Oh Valleywag

Friday, April 20, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I think they're all smoking crack down there, or abusing small animals, or sticking things in orifices god never intended things to be stuck in, or maybe all of the above (at the same time), because their brains seem to be shrinking, visibly, every day.  

Sorry, but I had to even the score before I could write about them.  

The latest evidence of self-abuse is this piece where they say Apple won in podcasting. I strongly disagree. The users won. And the people with programming that the users like won.  

It's not all about technology. One would think the Valleywag guys would get that. Sure there's a little bit needed, and Apple helped distribute podcasts, enormously. If I were Evan Williams or Adam Curry I never would have invested in the systems they invested in, even before Apple came in to the market. I put my stake in the ground when both these systems launched. No future here. 

It was kind of obvious -- podcasts aren't like photos, you can't make a social network form about them because people get ideas about podcasts when they're nowhere near a computer, unlike photos or blog posts. Apple didn't make this mistake. Their goal was to help the MP3s make the trip from the podcaster's server to the user's iPod, and that they do fairly well, so god bless them, they helped us get this thing going. Thank you Apple. 

So it's shaken out as it obviously would. There was no boom in podcasting technology, and there won't be. There's still lots of opportunities in players, iPods are the best available, but they're designed to play music, not podcasts, and there's a lot of room for improvement. Whether the VCs will bet on that is a good question, or any consumer electronics companies other than Apple, but that's where they should be putting their money, not on fakeouts like Odeshow and Podeo.