Who Listens If Everyones Podcasting?

Local NBC affiliate KARE11 came by this morning to talk podcasting and we continued the ‘who’s the audience when everyone publishes?’ conversation.

I don’t think this is a question about too much stuff to pay attention to, it’s a question about ownership of the publication process.

Traditionally, recording companies, television stations, newspaper publishers had an iron grip on the voices that were published. Their whims determined which perspectives received airtime and column inches. They kept the amount of information published down to what their capacity could support – an no more. They were gatekeepers not filters.

I’d much rather have the problem of too much to choose from than gatekeepers preventing things from being published.