SAN FRANCISCO, 2 April 2005 — Ever wondered who reads all those millions of weblogs that are supposedly revolutionizing the media world? Well, here’s another question to get you thinking: Who will listen to the audioblogs known as podcasts that will supposedly revolutionize the world of radio?
If you’ve never heard of a podcast, here’s a brief description. The concept was developed last summer when Adam Curry, 41, a former VJ for MTV and an inveterate tech tinkerer, became intrigued with the idea of freeing Internet radio and audio blogs from his computer and putting them on the capacious drive of his Apple iPod. He called the result podcasting, named after the Apple iPod that is often at the center of the system. The basic idea is instead of listening to radio over the airwaves, you download the radio shows you want from the Internet onto your iPod and listen to them when you want.
That may not seem such a revolutionary idea, except for the fact that the wonders of digital technology make it easy for anyone who wants to record his own radio show to upload them to various sites that then use syndication feeds to deliver the radio segments directly to listeners MP3 players.
Listeners interested in hearing the ramblings and eclectic music choices of such shows as “Soccertunes” or “Geekspeak” can click a few buttons and presto the show will automatically be downloaded to their iPod whenever they connect their device to their computer. Thousands of amateur “blaggards” (or should that be bloggards?) have launched podcasts since Curry and his pals unveiled the technology last autumn. But now even big business is getting in on the game. Companies like Heinekin and Playboy have launched their own podcasts while Virgin Radio recently became the first major radio station to offer content for podcasting.
Not surprisingly the new medium is earning plaudits from the usual digerati. “Podcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it,” noted Linux guru Doc Searls when he discovered podcasting way back in September.
Searls believes that podcasting is at the same embryonic stage where blogging was in 1999, when he was just one of a few dozen people writing an online journal. Five years later there are 4 million. By some measures podcasting may be growing even faster. There were just 17 Google results for Podcasting when Searls did a search in September 2004. At the end of March 2005 there were 2.7 million results. There are numerous sites like podcastbunker.com, ipodder.org, podcastcentral.com and podcastalley.com that offer comprehensive directories of thousands of the DIY broadcasts.
Curry is working on ways to take podcasting mainstream and recently met with leading media and advertising executives in the US to discuss the prospects. “It is totally going to kill the business model of radio,” says Curry. He believes that mainstream media and advertising companies are rapidly losing the ability to reach their audiences as the decline of network television, the rise of the Internet and the fragmentation of the media make the models that have existed for the last 50 years rapidly obsolete.
“They are scared to death of the next generation — like my daughter who is 14 — who don’t listen to radio,” Curry says. “They are on MSN, they’ve got their iPod, their MP3 player, they’ve got their Xbox - they are not listening to radio. So how are they going to reach these audiences?”
“It is the distribution that is changing and the barriers are being brought down so everyone can be part of it.” The phenomenal success of the iPod, of peer-to-peer systems like Napster and its descendants, and of social networking site like Friendster that let users communicate with each other and with small like-minded communities offers hope that such a model could prove popular, experts say.
Moreover, the advent of advertising models like Google’s Adsense that automatically direct adverts to relevant websites, even if these attract only a small audience, provides a further boost to the chances of podcasting.
But Dave Winer, who teamed with Curry to launch the first podcasts and is also the writer of the longest-running weblog on the net, Scripting News, is more sanguine and warns against expecting an overnight revolution. “We’re the sources, the people doing stuff, and podcasting is a way to tell people who care what we’re doing,” Winer told the BBC this week. “No matter how you look at it, commercializing this medium isn’t going to make very much money.”
