A lengthy and detailled rant about the current clunky, short-sighted approach of RSS enclosures and other podcast “standards". Sheds light on many of the things that make distribution of podcasts considerably less than the smooth process that it’s sometimes claimed to be.
If you are at all interested in the infrastructure at the heart of podcasting, you need to read this article:
Whole Wheat Radio Blog
I’ll say up front that I don’t like advertising in my media (and here).
Dave Writes:
So instead, create commercial information, in any form you like and make it available. This is very different from sneaking it in, or being annoying. Make it available. Then you have a responsibility to be: Informative. Respectful. Entertaining. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Given the choice I would eliminate advertising completely from “real-time” media (such as audio and video). It’s simply too obtrusive, however “relevant” someone else may think it. This “active” advertising steals my time and offers little or nothing in return. On the other hand, I’m a big fan of providing useful, informative information on the web and in print. In both of those cases I can choose content of interest to me, and ignore (or never see) the rest.
I can’t really see any point in traditional “blanket” advertising any more. The spam-like attitude of tell everyone, and any interested ones will get the message too is what has driven development of a huge variety of ways to eliminate ads. Pop-up filters, ad-eliminating tivos, copyright-busting bittorrents and podcasts of programs with the ads removed. The proportion of such ads that are of interest to me is vanishingly small. So my life is made much better by eliminating all ads completely, even though I miss some that I might actually find interesting or useful. Ultimitely this benefits nobody but the perveyors of ad-removal potions.
Here on the internet, we have much better solutions. Google, PubSub, the blogosphere, even the likes of Amazon and eBay, all allow me, the potential buyer, to drive the process. Simply putting real, detailled, current, searchable information on a web site can attract buyers from across the world. Setting up a web site costs a fraction of an ad campaign, and (provided the site isn’t filled with irrelevant sales crap) will get an astonishingly high proportion of interested, willing, buyers among the visitors. Add a blog, or similar site updates, with a RSS feed, and the information about latest releases and offers will percolate around, passed on from one interested customer or topic-specific aggregator to another. No traditional ad campaign can give this kind of ultra-precise targetting. All at negligible cost.
And yet, so many vendor web sites lack basic information about products, services, price, and availability. They would apparently rather spend thousands (or millions!) with an ad company than take a few hours to put detailled product descriptions and prices on the front page of a web site.
My key distinction in all this is between selling as typefied by traditional in-your-face advertising, and buying, which is what customers want to do.
It was probably just a quirk of my linguistic abilities, but this was all sparked in me, many years ago, during a visit to the Netherlands. I noticed a building marked with a sign “te koop” (roughly “to buy"), and was struck how that contrasted with the equivalent English “for sale". More and more I have come to the conclusion that I simply don’t want to be “sold” to. How different would the world be if “to buy” rather than “to sell” were the driver for commerce.
Read more at Dave’s Advertising-in-the-age-of-podcasts Manifesto
The title says it all, really. Passes both the “deliver via RSS” and “you don’t need an iPod” tests. It also discusses uses for podcasts beyond the obvious “mix tapes” and open-mike rambling.
Read more at What is Podcasting?
Here’s another neat idea, a random feed of podcasts you might never think to subscribe to.
following the “Life is Random” meme and looking for a way to experience podcasts that one might not otherwise find, Manton Reece put together a handy little RSS feed called Podcast Shuffle.
Sounds like an interesting way to find different feeds. I’m not sure I’d want to listen to it all the time, though, and current podcatchers don’t seem to have the flexibility to allow “pausing” or “dipping and skipping” a feed - it’s all or nothing.
And I can really imagine hearing something that I really like, but not being able to find the URL or feed. Most podcasts seem to assume that if you are listening, then you must have come via the web site or feed URL. This is an increasingly dangerous assumption.
If random feed listening becomes at all popular, people are really going to have to take to putting plenty of “station id” in their ‘casts (and choose some pronounceable, memorable URLs), and putting genuinely useful information in the audio metadata.
Read more at:
Becoming: Let’s do the Podcast Shuffle and Manton Reece: Podcast Shuflle
Adam Curry mentioned PodGuides.net.
What’s a PodGuide?.
A PodGuide is a very simple thing. It’s the combination of a map (PDF) of a certain place and a series of audio tracks (mp3) which you can download for your iPod. Think of an audio tour in a museum, but not limited to just that. You could have a PodGuide about the 10 coolest pubs in London for example, or a PodGuide which shows you the most known historic buildings in Bruges. But it might just as well be about the most strangest front doors in Kleit (no you don’t know Kleit).
This is an idea that brought back fond memories to me of a whole bunch of water-cooler and coffee-pot business ideas I used to talk about. This was mostly during a particularly lengthy and tedious software development contract back in 2001/2002.
One of my many “cunning plans” was a community web site where people submit recorded “tour guides” of their local area and get some sort of small performance-based “royalty” payment to provide an incentive. Potential visitors download and rate the tours. Back then MP3 players were less than ubiquitous, and bandwidth was more expensive, so one of the possible income streams was to sell/rent customized tours of larger areas pre-loaded on to a player. Other potential money-earners included selling “ad space” for things like “why not take a break and rest your feet at Mary’s Café". or “don’t miss the museum of wierd stuff, down the alley on your left".
Like so many ideas, we never did anything about it. Still seems like a good idea, though.
Checking my referrers I found that podthings.com, a shiny new (first post March 12, 2005) podcast-focussed news-and-thoughts blog, has blogrolled me. Many thanks, I’m happy to reciprocate.
On that blog I also noticed a link to another new podcast blog, podcastwizard.com (first post February 28, 2005).
Welcome to the fray!
I just read a small blog article Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104: Vacuum News podcast for 3/15/2005, and it prompted me to write about something that has been puzzling me for a while now.
Edward writes:
It took me a lot longer to do this production tonight than I expected, since I did it in multiple takes instead of all straight through. I’m better off writing the whole thing all at once.
The bit that puzzles me is wondering how anyone else makes their podcasts. I’m not (this time) concerned with the hardware (microphones, voice processors, recorders, etc.), or content and licencing. In this case it’s all about whether you:
My natural inclination is to use the “non-linear” approach (number 5). I guess this is because of my background in video. The few times I’ve tried to do live video editing I’ve found it so stressful that I much prefer to do multiple “takes” of each bit, and assemble the final production from the best take of each section.
I’m guessing, though that this is not a particularly common way to make podcasts. It’s a relatively time-consuming, perfectionist, way to approach the problem, and can lack the raw energy and edginess that works so well in some podcasts.
I’d love to hear how people do this stuff.
Powered by WordPress
