About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
For a while now, Dave Slusher hasn’t been happy with “dead fish” performance of Google AdSense on his site. We pulled AdSense off MNteractive.com months and months ago because of the same problems. I haven’t even considered looking back.
I believe Jim Cuene and I hit on the crux of the problem this morning;
Google AdSense doesn’t work because the ads are publisher focused.
One of the reasons we drove to Boulder was to remind ourselves of the vastness of this great country. Miles and miles of little more than telephone line. Maybe a house. Maybe a gas station. Dirt road intersecting the highway.
Even in the most remote areas, someone has a house. With electricity and a phone.
The fact ribbons of highway run multiple directions through every state with phone and electrical line spun even tighter is a remarkable feat. Something we take for granted far too often.
If you haven’t yet, check out the trailer of Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell 10 mph Segway journey from Seattle to Boston.
Kansas at 80 mph was a long day. At 10mph? That’s plenty of time to think.
Had another conversation yesterday about how podcasting can help business communicate and connect both internally and externally. One thing coming out of these conversations – there’s probably audio or video somewhere in your organization that is collecting dust and could be more used and more useful in an RSS feed. Aside from the convenience, there’s an accessibility aspect to podcasting.
Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion pointed to News@Cisco Podcast the podcast from Cisco’s PR team.
Garrick: “Doom’s coming out as a movie this fall, starring the Rock“.
Jen: “What’s Doom?”
Garrick: “The first big first-person shooter video game. You play the video game from the character’s point of view.”
Jen: “Maybe it’s not starring the Rock, it’s just from the Rock’s point of view.”
Doug Kaye states Mark Ramsey doesn’t get podcasting.
Mark Ramsey replies that Doug doesn’t get broadcasting.
Yes, podcasting is a great opportunity for broadcasters to experiment and create a farm team. Yes, podcasting is a no-brainer for a broadcasters to connect with their audience on their audience’s terms. Finally, Yes, podcasting is the easiest way to share audio on a very specific, niche topic with self-selected people.
Mark is right, podcasting and videoblogging can’t be shoehorned into traditional distribution channels:
No, it doesn’t make sense for a movie theater to show an extremely niche production. Though perhaps if they did, it would help solve their current attendance problems. Mark Cuban suggests focusing on the customer also. Though, perhaps even movie theaters are already catering to niche audience; those that don’t find DVDs from Netflix good enough.
On the Silicon Valley Gillmor Gang, Robert Scoble complains that while Adam Curry’s early Daily Source Codes were addictive (that’s why I started podcasting), Curry’s PodShow on Sirius Satellite Radio isn’t interesting in the least. Proving that podcasting is unique from radio, just as blogs are unique from newspapers, and videoblogs are unique from television.
Nothing in podcasting requires it to be a stepping stone to mass appeal. It could be, and this is a benefit – especially to broadcasters. But podcasting can in-fact be the end game. Independent and ignorant of broadcasting’s constraints a podcaster could build a small (less than 10,000), loyal, and passionate listener base by fulfilling an extremely specific niche. A successful podcast – though a failure by broadcast measures.
iTunes Top 100 Podcast list (counting the number of times in 24 hrs the ‘subscribe’ link was clicked), the Feedster Top 500 list, and every other Top X listing is an attempt at shoehorning. As Dave Slusher eludes, these rankings assume all blogs and podcasts are competing for the exact same audience. If you’re looking for a blog or podcast on gardening in the Upper Midwest or learning Japanese, these lists don’t help. More on the “Evils of Head-ism” at the Long Tail including the fantastic, “Nobody cares if bananas outsell soft drinks.”
Ultimately, I’m talking about 2 very different mentalities:
Considering customers now regularly blog about their market experiences, I recommend option number 2. As does Seth Godin in his recent ‘Clueless’ post
Strip the web of all the graphics, all the CSS, and all the AJAX, and you’re left with a list of things, their detail information, and the forms to add more items to the list.
RSS is the list. The web browser is simply a presentation of it. Same as my feed aggregator, my email client, and my instant messaging client.
As such, the list as RSS should come first, it’ll be needed anyway, with all the various presentations simply parsing it out. The RSS file is the molecule of the internet, made up of atoms, er, items.
To add to the list, Web Services. The create, read, update, delete functions offered through web services are always needed by Web developers. Seems like the site itself should simply be another customer of its web services.
As broken by Tristan Louisthe Mac Observer (corrected by Doc), NPR is not renewing their contract with Audible.
This is a good thing. Podcasting and public radio are peas and carrots. They belong together. By not renewing the Audible contract, NPR removed the easiest obstacle preventing them from offering more podcasts.
After some conversations with a handful of people in public radio, the biggest challenge is their underlying organization and business structure. As Doc Searls states:
“NPR essentially wholesales programming to local stations, which retail them to listeners.”
Prior to the ease of podcasting, I listened to WNYC‘s On the Media, via KNOW. Today, I receive each week’s program automatically every Friday night – direct from WNYC.
As I mentioned in ‘Podcasting Rewards Good Conversation‘, the biggest win for public radio stations could be in the smaller markets – Wisconsin Public Radio for example. They’d no longer have to purchase programming at prices they’d rather not pay and can reach past their broadcast antenna for members passionate about their homegrown programs.
“There’s no time of day that would be good for me. I don’t plan my days around a radio or TV schedule because, quite frankly, I don’t need to. I have an iPod and I can listen to what I want, where I want and when I want. And given that there’s already more good programming than I have time for, anyone who doesn’t make it easy for me by providing an RSS feed with enclosures simply won’t make the cut. Even in my car, unless it’s just a trip to the grocery store, I no longer tune in a broadcast station.” – Doug Kaye
If you’ve been following along for a while, you know I’m on a quest to learn Ruby and specifically – Ruby on Rails. Back in May I started on Sam’s Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days. After the fourth time through day 15, I knew I needed some other assistance.
The inspiration to find the other assistance came from the How to set up a Ruby on Rails Weblog in 15 minutes quicktime movie. I ordered Agile Web Development with Rails, and in 2 days, I’m half way through the book with a better understanding of AJAX, web services, and a fairly useful project to show for it. Yes, you’ll start to see the changes.
Ruby and Rails?
Back in Day 1 of Teach Yourself Ruby I talked about the Principle of Least Surprise. This principle is how Ruby on Rails made web development fun again. I know that every two hours, I’ll have at a least one bug fixed and at least new featured added. Thanks David.
The comments feed of the First Crack Podcast is now a podcast. This is part of the new version of my WP-iPodCatter plugin.
To add your audio comment to the feed, just add a link to the mp3 file in the comments form.
Yep, that’s it.