I love podcasting

Topic created from blog post of the same name here

To be honest, at first I didn't buy into the hype. First of all I had to get over the name. I dislike the term "podcast" as it distorts what the breakthrough idea of the technology actually is. First things first. Podcasts have nothing to do with iPod's. To think of the balls of the person that called it podcasting really gets my panties in a bunch. What if MP3's were originally named Podsongs?

I was first exposed to the technology as I spent some time with the boys at Engine Studio. I had, of course, heard of podcasts / podcasting before that time but I had pretty much ignored it until early Summer '06. Needless to say I think that the boys at Engine are pretty much self admitted Mac fanboy's and may occasionally fall under that sweet <acronym title="Reality Distortion Field]RDF spell that Steve Jobs is so good at casting. So I wasn't surprised that they were excited about podcasting. I don't know why I never investigated podcasting prior to this point other than the fact that it seemed so instantly popular, and my own work had kept me pretty distant from it. As a side note, I have long thought that accepting a technology just because it is popular ( jumping on the bandwagon ) is a horrible trait, but I also think that dismissing a technology just because it is popular ( something I am more akin to do ) is similarly despicable.

One of the employees at Engine, Tim Stotz, has his own self coined VODcast ( video podcast ). He exposed me to it and I was intrigued...

I have since delved deeper into podcasts and I have found my own little niche of programs that I REALLY enjoy listening to, these include most products of the TWIT.tv network, which I like to think of as the phoenix like rebirth of the now defunct TechTV, as well as some great material from BrainFood, MathGradPodcast, JavaPosse, etc...

After finding these great programs, I sat down and tried to think about exactly what the big deal about podcasting is? Isn't podcasting simply personal radio broadcasting, with some syndication goodness bundled in? What's the big deal about that? Well here is what I am thinking:

Why podcasting is the cats pajama's?

Massive distribution potential
Marconi opened up the airwaves for communication, however I would argue that until very recently you could not conceivably create a radio broadcast, transmit it yourself and hope to get any sort of wide listener base. That is, until podcasting.

Users have the power
Users listen to what they want. They have broken free of the tyranny of the radio producer. Users can now find podcasts for all sorts of diverse and specialized topics. They also determine when they want to listen to it. Whether it is in their 45 minute commute into the city, or while they are walking the dog... Users are their own Radio producers deciding which shows are the best and when they are convenient to listen to. Also it is so refreshing to hear radio broadcasts that aren't completely overrun by advertisements, traffic reports, or the same 5 news headlines repeated over and over, ad nauseum. Podcasting has really refreshed the medium.

Affordable Marketing and organization
How would an individual that has a great idea for a radio show ever have gotten his idea off the ground? Sure he could have created some tapes and mailed them to some radio producer hoping that his unique voice and manner would have enough mass market appeal to get him a show somewhere in Nome, Alaska. ( Have you ever noticed that when your market is too big you really have to dumb everything down to a 3rd grade level? Howard Stern, anyone?) Now with podcasting you have some automatic marketing available with the iTunes music store, in which anyone can create their own podcast, submit it to iTunes and people will come along and listen. Then, if you have a great show, you can create momentum for it by asking for reviews on iTunes, votes on podcastalley etc...

Automation
The subscription nature of podcasting makes it really easy to distribute your latest programs, and almost always in an automated fashion. This has been a perpetual problem for marketers in the past... Ok so now that you have a customer, consumer, what have you... How do you keep them informed of your latest and greatest works? With podcasting, it is built-in. At this point the subscription model of podcasting is much more effective than any alternative method? How would you feel about a mass email with a huge audio file in it? I think that most people would think of this as SPAM, but when you subscribe to a podcast it feels like you are pulling this program down, instead of them pushing it out to you. They have really come up with a satisfying way to live in the Push or Pull nature of distribution, it exists as a hybrid model where the end user either remains subscribed and is pushed the latest and greatest, or can at will decide to unsubscribe or pick and choose which episodes they want to keep.

Essentially podcasting has put the mass communication power of Radio, combined it with an extremely low startup and production cost, embedded the greatness of TIVO/DVR user based control, and some good marketing / organizational tools ( iTunes Podcast directory, etc... ). This environment has really created something wonderful and all sorts of great things are coming out of it that would never make it onto more traditional broadcasting outlets. What a great time we live in.

Most people seem to "credit" the term *podcast* to Ben Hammersley's discussion of the technology in The Guardian on February 12th, 2004.

To be fair, he did discuss several alternatives that were vendor neutral such as Audioblogging and GuerillaMedia.