Wednesday, 13 July 2005

Mark Cuban is a Spoiled Sport

Yesterday I finally fired up iTunes 4.9 to see what all the hoopla was about. I was prepared for a reasonably steep learning curve, but about 3 minutes later I had subscribed to my first podcast and with in an hour I had downloaded 1.5 days of solid podcast content. I am currently subscribed to 23 podcasts, most of which I've download all of their available content (backcasts ?). I have 2.7 days of content occupying 1.6GB of hard disk space waiting to be sync with my iPod. When new episodes are released for any of these 23 feeds, iTunes downloads them for me automatically. This is really cool.

Since I'm still in discovery/experimentation mode, I've tried to scoop up tidbits from all along the long tail. I'm subscribe to The Al Franken Show, CNN News, Science @ NASA, Ghostly Talk, Rocketboom, How to Do Stuff and YACK – The Nantucket Online Community. It's more work than satellite radio but it's time shifted and the volume of content is staggering.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm though. Mark Cuban recently wrote about podcasting being the new streaming audio (in a bad a way). I think he has some points –

You see, there are no hit's on the Internet... Podcasting is hot. Pod casting is cheap and easy. Podcasting can be fun. Creating your own podcast and trying to make a business out of it is a mistake.

But I also think he's missing some key differences.

  • Podcasting is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than streaming audio in the '90s.

  • With Apple's new iTunes 4.9 being free and cross-platform podcasting is headed for the mainstream – it's not being driven by startups unknown to the general public over technology that's inaccessible to the "everyman".

  • Broadband penetration today is huge. Not that it matters, podcasting is less dependent on bandwidth than was streaming.

  • And perhaps most importantly, podcasting works.

So, download iTunes 4.9 and decide for yourself.

Posted by Matt Galloway at 9:58 AM in Podcasting
Comments (0)

Saturday, 9 July 2005

Podcasting Rocks!

I was in the car today for 10+ hours with my family and I took the opportunity to download a couple of podcasts to see what all the buzz was about. I listened to Steve Rubel, Steve Jobs, Chris Pirillo & Ponzi, Code Sermon and Other World News.

Overall I was very impressed. In general, the production quality is much lower than commercial radio, for example - this is to be expected. The amazing thing is the content itself. Steve Rubel doesn't sound like an A-List Blogger - he sounds like a really smart guy who is genuine and sincere and is stumbling and experimenting in this neat new medium. In other words, he sounds like any of us. Suprisingly, it's the underproduced nature of his podcast that gives it sincerity and credibility. Reminds me of listening to tapes of indy bands in college, you know "real" music - not the stuff the record companies wanted you to hear.

Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement address is amazing and powerful - and short (about 15 minutes). This is the best motivational 15 minutes you'll have this year. YOU MUST LISTEN TO THIS!

My wife and I listened to Chris and Ponzi telling the story of how they met through Match.com. My wife and I also met through Match. We identified with Chris and Ponzi and laughed at ourselves in the process. I felt a deep connection with this couple. I can relate to them, identify with them more than I have even been able to with hyper-produced commercial on-air talent.

Code Sermon is weird and fun but wouldn't play all the way through on my iPod. It's some guy evangelising good coding practices to organ music. I think I would really enjoy this in small doses if not for the technical difficulties.

Other Word News is a reasonably professional sounding radio-like mystery/sci-fi serial in the vein of Mystery Theater or some such. The web site crashes Firefox on my iBook but the program is fun. The quality and effort of the program is impressive.

The suprising thing to me was that when I dumped a bunch of these things into my iPod and hit play, it sounded like my own personal readio station because they all played one after the other without me having to click anything. I knew that this was how it was going to work but I didn't realize how seamlessly randomly assembled content like this would flow together. For the first time I really got micromedia.

During our vacation I'll be learning how to use the new iTunes podcasting feature. I may never listen to broadcast radio again.
Posted by Matt Galloway at 12:02 AM in Podcasting
Comments (2)
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