I am sure that I am going to eat these words as soon as I write them, but I am not buying.
Literally, I am not buying an iPod so I can Podcast!
Sure I can make any such device work with enclosure supported weblog feeds and sure WordPress supports enclosures now. I know that I can add casts to this weblog using WordPress 1.3 and I can do a bunch of cool stuff with the Windows Podcasting application that I am writing. But do we really want to *listen* to one person rambling on?
What are your podcasting experiences? Do you like to listen to a single voice ramble on? I would think that a Podcast that you can download to your device and listen to (say in your car) would make you feel a closer bond with the person you are listening to.
While on the subject, how do you start a Podcast? Do you introduce yourself and your blog when you start recording? If everyone started putting out Podcasts and you downloaded all of the 10,000 megs to your player, how in the world would you know who is who? I would think Matt was Scoble and Dave would sound like Adam.
Even worse are the symptoms of forgetting podcast content. Say I hear Scoble say something really cool, or I want to refute something that Winer says one morning, I would kill myself trying to write it down while speeding down I-75!
I like talk radio. Does that make me a natural Podcaster/listener?
Thankfully, I sound like the average mid-westerner (go figure!), would heavily accented people be at a disadvantage at Podcasting?
What do you do if you get tongue tied and all kinds of lost in the middle of your podcast? Do you start all over again?
Was Podcasting designed for the A-List blogger and meant for the rest of us to listen to them? I really cannot see having hundreds of podcast feeds and gigabytes of information to be downloaded everyday to get my news fix.
Maybe my understanding of the process is completely out in left field.
Hello!
I’m the developer of iPodderX, a podcast receiver for the Mac. I just thought you should know that you do not need an iPod to take advantage of podcasting. Audio gets shuffled off to iTunes, photos to iPhoto. If you don’t have an iPod, simply listen through iTunes or view through iPhoto. In fact, I do very little podcast listening on my iPod, but it’s great to have all this content downloaded automatically. I always tell people, it’s like a newsreader, but for audio and other types of content. So don’t be shy, jump in! The water’s fine!
Well, I’d say that while it might not have been explicitly designed for the abloggers, they’re really the only people who will end up using it with any success.
Here’s my predicition at how it will go:
random schmuck will start using it all the time. 30 of his friends will read the blog and that’ll be that.
After a few months, the ablogger crowd will suddenly “discover” this in much the same way that North America was discovered by the Europeans. A few will start using it semi-regularly. then, they’ll get bored and go back to writing stuff.
Every now and then, someone will be at a convention and fancy themselves as a radio reporter, much the same way that people with really shitty camera phones who can’t tell black from white fancy themselves as photojournalists with their moblogs.
Remember the whole audblog thing? That’s where this started. What happened to that?
Podcasting is just like every other form of content out there. You can’t listen to *every* radio show and watch *every* television show or movie ever made. Same thing with newspapers columnists and blogs. And restaurants.
You’ll learn about podcasts like everything else. Word of mouth/recommendations. That’s how we learned about certain blogs. It’s built one piece at a time by everyday people now. After all, doesn’t the I in Internet really stand for information overload? Heh.
And just before we go down this road, I must say, it’s high time we stop comparing audio to text to video to audio to text. A newspaper is not talk radio nor are they music videos or the evening news. Text, audio, and video are three different (yet supplemental) forms of content.
>>Do you like to listen to a single voice ramble on?
I like to listen to many voices ‘rambling on’…just like in real life…
>>While on the subject, how do you start a Podcast? Do you >>introduce yourself and your blog when you start recording?
You can…if you want to communicate who you are….but at the same time there are no rules for a Podcast…one of my favorites is nothing more than weird snippets of voices and conversations…it’s sort of an abstract piece of audio art…not for everyone but I enjoy it!
>>I like talk radio. Does that make me a natural Podcaster/listener?
Sure…actually anyone who is interested in ideas large and small, real and abstract, is a natural Podcaster/listener…
>>Thankfully, I sound like the average mid-westerner (go figure!), >>would heavily accented people be at a disadvantage at >>Podcasting?
The more voices, accents, dialects, and sounds the better…no matter who you are or where you are from, your voice should be heard because it’s YOUR voice…
>>What do you do if you get tongue tied and all kinds of lost in the >>middle of your podcast? Do you start all over again?
Keep going! I love real Podcasts from real people….real people get tongue tied, they drop their microphone, family members interupt their Podcast, etc, etc. Listeners empathize with reality…when your less than perfect, you’re one of us….
>>Was Podcasting designed for the A-List blogger and meant for the >>rest of us to listen to them?
Podcasting is for anyone with anything to say about anything, and within that coloful blend of voices I can create my own A-List that I choose to hear from regularly…that’s the beauty of it, and that’s why we need as many voices out there as possible…
I’m listening to Podcasts most days now, on my bus ride to work: but a lot of it is BBC radio content, not amateur content or audioblogs.
The written word is a great medium — it’s easy and cheap to edit and transmit, you can inline pictures, you can skim read, re-read, pause while reading. You can read and write without disturbing others or blocking out your environment with headphones. So if you’re comfortable with writing, keep writing. If you’re happy with reading, keep reading.
But, there’s stuff that works better as audio. Some personalities only shine when you hear their voice. Conversations between two or more people rarely translate well to print (note that a lot of successful amateur podcasts — and a lot of successful talk radio shows — consist of banter between a man and woman), jokes often depend on delivery, some puns are spoiled by spelling. If you feel there’s stuff you want to communicate that’s just not coming through in writing, maybe a podcast is worth a try.
Finally, it seems clear to me that there are people out there who are just “audio people”. Adam Curry encourages MP3 feedback and he’s just wild about Skype. Why doesn’t he prefer a simple email? Because he’s an audio guy. At work in the past I’ve got frustrated when people leave me voicemails — slow to navigate, I have to transcribe phone numbers out of them, they don’t get filed alongside my email — but I’ve come to realise, it’s just another example of how different people’s brains are wired up differently. The people who leave me voicemails would probably prefer it if I called them instead of sending mail or IM.
I won’t buy into it either. Or better yet, I should ride the coat-tails of this fad and make something like…oh, ProgramCaster(tm)! Sure people could just download programs, and put them on their computer using normal methods, but why bother when we can put some mystery around it by giving it a fancy name like, “A ProgramCast” and requireing them to download it into a seperate program with a fancy “Execute!” button. Then, they can talk with their friends and ask each other, “Hey man, did you get that latest ProgramCast? Yeah, I’m ProgramCastin’ like Magellan! Are you ProgramCastin’?” Then, all their friends will feel left out and start ProgramCasting just like their friends.Except me. Save your file as an MP3, because we all know that’s basically all a “podcast” is. An audio file. Audio files we’ve been downloading and listening to at our lesiure for…um, ever since the invention of an FTP server. Maybe your typical audio listener isn’t so advanced to know how to “Save File As…” or maybe it’s simply word-of-mouth. Whatever it is, It’s a mystery to me as to how crazy this technology is taking off. It makes me laugh. I have begun to cringe at the very sight and sound of the term, “Podcast.” I hope it’s only a fad.
I was sent here by Google in response to “podcast hype” query. Could you please let me know what’s so special about receiving a link to an audio or video file, downloading and playing it? No, frankly. Is there something extraordinarily new about podcasting? (Installed Juice. Downloaded a couple of clips. Where’s fun?)
The hype is a piece of shit!!!!!