Category: Podcasting

ID3 – The Podcast Magazine Site Launches

Kris Smith and Todd Andrlik launched ID3 – Podcast Magazine website yesterday. Yes, that’s right – they’re working on a bimonthly print publication covering podcasting.

It’s an interesting project, one I’ll be tracking and talking about more. Especially considering I’m on the ID3 Podcast Magazine Editorial Board.

To me, the most interesting bit is to answer the following question; In this age of weblogs, Google, and immediate answers – what value does a print publication have? Especially one on a fast-moving, technical, internet-native topic like podcasting.

TiVo’s Future is in Videoblogs Not in Network Television

We’ve been a TiVo household for about a month now. Excellent service, I’m glad we got it. What we don’t have is a satellite or cable service. As I mentioned on my other blog, this omission is very challenging for TiVo.

To me, the most interesting television isn’t on television. It’s the videoblogs or video podcasts or vlogs, or video clambakes, or whatever you like to call them. After watching a handful of TiVo recommendations, I’m confident in saying anything you can do with a video camera and iMovie is on par with most over-the-air offerings.

Right now, TiVo is only recommending programs based on what it can see with the decade-old rabbit ears on the top of my non-HDTV. But it’s artificially handicapping itself. The TiVo is on my home network – so its recommendations should be based on all the video across the internet.

This means because I prefer watching video on my TV rather than my computer, I’m way behind on Minnesota Stories, RocketBoom and without an incentive to dig deeper into video.

Now, despite the TiVo being a Linux box and hooked up to my network – I can’t easily send video to it. To be clear – I don’t want to get video off it – I want to put video on it. Easily. As easily as setting up a Season Pass. This seems to be completely outside current capabilities – these are the capabilities keeping TiVo alive, out from under the thumb of television advertisers, and provide a reason to accelerate the TiVoToGo rollout.

Just as Apple has embraced podcasting as a way to sell more and bigger iPods, copies of GarageBand, and podcasting servers, TiVo could do the same and one better – put a recommendation layer on top of all this video, a la AmigoFish.

Let’s take this one step further: Each TiVo is a Linux box, with Apache running and a Firewire/USB2.0 port in the front – it provides an easy way for people publish their video to the rest of the world. Turning TiVo into a social medium and a full-fledged citizen of the Read/Write Web.

In early December, TiVo started a very slow rollout of Online Services – including podcasts. Baby steps to their survival. But, my box hasn’t been upgraded for the TiVo Online Services yet. So it remains less used that it could be.

Fast Forwarding Through the Funny Parts

“What’s the value of that laugh to someone selling something associated with that laugh?” – Ron Bloom

I’m all for commercial messages in podcasts. I’m all for companies using podcasts as part of their ongoing marketing efforts. Done right – along the lines of what Whirlpool is doing – it’s a great way to reach customers with more on their mind than you. Directly. More deeply than any other medium allows – aside from living with a product.

When it’s expensive to publish (traditional media) marketers have to fight for column inches with real news… or at least the society pages. In the mind of the reader, the advertisements are noise and the column inches are signal. For the marketer – it’s flipped.

Today, it’s cheap to publish. For pennies a bit you’re reading this now. There’s no reason for editorial and advertisement to be delivered in the same package. Delivery is cheap, time is expensive. When I want commercial messages I’ll ask for them. When I don’t – get out of my way.

How many times have you gone to a website hoping for a specific banner ad to be there so you could click through?

Right, you’d just go to the marketer’s site. Directly. Duh.

Chances are someone in your organization is podcasting in their off-hours – might even be a customer.

  1. Find them.
  2. Pay them to produce your company’s podcast.

This is smarter than advertising on an existing podcast for three reasons;

  1. If your product isn’t interesting enough to talk about for 20 minutes why are you selling it?
  2. Your customers are not the same as anyone else’s.
  3. Everyone has a fast forward button.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer to the Business Week podcast. If you listen to it, I recommend Mark Ramsey’s conversation with Douglas Ruskoff as a chaser.

The Problems with Podcast Directories

I had a great lunch with Paul Cantrell today at Sushi Tango. Oh, and if you need an idea for lunch, ask Paul. He listed off a half-dozen other places that sounded just as fantastic.

One of the many things we discussed was the problem of podcast ratings and categorization – i.e. the problem of finding interesting podcasts.

At the bottom of each post here on the Work Better Weblog (and many of the other sites I contribute to) you’ll see a star rating. Click it if something I say resonates with you – don’t if it doesn’t. I offer it as a low-investment feedback mechanism. It’s cheaper than writing a comment and only slightly-more expensive than reading the post itself.

Like all feedback mechanisms – those most likely to bother are those at the poles (polls) – why speak up if you’re not the choir or in the wrong church altogether?

The number to pay attention is the number of votes – not the rating itself. So yes, an overall rating of 2.5 with 10 votes would be a good thing. In the end, our individual rating criteria are very different. Is this rating in comparison to the previous post? Another post on the same topic on a different weblog? How well my writing went with your morning coffee? Is 5 good or is 1 better?

The star is only a single indicator. Top rated posts on this blog will be different than top rated posts that I’ve written, than, well, you get the picture. How does a 4 at podcasts.yahoo.com compare to a 5 at Podcast Pickle to a 0 at Podcast Alley? Given how niche anything in a weblog or podcast is – the qualifiers of what these ratings mean are a mile long.

AmigoFish has promise – its collaborative filter + RSS feed sends new stuff directly to my feedreader – based on what I and others have rated – then provides an easy way to go back and finish the loop. Problem is (like all the directories) ratings are applied channel-wide and there are a lot of open loops.

I’ve got a channel over at GigaDial – Garrick’s Podcast Picks. It’s an on-going list of podcasts that I’ve found exceptional (35 as of this writing). Here’s the 9-step process for a item to get added to the list:

  1. A podcast finds its way into my feedreader
  2. It gets transferred into my iTunes’ Unlisted Podcast smart playlist
  3. It comes up on shuffle
  4. I listen and don’t hit ‘next’
  5. It resonates with me
  6. I remember I liked it the next time I’m at my computer
  7. I click the ‘add to podcast picks’ bookmarklet in my browser
  8. I search for the specific podcast in their directory (not everything is in there)
  9. I find the podcast and add it to the list

I gotta wanna – I’m just saying. So, this means something and I’m only going to do it once. Now, unless I take the extra step of telling the publisher I’ve added them – they’ll never know they connected. Same is true at all the other directories. That sucks. More than Earthlink advertisements in podcasts.

Within the RSS 2.0 spec, there’s an optional category tag, at the channel and item levels. It’s a free-form field – can be anything you’d like. Anything. If it’s a series of characters – it’s a category. And it can be different item to item, podcast to podcast.

Reminds me of a scene in a quiz show sketch from MTV’s 90s comedy show ‘The State’:

“Name a type of car.”
“Blue.”
“Yes, blue can be a type of car.”
Applause.

So, why are all the directories shoehorning podcasters into 15 main, meaningless sections when each podcaster could declare their own unique categories – plural – and standout?

A single-dimension directory is like trying to make money hosting podcasts or sanitizing telephones – it’s only fulfilling at the most cursory level. This is why Google is still the best podcast directory – it takes very specific queries, ones with multiple qualifiers. Then returns fulfilling results.

Bringing me to the podcast directories splogging up the search results. Yes, podcast directories are guilty of the same crime as the the other PageRank-loving sploggers – taking an RSS feed and republishing it for higher placement. 6 of the 10 items on the first page of Google results for “first crack podcast” are directories echoing one another. This redundancy makes each result less valuable.

Update: 9 Feb 06, If you’d like a more colorful read of the same issues, The Bman at FalconTwin.com delivers

Lawyers That Get Niche Publishing and Podcasting

Some of you may remember the 6-part series I did with Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg & Gotlieb P.A. over at the First Crack Podcast. For your convenience, I’ve consolidated all the PKR&G podcast conversations including 2 bonus conversations that didn’t make the original series.

This week PKR&G came out with their annual lifestyle magazine, “Perfectly Legal”. It includes text versions of many of the conversations and – just in time for the holidays – many other recommendations from the firm. There’s also a nice article on how podcasting builds and extends personal relationships written by yours truly.

All the articles in the 32-page issue were written by the someone with a relationship to the firm, all the photos are of people in the firm, and the magazine itself gets sent out to those again – with relationships to the firm.

This isn’t millions of people. It’s the right people. The people that trust and respect PKR&G, the people that will recommend PKR&G to their friends.

You don’t pick a lawyer by scanning a directory, why would you do the same for a podcast?

The Business Models of Water

As a follow-up to How to Build a Business from Podcasting I thought I’d share this with you:

  • There’s a case of Ice Mountain bottled water in my kitchen (the extra big case from CostCo).
  • There’s also 2 Brita pitchers in my fridge and 4 Nalgene bottles – of different sizes – in the cupboard.
  • The house itself has 6 built-in faucets – 1 each in the kitchen, laundry room, and outside near the garden, 3 in the bathroom (shower, tub, sink)

Only the Ice Mountain bottles have advertising.

On Measuring What Matters

I’ve been itching to see Dave Slusher’s reaction to the Audible Wordcast announcement and he didn’t disappoint.

“What matters to me are the number of sensible comments, the other shows that quote me, the number of people that came up to me and talked to me at PME and told me they enjoyed the show. These are not simple numbers, but the simple numbers are flawed and odd and full of fraud.” – Dave Slusher

Earlier this year, I was asked how I’m measuring the success of the First Crack Podcast. With robots and aggregators hitting the feed, people downloading and not listening immediately (or at all), and so many other factors throwing off the simple numbers – I’ve also decided they weren’t good measures.

Instead, I’ve decided on two factors:

  1. Showing up within the top 10 results in searches for the people I talk to.
  2. The number of comments and ratings for the individual conversations.

Both of these factors are driven by people interested in the conversation and have an indefinite time period associated with them. Two things that map very well to podcasting’s inherent characteristics.

UPDATE: Hugh’s got a great comment on metrics

“Metrics don’t really matter. What matters is your network, your readers, the quality of your writing etc etc. It’s an easy thing to forget, once you first start seeing your traffic exploding and the lucrative consulting offers start landing in your inbox.”

How to Build a Business from Podcasting

“I spent the better part of last year trying to envision a business built on podcasting, and didn’t come up with anything that I believed in.” – Dave Winer

Like Dave and so many others, I’ve done the same thing and ended up with the same conclusion. Recently on the PodcastMN mailing list the conversation of making money from podcasting came up. Though there’s a big difference between making money and building a business, these are the half dozen off-the-top-of-my-head strategies that make sense to me.

  1. Build better tools and sell them – making podcasting easier.
    This is what software companies like Rogue Amoeba, Odeo, and AudioBlog.com are doing.
  2. Sell implementation of the free, open source tools you build.
    Take a look at the BetDirCaster, it ties together a bunch of open source tools, you can download it and install it yourself for free or you can pay Working Pathways (or your geeky nephew) to do it.
  3. Sell training helping people become podcasters.
    These are classes, tutorials, and other one-on-one interactions helping people use the tools they’re most comfortable with to publish a podcast. This is what we did with MOMbo.org
  4. Sell production services to companies with more money than time.
    Think professional services podcasts – I’m also a big fan of this one. Anyone that’s been podcasting for more than 9 months is an expert enough to produce other podcasts.
  5. Sell filtering services
    Help people find the most relevant podcasts for them. This is huge and yet unanswered. I’ve talked about this before in A Business Model for Abundance. I’ve heard of a couple projects in the works that acknowledge this problem, but I haven’t seen anything that addresses it in a useful way.
  6. Sell other stuff through your show like the CDs from the bands on your podcast where a couple bucks goes to your podcast.
    I’ve praised Dave Slusher for going down this road, also Kris Smith is now offering the Best of the Croncast CD & DVD. I expect more of this.

As you can tell from this list, I prefer the ‘because of…not with’ models, as in “it’s far more important (and interesting) to make money because of our blogs, rather than with them” – Doc Searls.

Advertising might work as product placement, on a one-off basis. Ad networks won’t work for two reasons:

  1. The larger the network, the more generic the ad message, the more inappropriate the ad message
  2. Any commonality across a podcast can be skipped or re-edited programmatically. If listeners know an ad message will last 10 seconds at the beginning of a podcast, a script could be written to splice out that bit upon download. Though, you could probably charge for that splicing app.

Charging to access mp3 podcasts will work once. Customer #1 will buy them, then redistribute them for free. Anything other than an mp3 (m4p, mov, etc) artificially limits reception. And if you want to limit when and where people listen to a podcast – just stream it.

IBM Employee Podcasting Guidelines

In an age when every employee and customer is a few mouse clicks from their own weblog and podcast and Forbes is spreading blog FUD it’s refreshing to see Big Blue is not only publishing podcasts, but encouraging their employees to do the same.

As a nearly hundred year-old company that no one ever got fired for choosing, you might anticipate a hundred page document signed off by every lawyer this side of the Mississippi. Nope. Just seven very reasonable, sensible points in the IBM podcasting guidelines.

I agree with 6.5 of them.

I only half agree with high audio quality. As you’ve heard me say before – if we as people were concerned with high audio quality, telephones wouldn’t exist. That said, higher quality audio quality is easier to listen to over the wind noise in my car. There is a different expected level of quality with the IBM-brand than say, MOMbo.org. IBM is admitting that.

Kudos to IBM for leading the charge for sane employee guidelines.

Our Memories Are Poor, Measure in Context

“It isn’t as astonishing the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so” – Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1912

This Sunday, the Vikings are playing the Lions. I’m confident they’ll be keeping score throughout the game. Yard by yard, play by play. Rather than having the refs remember who played better and declaring an arbitrary score on Monday morning,

There’s a huge, often un-acknowledged difference between what people say they do and what they do. This delta widens with time. If you’re looking for accuracy – metrics need to be captured in context. If you’re looking for fiction – then making up what someone did two days ago is as valuable as asking them to remember (making it up just might be more interesting).

PodcastAlley, Podcasts.Yahoo.com, and a number of the other podcast directories offer ranking and voting for “your favorite podcast”. There are three problems with this;

  1. The metrics at different sites don’t know about each other – diluting the value of each of them. For example, what does it mean to be #8 at PodcastAlley and simultaneously #23 at Podcasts.Yahoo.com?
  2. All these systems rank unrelated podcasts against each other – just like Arbitron or Nielsen Ratings. The only people interested in how, for example, meatloaf ranks higher than lawn mowers are advertisers. This ranking doesn’t help the listeners’ enjoyment or the producers improve (in fact it could be detrimental to both).
  3. I still have to remember to vote, at one site or multiple (just like Arbitron). The action of voting and ranking is separate from listening, so I don’t.

I’ll let Mark Ramsey wrap this one up for us:

“The diary methodology is woefully inadequate to meet the challenges of measurement in our industry going forward.”

“If we want the advertising community to place any credence whatsoever in our measurements, then we are obliged to use measurement methodology which inspires credence.”