You do your thing and I’ll do mine. I like the blog form and I love the toolset I have to work with them. If I had to do all this in the form of a wiki, I’d have said “fuck it” and quit years ago. I just don’t like using wikis. I don’t have a problem reading them, but I find writing in them painful. I have made minor edits in them, but using them as an authoring tool sucks.

Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to collaborate, decide and agree. But if you don’t, who cares what you have said, since it’s only you saying it?

For the life of me, I can’t understand why you have this stance. Having umpteen wikis vs. umpteen blogs is at best a lateral move.

But could we please put it in wiki, not blog, format, so it’s worth reading? Blog bad wiki good, from the reader’s point of view, there is no time to read anything but the current snapshot of consensus opinion.

Maybe something like openpolitics.ca

What is different about podcasting from previous internet radio style mp3 files is that the hype in the media has caused poscasting to catch on; thus more podcasts; thus more listeners; thus more podcasts.

Dave, please do more serious controversial shows like the godcast you did.

The vast majority of what I care about is the new voices and interaction. Radio listenership is at a 30 year low, and that is for a reason. Part is competition for attention from other media but the largest part is that what they are broadcasting isn’t worth listening to. When they podcast the same content I don’t want to listen to on the radio, that just gives me another way to not to listen
it. The second I had a decent alternative to broadcast radio in my car, I stopped listening to it. I do listen to some radio, but nothing I can hear in my area when I want to listen to it.

I counted in my iPodderX list. I’m subscribed to 10 feeds that are existing radio programs, 4 that were existing stream-based radio programs prior to the podcast era, and 56 that exist because of the podcast era. By that, I think you can say that about 15% of my attention is towards existing broadcasters and the rest is to the new voices.

I think we clearly look at the world with different colored glasses as I still don’t think you really hearing what I am saying about podcasting and the history of downloadable spoken-word content. You are so focused on the new voices part of podcasting that you are not able to see my flipside view of it. I have always said that podcasting in the long run will be remembered for the creation of new and different content. These voices are part of that, but I am addressing the other side of podcasting which is its use by the major broadcasters and other long-time distributors of downloadable spoken-word content. I am tired of being painted as a person who does not get what is important about podcasting, that is unfair as I have been a student of it since it started. We are both pioneering podcasters and broadcasters. The only real difference between us is that I have less interest in talking about the new voices and more interested in talking about current broadcaster voices and how this podcasting development is changing what they do. I agree that the technology of podcasting in not important, but it will be a topic until the technology piece disappears from the listeners view. I think that day is coming, but is not here yet and we must continue to talk about the context of the changes occuring at all levels of spoken-word audio distribution.

Rob Greenlee
WebTalk Radio
http://www.webtalkradio.com

Dave Slusher at Evil Genius Chronicles has an interesting post about the criticism that pod [...]

This is what standards are supposed to do: enable intelligent and interesting remixes of previous technoloyg which the original creators might not have envisioned.

The problem I have with conflating podcasts with previous (and concurrent) forms of audio on the web is that if you say that MP3s without RSS are podcasts it automatically makes a ton of things podcasts that the original author or poster never intended into podcasts, like ringtones that are on the net, or every song on a filesharing service.

There are many media that are defined by how they’re distributed (think television, radio, newspapers).

Maybe the problem is that many recent innovations have started to decouple media from the original distribution mechanism that gave it its shape. Over the air television gets piped down a cable, radio comes from a satellite, phones don’t have wires, the newspaper now can be viewed on the net instead of its traditional dead tree distribution.

I think in part what people are expressing is their indifference to distribution. Maybe this is what happens when a VERY VERY widely distributed format (MP3) meets a less widely known one (RSS). It seems to me that this is a byproduct of the fact that more people “get” MP3s than RSS.

I often ask people who don’t like the subscription aspect of podcasts, or don’t get its value, if they use RSS to read blogs.

Very frequently the answer is “no.” If you look at podcasts for users who have never used any kind of aggregator, the learning curve is much higher than for those who already subscribe to a lot of feeds. For them the change is just incremental — now some of their feeds deliver files.

Technology is full of people whose computers half work. They feel cranky, and the low quality of most software means that when they try something new, they don’t know if it will work or how long it will take to make it work. (Think if you rented a car at the airport and felt the way it’s common and normal to feel about software). The most common reaction is, “I don’t need that, I don’t want anything new.”

That’s one of the reasons I called my movie about podcasting “Four Minutes about Podcasting.” Even if you decided it wasn’t for you, you knew up front how much time you were going to be risking.

We’re still at a technological point where people don’t (and shouldn’t) have the “oh, I’ll just download this nifty little widget, I understand what it does and it won’t take me a long time to set it up or figure out how to use it” point that signals mass adoption.

In Podcasting: Mechanist View vs Humanist View, Dave Slusher makes an excellent point. He talks about the people who…