Funferal

Podcasting Idea

A lot of the stuff I read today has been about Podcasting. It really is the ‘pop concept’ of the moment, not yet mainstream, but beginning to get clusters of attention. The term refers to an interesting convergence whereby links to audio files – or, potentially, video or some other format – are embedded in RSS feeds, and a tool, such as iPodder, monitors the RSS feeds to which you subscribe, transferring new audio to your audio library. The term comes from the fact that you can then sync your iPod to pull the new audio, and listen to it at your leisure (and disconnected from your computer). The concept is still embryonic, and the files/feeds available are generally tech oriented, but the possibilities are intriguing.

Mark Glaser recently devoted half a column to the topic (the other half looked at satellite radio) and included this particularly interesting insight, from Russell Beattie, on the mobile phone’s potential to bring podcasting mainstream, given the much larger number of mobile phones:

The phone may not hold the thousands of hours of audio that a normal iPod holds, but it’ll be perfect for the day’s podcasts, no?

Meanwhile, Tim Bray sees at least one possible practical application:

Musicians could use it for total disintermediation. If some musician of whom I’m a major fan, say Ry Cooder or Emma Kirkby, were to launch a subscription where you pay them a few bucks a month and they promise, once or twice a month, to drop something into your iTunes, well, where do I sign up? There’d need to be some enforceable legalities; basically, a promise not to post what you get on the public Web. Should be do-able.

(Hugo Schotman has a more extensive list.)

The idea of podcasting is especially interesting to me because it gives meat to some of the concepts I raised at my recent talk to the NUI, Galway Radio Society. Building on David Park’s talk at AoIR, where he explored some of the potential impact on college radio of webcasting, IM, and Paypal donations, I tried to draw a more general picture of what will change, and what will stay the same, in college media, moving into the future.

[aside]I enjoyed the talk because, for something that was drawn up at short notice, it actually came together in quite a coherent form. Most gratifying though, was that as I spoke I actually began to understand how this all related to the ‘two models of community radio.’ It wasn’t until after I had – surprising myself – detailed the two models that I understood why and how this was central to the issues I was raising, and the talk worked as a piece much better than I had expected.

But enough of that. I sketched out the many ways in which distribution is changing – file sharing, webcasting, distributed models, the pending move to digital radio/DAB, the possibilities of wireless internet and other similar networks (note: one friend pointed out that just like the IM/SMS split between the US and Europe, WiFi may be big in the US, but Bluetooth is where it’s at in Europe). Podcasting – whether it catches on, or leads to other similar approaches – gives a wonderfully vivid example of just how things might change.

Of course not everyone will see Podcasting as revolutionary, or likely to catch on widely. Apophenia, over at Zephoria sees syndication feeds, such as RSS, as attractive to content-addicts, but not matching the usage patterns of today’s youth:

i cannot imagine youth syndicating non-intimate feeds unless the benefit is exceptionally large, or the feed plays into that culture already. When my generation signed up for mailing list after mailing list just to get access to a particular site, we often used one of a million throw-away addresses, but once we were on the list, it was hard to get off. With feeds, the user doesn’t have to ask the company to be removed; they can simply stop accessing the feed. The question then becomes: why start accessing the feed unless you’re exceptionally motivated?

There’s an important insight here. When you sign up for an RSS feed it updates continually, and the only option, if you tire of it, is to delete it from your subs. I’m reminded of a friend’s complaint that the flaw in the weblog model is that it’s too linear – it doesn’t match the way people actually interact. So, is there a way in which syndication will evolve to allow a more free-form come-and-go usage?