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Podcasting, a White Elephant
Now, I’ve been mulling this over for so long that, in fact, the “podcasting” goalposts have moved some considerable distance since I first heard the term and choked most unpleasantly on my morning cup of tea.
Which is just the first problem – what the hell is podcasting anyway?
For the sake of some brevity, I want to tackle two things which seem to fall under this latest abortion of a word:
1. Recording yourself rambling on about something, and releasing it on the web.
2. Using RSS Media Enclosures to distribute audio content.
The majority of my scorn is reserved for the former.
See, it’s really quite simple. Just because you have a face for radio does not mean that you have a voice for radio.
In fact, for the most part the inverse seems to be true. I’ve tried to listen to a few bona-fide “definition 1″ podcasts All of them contained the horrors of someone’s muffled nasal whine pontificating on topics which were dull enough even when he had the good grace to write them down so I could skip to the actual point.
This may sound elitist, but… well, no, it is elitist. Spoken-word performance is an art which very few people can master, and I say that as someone who’s actually tried and just barely scraped by.
All the podcasts I’ve heard have lacked the following essential qualities:
- Professional presentation – no ums, ahs, dead-end rambling sentences or “dead air”
- A clear, articulate voice.
- A lack of interference from other sound sources
- A clear point to their existence, communicating something of actual note
There’s a simple reason that these things are lacking – good radio takes time and effort to produce. It takes some scripting (yes, even for live broadcasts). It takes more than a passing knowledge of sound engineering. Even if you’re from a rickety hut in the middle of a muddy festival site (yes, I’ve seen it done) you still need a few guys around who can make like MacGuyver with a tea-tray, an old cassette deck and some copper tubing to produce professional-quality sound.
You, oh pod-caster, are an untrained amateur. You’re never going to produce a home video which is hailed as a Scorcese-esque masterpiece, and, guess what? You ain’t Radio 4 either. Not even close.
The fair-enough response to that might be “so don’t listen to my podcast then.” And, well, I don’t. But I remain completely puzzled by the fact that you’re bothering to record this stuff. Why on earth would you pour an hour or more per “broadcast” into something which you’re really, really bad at?
And why, after several months, do I access another podcast (after succumbing to the sort of curiosity which mangles felines), and find that you haven’t improved an iota?
At least, in the nature of all internet neologisms, the term is so broad that it does actually cover a few things which don’t make my ears cringe.
The following are potentially interesting:
- Local/amateur/pirate radio stations who stream their programmes and provide an RSS feed
- Bands/music labels who provide lists of tracks via an RSS feed
Uh, I ran out, but I’m open to the suggestion that there are many more uses.
But here’s the thing which upsets me – we’re back with the same-old same-old. It’s a useless, misleading, broad term. And an ugly one. Again.
Firstly, I know that Apple have seized the soul of most of the “I’m so hip I’m following a million other Starbucks Venti Latte drinkers” scene, but hey, the iPod isn’t the only music player on the market. It wasn’t the first. It isn’t the best either. Drop the “pod”.
Secondly, “broadcasting” is the act of sending a continuous stream of programming which people can receive and consume as it is sent. Y’know, like Broadcast TV or Broadcast Radio. Archived material is not “broadcast”, it’s “streamed” or “downloaded”. Drop the “casting”.
Thirdly, the RSS “enclosure” tag is badly specified, and not something to by hyped endlessly.
- 12216320 what? Seconds? Bytes? Bits? Elephants?
- “audio/mpeg”, sure. But I have to discern the codec version from the filename? That’s reliable… Didn’t people bash Microsoft for that years ago?
Sheesh.
Finally, can we stop complicating RSS now please? Remember that middle letter, and the fact that it once stood for “simple”?
…so again, yes, I’m kinda hung up on semantics. But these things matter to me, and they should matter to you too. Our language is all we have to describe the world around us. Do we have to pollute it with faddish terms? And do we have to disseminate it in voices which really, really don’t sound good when recorded?
I don’t think we do, but I don’t expect you to agree either.
June 3rd, 2005 at 7:44 am
The middle ‘S’ never stood for ‘Simple.’ That is only in Dave Winer’s mind, and he is one of the main criminals behind podcasting in the first place. RSS did, and does, stand for RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary (the latter is acceptable only because the RDF was dropped).
The initial term was RDF Site Summary, which necessarily implies the intent of RSS at the very beginning was not to be “simple,” as RDF is not simple. RDF is, however, intended to be extensible.
I would agree that this terrible crap Winer calls “RSS 2.0″ should not be so extensible, because that conflicts with its purpose, which is to be simple. But that is just one more reason not to use RSS 2.0.
My own music RSS feed at http://homepage.mac.com/pudge/tunes.rss is in RSS 1.0, with sane — though not simple! — enclosure semantics.
June 3rd, 2005 at 9:57 am
Heh. The ‘S’ point was a, um, subtle dig which you effectively expanded
That said, I actually think “Really simple syndication” is probably a better way of describing the purpose of RSS to the average punter who cares not what RDF is, why it’s not simple, or any other element of the technical details.
Whilst RSS is not intrinsically simple as a format, it has taken on a life where apps/sites like My Yahoo! and Firefox support it (and a whole host of others are dedicated to reading it). The upshot is that it’s very easy to get hold of diverse feeds from various sites. Joe News Consumer really doesn’t care how easy the stuff is to set up and create, as long as he can consume it.
As for the competing versions of RSS, well, I personally believe we should all use the one true RSS. 3.0 all the way, baby!
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Have you seen Maciej Ceglowski’s Audioblogging Manifesto?
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:59 pm
I hadn’t seen that, no. Thanks!
A particularly genius way of making the point.
Typical, that the best piece of “audioblogging” I’ve heard is a well-made argument against the entire practice….
June 4th, 2005 at 5:00 am
“Joe News Consumer really doesn’t care how easy the stuff is to set up and create, as long as he can consume it.”
What a lot of rot!
I’ve got a computer science degree, and I can’t be bothered to faff around with all this RSS and podcasting guff.
Somebody here was moaning that the iPod wasn’t the first or the best MP3 player. No, but guess what: it’s the one that most people *perceive* is the easiest to use, and the most compatible with everything else. And guess what else: it won! Marketing is all about perception, not reality. It’s about emotion, not logic. Guess what: people are *not* rational!
I used to be a techie, and now I’m doing an MBA, and all this marketing stuff is really interesting if you can see both sides of the coin. To my mind, the technology is actually *totally irrelevant* (heresy, surely!) and it’s the total customer experience that’s important (even though it sounds like buzzword bullsh*t!)
Don’t forget that almost any technology that’s going to be picked up by the masses has to be very simple – if people can’t program a VCR after 20 years then they’re not going to mess about with anything that requires technical skill to set up.
One of the big debates in media at the moment, certainly if the conferences that I go to are anything to go by (and they have big people there, so they should be) is this: what’s going to be driving media forward: technology or content? Admittedly this is a bit chicken-and-egg, and they probably will develop together. But I think a key point is this: there’s no point everyone being able to broadcast to the world if they haven’t got anything to say. That’s why publishers and editorial teams will continue to be important, in my view.
June 4th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
Ian, despite your “What a lot of rot!”, I don’t think you say a single thing I disagree with!
I happen to know that consumption of RSS feeds is actually quite popular, in places where it’s made simple. On this site you’ll find an “add to My Yahoo!” button – one click, and you can keep track of what I post here (assuming you use My Yahoo!).
As for setting it up, the only reason I have RSS feeds is that they worked out of the box when I installed Movable Type.
This is why I argue that “Really Simple Syndication” is a good moniker – people will use it when it’s transparently simple, and the communication of that simplicity starts with what you call the technology.
As for the iPod, the moaning was me. And I agree, it won. For now. Possibly, in colloquial terms, “iPod” will be the generic term for portable mp3 players regardless of what competitors put out, much like all portable cassette players were popularly “Walkmen”, regardless of whether they were built by Sony. Apple had better hope not – that way Trademark dilution lies.
Personally, I currently have a Creative Zen Micro, because it has reliable battery life, it’s at least as pretty as the iPod, it’s proved easier to use than iPod/iTunes ever did, and it can play tunes from a multitude of subscription/purchase stores rather than tying me to iTMS.
I’m not going to get into DRM/format arguments here – that’s a whole other issue which is better explored elsewhere.
“The technology is irrelevant” is not a heresy around these parts – you’re more than welcome to say exactly what I argue on a near-weekly basis in the development communities I’m part of at work.
As for “technology or content”, the past 10 years have suggested that consumption of content drives technology. The first video compression and delivery mechanisms were picked up by pornographers as a way to disseminate their material more easily.
Over time, other video content came online, and two things happened – codecs were improved to increase quality, and broadband usage rose to cater for those who were consuming more of this high-bandwidth content.
Now we’ve reached a new plateau, where broadband usage is high enough to allow content like music downloads, online MMRPGs and film trailers/music videos to be distributed to a wide enough audience that money can be made.
In the next decade, we’ll probably see online streams/downloads of entire films starting to compete with physical distribution of rental DVDs, particularly as various companies gear up with their “media center”/”digital home” technologies, and package them in boxes which (here’s that point again) are as easy to use as “plug in, switch on”.
This will partly be a content issue (studios figuring out how to licence their content for the new platform), and partly technology (streaming long videos is still intriguing if you’ve got a lot of consumers, DRM will continue to evolve, and those home media centers really do need to be “plug and play”…)
As for traditional publishing and editing roles, well… The argument of the “blog/podcast/next-big-thing will kill mainstream media” crowd is that new technologies will allow people to become their own publishers/editors by choosing RSS feeds (or whatever).
I really don’t buy it though, for reasons already argued in another piece. To those arguments, I’ll add my complete agreement with your general point here – I really can’t be bothered to edit my own news.
I subscribe to RSS feeds from maybe 5 sources, and collate those on a single page which gives me a general overview of what’s going on. Setting this up was as simple as clicking a few links on web pages. But I still rely on the staff of those organisations to “pre-filter”, package and deliver the stories to me.
Because, frankly, I’ve got better things to do.
Thanks for your comments – I like the way you think!
June 5th, 2005 at 5:07 am
Hello. I think that’s a good point about content driving technology forward. I suppose this then leads to the question that appears to be vexing the media types here at the business school, namely what will the next new types of media be? (And how can we make some money off it!)
Perhaps the fundamental question behind all of this is “What do people use media for?”
I’m fortunate to be studying at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, and we’re in the process of setting up a special centre for media. The dean of the school, when he’s not having dinner with the Prince of Wales(!), identified three hot areas for the future: the management of professional service firms (lawyers, consultants, etc); social entrepeneurship (funded by a huge donation from Jeff Skoll of eBay); and media & comms.
I’m not entirely sure what the aims of our media centre will be, but the people involved are top notch so presumably they’ve got it all worked out.