every other medium that has come before,” he says. ‘’It’s different. It has different economics.”

Source: Boston.com, “Podcasting faces growing pains”

There are a few problems with the argument being made here. First and foremost, podcasting is too much in its infancy to really be having growing pains at all. What we do have, with little shortage mind you, is a burgeoning class of entrepreneurs and media pioneers all searching for the leverage they seek and need from Podcasting.

Second, any expectation that the podcasting “business” would not come to mimic the traditional media is just foolish. There’s a huge infrastructure in place that supports that model and despite its shortcomings, many people still believe it to be efficient and effective. I think podcasting presents us with many different opportunities that are yet to emerge, but the old and tried ways still dominate regardless of how much we like or dislike them. Dave Winer not wanting it to go commercial has nothing to do with it (though I have no doubt Dave also expects this to happen).

Third, when will these reporters stop talking to the wrong people. I’m amazed more and more that they continue to ask the same questions of the same people and somehow expect different answers (isn’t that called insanity). What most people seem to overlook is that innovation and invention happens at the edges. While the top shows serve as inspiration and a benchmark, usually, it’s someone tinkering at their computer that’s going to figure out the “next big thing”. If you want to know where the business model is - ASK THE BUSINESS PEOPLE!

Podcasting is filled with interesting people doing interesting things - don’t condemn the thing before you’ve done your homework.

P.S. For any reporter that actually wants to talk to someone with a podcasting business model that’s starting to make money, feel free to check out Beercasting.com or contact me at greg AT beercasting.com.

Conover on media: Frustration takes hold

To put things even more bluntly, as of today, podcasting looks more to me like a beta than a first release. Geeks and wannabes (like me) will love playing with it and puzzling through the problems, but the average person just won’t care that much.

Yesterday, I pointed out to the role of Power Laws in the major press coverage done on Odeo. The main point being that the reputation of the owners drove the mention.

I came across a pointer from Dave Winer where he points out another factor, the media. Dave quotes Staci Kramer of PaidContent:

Few start ups launch with John Markoff as an advance man. The story’s close to dismissive or oblivious to other entrepreneurial efforts to make money by automating audio feeds or creating audio for RSS-driven distribution. Markoff heralds today’s upcoming announcement of Odeo, Ev Williams’ new venture with Noah Glass, as “a small, hopeful step” toward podcasting “becoming the commercial Web’s next big thing.” He adds, “The question for Odeo, and for the many other entrepreneurial efforts almost certain to come, is whether there is any money to be made from podcasting.” (Like I said, blinders when it comes to endeavors already underway.)End of mini-rant.

Source: PaidContent

Dave also vents a bit of his frustration with the media and it’s often irresponsible reporting, especially as it comes to Podcasting:

My comment. This is John Markoff as kingmaker, not reporter. He’s trying to deal a market to people he likes, and away from people he doesn’t. Of course this is not the proper role of a NY Times reporter, who is supposed to report objectively on just the facts. But Markoff is so far from that role, he’s more of a king these days than a kingmaker.

Source: TheTwoWayWeb, “Markoff as kingmaker, not reporter”

I definitely think the media is a culprit and and eager to learn more about how these articles takes shape. I doubt we’ll ever get those answers though.