Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Folks, listen to what Papa Doc says about podcasting and radio.  

Podcasting News: "In a surprise move only tangentially related to podcasting, iconoclast and developer Dave Winer turned 50 today."  

Broadcast to podcast: "Every weekday you can download highlights from CHUM FM’s Morning Show with Roger Rick and Marilyn to your MP3 player." Bing! 

CNET: "We media types need to quit kowtowing to manufacturers who are trying in vain to hold on to the last shred of control they think they have. Those manufacturers need to wake up and smell the RSS feeds--the information's already out there." 

Kosso sent an email suggesting I do an image search on Google for "xml inventors." Please don't go there if you are easily frightened or are under a certain age, or prone to nightmares. 

WSJ: Corporate Marketers Try Out Blogs. 

Rogers Cadenhead has lost his mind. He's giving away free Radio UserLand books. 

I keep meaning to write an update of my Archos mini-computer. I take it everywhere with me and love it. It works really well. I keep discovering things it can do. The wifi hardly works at all. This isn't the review, btw, just the reminder that I owe you one. 

Leon Winer, PhD: "If you think fifty is nifty let me tell you that at seventy-five it's great to be alive." 

Armangil's podcatcher is a "podcast client for the command line." 

Sylvia's love letter to two Daves, one of whom is me!  

Now that the "marketing" folk have arrived in RSS-land, I've become a utopian. Isn't that funny. Hey remember, this an optional advertising place. Treat me with respect or your subscription goes into the bit-bucket. Marketing guys and their messages. I can think of a few choice words for them.  

I thought I would do a lot of podcasts last night, but nope -- too busy schmoozing and the place was so loud. Lots of good gossip. I think we're becoming an industry. And I'm seeing people for the third and fourth times at NY dinner events, so there's some continuity developing. Of course we don't all agree, but that's part of the fun. Lots of good data exchanged. And then we do it again, starting Friday, at a Southern blog meetup on a huge scale, in Nashville, y'all! 

What a birthday. My voice is gone. Good sign. Speaking with Jim Moore from a cab yesterday afternoon he thought I sounded like Bob Dylan. Heh. If he heard me now he'd think he was talking with Everett Dirksen.  

More comments on the Curry-Sirius deal 

Om Malik posits that the deal is really about broadcasting not podcasting.

When you combine yesterday's announcement with the weekend strategy-cast that becomes obvious. Some talent is leaving the podcastosphere, and joining the broadcastosphere, where the issues are different. They don't have to worry about podsafe music up in satellite-land because they've made their deal with the RIAA. That means that there will be new content created for the 4-hour broadcast that can't be played on the Internet.

The scaling issues that confront a popular podcast like DSC go away in the satellite system that already has its scaling worked out. But also gone is the breathless freedom, the DIYness of podcasting. As one of Om's commenters points out, the satellite people will want some control, the kind of control that isn't present in podcasts.

The BitTorrent corner-turn is nowhere near as hard as some think, but it is a corner-turn, and will require careful work with developers. Now that the air has cleared, and we can see that there are two distinct approaches, one which is a revisit of an old medium (radio), and the other a continuation of the new (podcasting), it could be time for the podcast community to get moving again.

But there's still another shoe out there,which has yet to drop. Odeo. In the spirit of "we do what we know how to do," it seems fair to assume that Ev and company will look at podcasting and see Blogger plus some of the community improvements of Flickr. I suspect that will further clear up what podcasting is, and isn't.

Comment here.