Thoughts on Podcasting
by Kevin Dangoor
Podcasting has received a lot of attention. I don’t think I’ve written a single word about it to date, despite being a longtime reader of Dave Winer and a creator of a news aggregator. The reason I haven’t written anything to date is that it’s not something I’m really jumping up and down about. There are many other things going on in internet audio that are more compelling: the move to subscription services, heinous DRM — and when consumers will finally revolt against it, the ongoing availability of AllOfMP3.com.
And now, I don’t have to write my thoughts about podcasting, because Seth Godin has summed it up perfectly. Podcasting doesn’t work as well as blogs for reaching a broad audience or sustainable. Check out Seth’s further thoughts as well.
In order for podcasting to work, it needs to provide an experience similar to what I get with blogs: it needs to be searchable, and it needs to be indexed. There are some blogs that I subscribe to, but there are many, many blogs that I read via searches and such. Usually, I’m interested in one topic, not an entire 1 hour show worth. I need to be able to do a textual search that links me directly to a ~1 minute space around the topic I’m interested in. Give me that, and podcasting may work.
Even with that, however, it’s not a certainty. The segment that talks about the topic I’m interested in may be 10 minutes long. With a blog article, I can scan for the specific item of interest. This is a lot harder to do with an audio file. Like I said, there’s a serious UI challenge to overcome before podcasting really works as well as a blog.
I see two halves to podcasting: the ability for producers to (relatively) easily create content and the ability for consumers to grab the content and listen to it whenever (timeshifting).
The production side is where I think the drama is. What blogs do for written content, podcasting does for audio content. Both are built upon a set of standards which make it easy to create and distribute whatever you want. You don’t need FCC regulated bands and a transmitter, just some relatively inexpensive hardware and software.
The consumer side is pretty straight forward: Cache is King. Podcasters create a nearly unlimited number of channels for me to consume — some good, some bad. The ability to consume this content when I want is what makes podcasting cool to the consumer. It’s the same thing that makes PVRs (Tivo, etc.) cool.
I also think you’re right on the money with the idea to create a hyperlink equivalent in the audio. It would be really cool to have those hour long streams turned into the equivalent of topical pages that could be jumped to and from.