As one of the unwashed, or one of those without an iPod, Shuffle, iPod mini, iPod nano, etc, I feel like I get the short stick of podcasting. Whenever a website says download our podcast I read that as “download our .mp3 which is probably huge, served from a slow server and then put it on your mp3 player” which I decide sounds like a lot of effort for something that might suck. So I don’t bother.
Even then, once the mp3 is on my mp3 player my fast forward/rewind just spins along until I tell it to stop. So if I listened to 23 minutes of a 40 minute podcast it’s no quick thing to get back to 22 minutes 50 seconds to start listening where I left off.
I’ve listened to some good podcasts and some boring ones. I like Authors@Google but that’s on YouTube, how do I get that onto my mp3 player quickly?
This is what I want so I can embrace podcasting with vigor:
- The online podcast market, where a user feedback system allows me to sort by genre, topic, country of origin, most popular, most downloaded, newest, most downloaded in last 24 hours/6 hours/1 hour, etc. A way for the system to make good recommendations “If you liked this podcast you might also like…” Selling podcasts is fine but don’t force them upon me. If a podcast is good, give it away the first one for free and then if ratings and reviews by users are good then it will become popular in spite of.
- Here is my mp3-playing gps-driven personal-details-embedded iPhone in my pocket. I click podcast on screen, podcast is transferred to iPhone.
- Pull up podcast on iPhone. Meta data describing podcast, user reviews, jump-to-this-point-in-time bookmarks with description of what is happening at each bookmark. The ability to jump quickly between bookmarks and also stop the podcast with the option to return to that point easily.
- Let me send portions of the podcast to my friends easily “Export bookmark 3 to bookmark 5 > send to friend with this comment: …”. Let me send it to my blog, back to the podcast market, etc.
- This podcast sucks. Let me tell the world from my iPhone by feeding back to the podcast market my ranking and review. Is there an option for the content creator(s) to open/close responses on their podcast? So if they wanted my review is limited to the podcast market or I can feedback commendations and criticisms directly to the content creator(s).
- Downloading album art for podcast ala iTunes. What if I want to add my own custom album art? What if I want to share my custom album art to the podcast market? What if I want to transcript the podcast for aurally impaired users and upload that?
rock and roll could never hip hop like this
August 11th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Very interesting commentary.
I would agree with the fact that podcasting has a long way to go.
For my 2-cents-worth: They should be easier to set up than they are - I’m currently battling to create a PodCast for Beat Dungeon Radio…
The idea of podcasting is a good one, but it needs further iterations/development so that it’s really, er, something.
But I have to repeat - looks like you put a bit of thought into this: interesting ideas.
August 11th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Sounds good. I imagine such websites already exist? If not, bam! You should totally make it in your free time.
I haven’t really got into podcasts, for similar reasons - too much dicking around. I guess being able to subscribe to them in iTunes (which I believe you can) is the sort of thing that could get me into them. I mean really I only find out about them when websites I read link to them, which isn’t often…
August 17th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Yeah, it all depends on whether the infomation contained within the podcast is good enough so that when you serach for a specific topic within, say, iTunes, you do find the right thing. People do make the mistake of not adding much description to the podcast, and they can forever go unnoticed…
db, IT IS a lot of dicking around trying to set it up… it really should be much easier, but man, once it was up and running, the number of downloads for my radio show has more than doubled when compared with the previous week when people could just find the link to the file on any of the websites I post ‘em to…
..and it seems that people do enjoy the convenience of subscribing to something, chucking the iPod on the dock, and letting it do it’s thing in getting the latest edition of the podcast.