Podcastplayer.org news

Anyone who’s interested in podcasting and media in general will probably have enountered a lot of trumpeting about “the long tail". This is the idea that although there are potentially rich pickings in the servicing the “most popular” of something, in reality there can actually be a larger potential market in “the rest". There’s plenty of web material available if you want to read more, for example this blog, this wikipedia entry, or this wired article.

This all sounds wonderful. The idea of empowering customer choice by making the whole “back catalog” available is an enticing prospect.

BUT, similar forces to those that pushed everything from superstores to TV stations into concentrating on the single largest identifiable group are at work in podcasting and other alternative media. Even though most pundits seem to prefer to ignore them.

Consider these recent blog entries:

From Digital Strips : The Web Comics Podcast with Zampzon & Daku:

we’re running a little tight on server space so we are going to have to trim down the show archives a bit. I will limit the archived shows to 8 episodes at a time. Now is your last chance to grab our earlier ones.

From Dave’s Chalkboard:

I didn’t download the podcasts as the episodes were being aired the first time because I didn’t want to listen to them so soon. Now that I want to listen to them, they are not available.

Supporting the long tail with anything other than hot air costs. It costs in storage space. It costs in index complexity. It places an ever-increasing burden on the freedom to change site designs and structures.

The most insidious part of all this, though is the way that RSS has become almost entirely a “what’s new” mechanism. Finding a few “most recent” podcasts, or blogs, or whatever is easy. Finding anything else is ridiculously hard. As an example, I recently discovered RocketBoom. I liked the few I received from the feed and wanted to download some older issues. But they are not in the feed. Instead I had to trawl through a complex and somewhat irritating set of “archive” web pages, each of which tried to force me to play the show in-page rather than offering a simple download link. In the end I wrote a small script in ruby which guessed at archived filenames and sat in the background trying the next one then sleeping for a while. Still didn’t get a complete set though.

As more and more podcasts, videoblogs, digital photos, independent music and other large media files hit the limits of storage, I predict we are going to see a huge shakeout of old stuff. In turn, the culture will subtly change, and people will take to pre-emptively grabbing stuff “just in case” rather than relying on it being on the net if they need it. Unfortunately this will just move the burden from storage to bandwidth, increasing costs for everyone.

So. if you can, please please commit to keeping all your old material available. And provide RSS lists of the old stuff, so it can be grabbed by regular RSS media-catcher software.