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Indie Podcasters vs. Big Radio
skepticality writes "The weekly news and business magazine BusinessWeek has an article coming out in this weeks edition that highlights Skepticality, Coverville, AMP, and other indipendant podcasts and podcast networks. The article explains how a small number of indie podcasts are holding their own against the corporate and big-radio shows in the iTunes top 20 rankings." From the article: "In one of the shortest trajectories yet for a new Internet technology, podcasting has gone from the hands of indie developers to media giants in less than a year. Credit Apple. With typical finesse, it has created a centralized, easy-to-use service on iTunes that makes it a snap to find and listen to podcasts, the audio recordings that can be downloaded from the Net and played on a computer or portable music player. Apple also put out a new version of the iTunes software, which makes it easy for people to create their own podcasts, and invited all to post their creations on the site. Indie podcasters such as Kempenaar and Hallgren rejoiced, ready for the mainstream to embrace the technology they had championed."
Seems like some "Big Radio" stations in Australia are embracing podcasting; ABC Radio National at least is offering some of its programs as podcasts here, and it appears to be going very well for RN...
In radio, nobody knows your spelling sucks.
Can we please stop calling these things 'podcasts'? They're downloadable mp3s, when did iPods start supporting only mp3? Why not call them rivercasts, or zencasts?
The irony of podcasting is that it was created to circumvent big media companies. The itms top 20 suggests that as much as people love to tell themselves "I hate those clear channel motherfuckers" When it comes down to it, thats all people really want.
for iTunes. I'm sorry but the iTunes top 20 is hardly representative of the current health of indie podcasts. The most recent version of iTunes with podcast support has only been around a short while; I've been using it and it is functionally quite satisfying but I certainly wouldn't trust it's charts as a reasonable way to measure any kind of health in the indie movement.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
This is proof that people are looking for something original apart from the usual tasteless commercial soupe.
Now we are in for a week of Adam Curry simultaneously taking credit for and bemoaning this development.
Still I listen to each new episode....
who hates the fucking "podcasting" name?
Its shitty audio streaming, not something one would expect to hear during some voyager technobabble.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
That is why big stations do market research so that they can target their broadcasts and podcasts to the consumer. A successfull podcaster will have to address the same group (compete) or a group which is now not addressed since it is commercially not attractive. To compete is tough, you have to fight big money, so yes, the big ones win again with this.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
D.I.Y. or DIE.
Podcast: a pretentious form of audio streaming peculiar to people who unquestioningly digest new buzzwords in the same way that Mac users butts digest fresh cock.
From the article: Cinecast movie review show was one of the site's featured offerings. The exposure...sent their show...up the iTunes' list of the top 100 podcasts, peaking at No. 13... Then Roger Ebert showed up...Within a few short days, Ebert & Roeper climbed to No. 2, while Cinecast dropped to 72.
I don't know if a direct connection can be made here. It's more likely that Cinecast got an initial bump from the first downloads and then only a percentage of people decided to keep with it. Same with Ebert. It is likely that it will also drop off after the initial first downloads.
Having said that though, a lot of indie podcasts, even the top ones, suffer from a distinct lack of professionalism. I don't mean just lack of a radio voice or something like that, I mean stuff like loooong intros and spending literally half the show talking about how you can contact the show. There's a real lack of understanding about how to keep people interested. A lot are good though, but to keep up with mainstream media, indicasts are going to have to minimize the boring stuff.
Streaming audio, i never heard of this before.. Apple thinks of everything!!!
Podcasting, like a lot of other deployments of technology (think the Web), was a lot more useful before The Man got a hold of it. Before the new iTunes came along, we had places like iPodder.org and podcastalley to list podcasts, and on those sites it was all about indepedent podcasts. There were a few more "official" ones from radio stations and whatnot, but they just weren't as popular.
Now with iTunes it's back to the same techniques using marketing and flashy graphics for the iTunes banner thingy for a particular podcast, so the same masses that tune into clearchannel will click on these new links. And the worst part is now everyone thinks there "in" because they listen to a podcast.
I think it's sad to see the iTunes top 20 - it's mostly corporate overproduced junk. To me, the whole point of podcasting is to listen to what I want to listen to, not just have another medium for corporate radio junk. Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't even on the iTunes list at all because (oh, the horror) they might play material that is not properly licensed because of copyright issues. It's almost like I feel I have gone "underground" to listen to the *real* podcasts.
--- witty signature
Big radio is a dinosaur.
I have a radio in my car and one in my kitchen. Both are tuned to NPR and never go to any other station. The reason is two-part: One, I can't handle the advertisements, annoying personalities, and repetitive play of commercial radio, and two, I like NPR. Either way, I'll probably never listen to any of the mediocre programming elsewhere on my dial. I doubt I'm the only one.
Satellite radio will be part of the change. My guess is that Podcasting will also be huge. It's the radio's version of the Internet with TiVo. Users decide what they want to listen and when, they do it mostly without commercials, and they get to comment directly to programmers of the media.
Why would I want to listen to some schlock programmed by record company execs, peopled with screaming buffoons who can't stop laughing at toilet jokes, and peppered with advertisements for used cars?
Big radio is dead.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
"Having said that though, a lot of indie podcasts, even the top ones, suffer from a distinct lack of professionalism. I don't mean just lack of a radio voice or something like that, I mean stuff like loooong intros and spending literally half the show talking about how you can contact the show. There's a real lack of understanding about how to keep people interested. A lot are good though, but to keep up with mainstream media, indicasts are going to have to minimize the boring stuff." now spending half of the show telling how to contact the show does suck, and when the host cant keep the ball rolling, its very anoying, but things like long intros or things that are not done on real radio is where the coolness is. some people do podcasts for the stats of the thing, some people do it because they just want to and do things the way that they want to. my show will never be anywhere near real radio, but on the other hand real radio will mever be anywhere near my show.
Right now, perhaps one of the highest-visibility media companies heavily involved in the Podcasting idea is Clear Channel through its Premiere Radio Networks division.
However, Premiere Radio won't put their stuff on iTunes, mostly because the current version of iTunes (Version 4.9) does not support subscription-based (e.g., you have to pay a monthly or yearly fee) Podcasting downloads. As a result, Premiere Radio Networks is forced to use its own customized software package. I expect this situation to change when iTunes does enable subscription-based Podcasting, probably with the next major version of iTunes.
Saw this on the trendwatcher podcasting trendwatch http://trendwatcher.koan.net/node/594 pretty solid popularity of this, and by watching this itll probably go into the future, check the grpahs
If you had actually heard 90% of what was on FM these days you wouldnt be saying that... (some exceptions do exist though)
I don't see what the huge deal about Podcasting is. People have been putting compressed audio files on the internet for years. Hell, I've been listening to 2600's "Off The Hook" in downloadable format for a LONG time now.
Nonetheless, many of these indie podcasts lack the professionalism of a real radio show. If I want to hear a talk show, I'd like to hear something worth listening to... not a bunch of laughing 14 year old boys huddled around a microphone talking about political things they don't understand. If you want to hear something truly worth listening to, then try tuning into a smaller market radio station. They tend to be less strict in their programming choices than huge-market megacorporation stations.
All in all, I'm not saying that Podcasting is bad. However, I'll laugh when all the podcasters rush out to spend $499 each on RE-20 mics and other equipment... program quality comes before audio quality.
With the evolution of podcasting (which is nothing new, other than the buzzword and hype) and other formats like RSS and all of these other social networking sites for bookmarking, blogging and what have you.. I just wonder about what will be the next wave.
This is what needs to happen: Someone needs to be implement wireless technology country wide the same as cell phones. Think of this.. iPod (or any other player) with wireless access, streaming whatever you want. Im talking about music, video, podcasts, whatever. Will replace satellite, radio and all of the rest of the redundant crap media in this age.
Some of you guys might be more saavy than me and might be able to explain why this isnt happening yet..?
So we have a /. article that highlights Skepticality. Probably the server hosting the article is being hammered as usual. But I also went to the iTunes Music Store and looked at the Top 20 Podcasts list. Sure enough, Skepticality is up to #2 for the day. The /. effect moves to new technology!
Of course there's an element of luck, too, as well as the '49er effect: that is, the ones that get there first stand a better chance of getting rich. But if you get there early and have a good product, you have a chance of attaining the critical mass that attracts not only listeners but collaborators. Slashdot as a tech website is an example. Among blogs, Daily Kos would be another. And I would put the Skepticality podcast in that category, potentially: it is well produced (decent recording, excellent editing and pacing, smart format), intelligent, has likable hosts, and has started attracting some well-known interviewees like James Randi. It's here to stay, I'd bet.
The distinction between corporate and indie is less important, I think, than the question of how an excellent late-comer can crack the barrier of the existing hierarchy. (The one heartening thing is that firstcomers tend to drop off the top of the pyramid when people realize they're just not that good or interesting, witness Adam Curry's drop in the rankings.)
I don't see how cramming a bunch of duplicate elements into RSS because you're too lazy to parse the ones that are already there is "finesse".
The rankings are based on how many new subscribers the show has received, not total subscribers for a show. That means established shows will probably have a larger listener base but might not be in the top 20.
What, me worry?
is there a support group somewhere for me?
ii ialso ithink ithe iway iapple iputs ia "i" iin ifront iof ieverything iis ireally iannoying.
The iTunes interface for searching and subscribing to podcasts isn't even all that great yet. Search for something, 'subscribe', then try to go 'back' to see the rest of your search results? Nope. At least, not as far as I've been able to work it out yet (and generally, if you don't see a way to do something in the first 30 seconds or so in an Apple interface, you just can't do it).
The ipodder program, for as basic an interface as it is, is just as good. iTunes obviously has more recognition, but I'm waiting for Apple to do a second revision of this to have the podcast functionality a lot more useful. Automatically creating playlists from subscriptions as an option would be nice too. I thought I read some reason why they didn't do that, but frankly, giving people an option to get more advanced is usually a good thing - podcasting community is still mostly early adopters who like flexibility. I know they (Apple) can do much better than this.
creation science book
success or failure for mass marketted stuff often comes down to its "hypability".
give it a name that evokes mental links with other hyped up buzz words and you can sell it more readily...
googles pods blogs.. they're all nice rounded names and they all allude to some culture/club (not culture club) that people feel they might want to be a part of.
ipods are the pogo sticks or yoyo's of today... (hell.. probably for the very kids who grew up with them only to buy an ipod at age 30)
We might as well just get used to all the baby talk (sure beats EEE.822b's or VNCs or whatever other names techies like to give really innovative technologies IMHO)
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
http://www.coolshite.net/
... but it's not iTunes :)
They rank highly in http://www.podcastalley.com/
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Apple has brought the power to the people with iTunes and iPods -- Windows people and Mac people alike, all over the world. I love that the word "iPod" has become a common english word like "kleenex".
The funniesst thing about the word "podcast" is that Apple did not come up with it - they found out that everyone was already using the word and ran with it. The reason it's called a "podcast" is simply that such a huge majority of people buying a portable music player went with iPod. Heck, even Dubya uses an iPod -- do Apple haters call the president a "gay Apple fanboy" now too? Somehow I suspect not...
OK, so who feels threatened by this format?
Why the need for this denigration?
Unlike broadcasters podcasters have to pay for every listener (yes, there is blog torrent but it does limit the audience)
I live in a town (Canberra, Australia) which is off the map as far as music producers are concerned, yet nothing can get on the air if it hasn't come from the big studios.
So we gather around a condensor mic once a week. We drink some beer, we talk some crap, and we get local musos to come in and play their stuff.
We like how it sounds, quite a lot of audio snobs like how it sounds.
A few hundred people around the world like it enough they send us postcards.
Where's the harm?
We belch, fart, spark up, talk in away that would get a broadcaster thrown off the air and we ask nothing of you at all. So where's all this agro coming from?
To anticipate the next question the feed is here:
http://the-riotact.com/?cat=39
A summary of the content is here:
http://loadedog.com/pod/pod.shtml
(and quietly scope my karma and user number before accusing me of being some kind of shill)
To return to the point, some podcasts will be crap, some (ok a very few) will be good. Much like blogs. But as no-one is forcing you to listen, or blasting it through the local spectrum, what'ss the problem exactly?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
... that I like best about podcasts. The professionalism lauded by other posters is the worst way to go. In this context quality is ONLY about knowledgable and/or enthusiastic presenters (The Rock and Roll Geek Show, Linux Linc Tech Show, LUG Radio) who can share their passion with the listeners. Worrying about what sponsors, bosses, Adam Curry ;) and iTunes think about a podshow will kill it.
I guess I have a different viewpoints for US readers because here in the UK the BBC dominates the radiowaves and their off-peak presenters have the kind of knowledge and enthusiasm I'm talking about (the peak time presenters are pretty plastic though).
Can't mention reality without giving a shout out to the most real of radio presenters - John Peel (RIP).
As others have stated "podcasting" is nothing but people putting audio files online. What a revolution! Remember how the WWW was going to change the world when everybody with a computer could become their own publishers for pennies and a vast wealth of creativity and quality would reshape the world of publishing etc. blah blah? What happened was there sure was a glut of "publishing" but 99% of it was pure crap.
And so goes podcasting. Just because I can buy a $5 microphone and free-associate into an mp3 file and put it on my web page doesn't mean that I should, or that anyone should care.
If you're looking for good radio, look to your local community radio station. I volunteered at one for most of the '90s and it was an incredible experience. Granted, you will occasionally hear some gawd-awful stuff on community radio - but it's more than mad up for by the amazing radio you'll hear from folks who have some sort of niche specialty - like 500,000 vinyl jazz albums in their record library. Or a passion for reporting news that goes unreported elsewhere. Or a talent for reading their own bizarre fiction at 1 AM.
If you don't have a local community radio station, see if you can find streaming audio of one. Unfortunately the DMCA is especially toxic to community radio station - no more "New disc at nine" (can't play too many songs from one artist in an hour, etc.). So some stations will have to either have dead internet air during certain periods, or not stream at all, or just archive some shows.
Finally I wish the "pod" would go away from podcasting. It's a terrible word. Worse than weblog.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
...But I can't wait until my favorite podcast is absorbed by a conglomerate so its format can be changed to "Jack"!
In case you're not frmo the US or Canada, "Jack" is a radio station format that is sweeping the nation. Much like the "All 70's" and "All 80's" stations you heard in the 90's, "Jack" is sweeping across the nation, replacing successfuly formats on some of the largest stations in America (including WCBS/New York, WJMK/Chicago, and KCBS/Los Angeles...
Essentially, the idea is a "format with attitude" but in many of the smaller markets implementing "Jack" means automating air personalities out of a job.
So lets cross our fingers and hope... After all, there's nothing like having something cool, original, and special co-opted by greedy guys in suits!
Who did what now?
They're directory file listings, when did Linux start supporting only ls? Why not call them riverlists, or zenlists?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
i dont live in north korea. i have full access to fm radio and listen to it daily. much of it stinks, much of it suits me just fine. fm tuners in a portable music player makes perfect sense to me and thats why i own a creative player instead of an ipod.
sometimes i want something different than the music i own on its hard drive.
sometimes i want weather.
sometimes i want headline news.
and so on...
The problem is, I have heard 90% of what is on FM these days. I first heard it in about 1981 and mistakenly thought it was new then. . .
'Classic Rock' is the 'slave songs' of the modern era.
No, they are names based on superior products to the ubiquitous iPod; products that tend to appeal to people who actually care about the quality of sound coming out of their DACs, rather than the fashion statement using an iPod makes (the iconic white earbuds being but one solid piece of evidence to these statements). Most iRiver/Zen/non-iPod users care little for iTunes, as they know full well it is far from the only means to buy affordable music and really aren't interesting in being part of some corporate media feed anyway.
The web's newest, best indie podcast.
Don't know about the rest of you, but I have a lot of dead time in my life -- waiting on my wife, waiting in traffic, waiting at airports and of course flying itself. I used to spend a lot of time assembling CD's and later mp3's to listen to. Lately, however, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. For audiobooks there's nobody like Audible.Com as their subscriptions are very good value for money. For podcasts, I listen to Keith and the Girl if I'm in a belligerant mood, or the Screenwriters Podcast if I want to lean more about my hobby of screenwriting. The CNN podcast is pretty good, as are several ones put out by PBS and their affiliate stations. Podcasts are particularly good if you have a passionate interest in something narrow like fine wines, a particular religion, etc which the Clear Channel motherfuckers are unlikely to spend much time on. Oh, and i don't give a fuck if it's called podcasting or not, sorry to you moronic trolls who fret about such things.
In other words, pure irrational bitterness.
While I would generally agree, I've found a single station that has redeemed FM in my eyes...90.5 WBER. It's a small rochester-native college run radio station that actually plays good music, and being private does not have to worry about commercials.
You can visit their website and listen to their stream if it sounds interesting enough. (They mostly play Alternative from both mainstream and indie but take requests for a good deal more)
But even with this station...FM makes me so terribly sad. I don't live in rochester for all of the year, and I can't get their signal from lower NY, so I have to make do with what is on. And what is played are commercials with music interspersed, annoying DJs, and rap/pop. Out of nearly 20mhz to choose from, I have a whole *one* station which I can tolerate, 94.3. In the past, 90.7 WFUV had a good set of programs, but they've shuffled their program playlist and no longer appeal to me. Because of this, I've ended up subscribing to XM, but only for my periods of break at home. Perhaps if it were less pricey, I'd consider it as a more regular deal with them.
Is there any hope anymore? I suspect not. *sigh*
Podcasting is another of the field leveling technologies that the internet allows. Prior to my friend mentioning the concept of a Podcast to me in March, I hadn't heard of them. Now I'm amazed at the selection. Most of it is chaff, but there are some good ones out there.
Ignore Alien Orders
Why do you remind of a rabit? An Apple Whoring Rabit?
If it's easier for the average iPod junkie to think of it that way, so be it.
It's an automated download you can time shift and listen to later. Sort of like tivo for internet radio. Before you had to manually do all the steps yourself, now it's easy for even non technical people to get the content they want and play it on the gadget they want, when they want.
>What's with all this aggression?
Simple.
Some people have such a high hard one for Apple Computer that anything related sends them into a tirade.
They hate the name becasue it is named after an Apple product.
OMG OMG OMG OMG. Streaming fvsking audio! What a major innovation! Yeah, go ahead and mod this a troll... my karma's unshakeable.
After Apple made the iPod, along came the iRiver -- it's basically a cheap knockoff without the scroll wheel or iTunes music store support. If you want to buy music online to listen to with your iRiver, you have to be a Windows user.
The creative Zen is pretty much the same story - a copycat of the iPod Mini without a scroll wheel. At least they didn't call it the iZen.
No scroll wheel == suckiness.
It's not streaming.
The shows are inventive and markedly different from traditional radio, which streaming radio imitates.
This isn't about technological innovation so much as it is creating a new killer app for internet-based media. And it's working.
If you don't get it, it's because you're ignorant of it.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
You have a better suggestion? Some word or phrase that nicely summarizes the we-don't-need-your-fucking-multi-national-corporat ion attitude?
Tell us. We're dying to know what it is.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
After Apple made the iPod, along came the iRiver -- it's basically a cheap knockoff without the scroll wheel or iTunes music store support. If you want to buy music online to listen to with your iRiver, you have to be a Windows user.
Cheap? Nope, iRivers are more expensive than iPods by a large margin. Knockoff? No, iRivers aren't knockoffs because that implies low-quality. An iRiver is currently the top-of-the-range when it comes to MP3 players. And has a matching price.
iRivers primarily play MP3 files. Since when was MP3 windows-only? They can also play Ogg Vorbis and WMA, of course.
iTunes? Nah, I'll buy my music on CDs thanks. Once I've listened to it and decided whether it's worth buying, anyway. And with the accurate navigation buttons it has, I don't need to look at the player to see what I'm doing.
And for me, one area where you cannot in any honesty say that an iPod is better than an iRiver: Recording. Once music's recorded on an iRiver, due to Apple's DRM you can't get it off directly.
Other people's mileage may vary. But I don't believe anyone who's really looked into the issue can say that an iPod is any better than an iRiver - except price, and when you buy top-of-the-range goods you expect to pay for it.
An iRiver is as much a copycat of an iPod as, say, any mobile phone is of another, simply by virtue of having the same purpose.
It amazes me how much people are complaining about the commercial shows and the itunes rating system.
Surely as long you are given the choice to listen to what you want there isn't a problem. You can choose to listen to an unkown indie show or to a more professional show made by the mainstream media. You can choose to ignore the itunes rating system which (quite usefully in my opinion) lists all of the most popular shows based on recent downloads. There is nothing stopping you from searching through the massive catalogue of shows for some obsure show that you could quite possibly be the only person to have an interest in.
Apple isn't stopping you from using any of the software or sources that exited before they integrated there implementation into itunes and they're not preventing any of the indie sources from posting there podcasts on itunes. They've just created another way of accessing podcasts that in my opinion is the easiest to use and the most polished out there. So get over it.
No scroll wheel, no dice. It's like a hi-fi sound system with a joystick controlling the volume. Like a car with handlebars instead of a steering wheel.
Nice straw man argument too:
First post: "If you want to buy music online to listen to with your iRiver, you have to be a Windows user."
Your retort: "iRivers primarily play MP3 files. Since when was MP3 windows-only?"
LOL what a retard. I LOVE it.
original point: Zen and iRiver are iPod copycats
your retort: Apple did not make the first hard-drive based MP3 player
Such a subtle and tasty straw man argument. Yummy.
Take a look at the crap Creative was making before the iPod and then after. It is plain as day that they copied the iPod.
That must be tough for him, surrounded by homophobes and all. Maybe that's why he's got such a big chip on his shoulder, and why Laura Bush looks like a Stepford wife all the time.
At least he's got his iPod to keep him company.
Visit PodcastAlley.com and you'll find a lot of disgruntled podcasters. iTunes4.9 created a caste system for those in the iTunes directory and those who were not. Being in iTunes doubled and tripled subscriber bases. Being left out of the directory meant obscurity. There's a lot of resentment out there.
/. who don't own or like iPods seem resent the label "podcasts" for audio blogs. Get over it. Suggestions that podcasts be called irivercasts and zencasts are laughable. "pod" rhymes with "broad" and hence "podcast" instead of "broadcast" for a downloadable MP3 radio show. I thought that was obvious. In addition, the guys who put all the elements together owned iPods, namely Adam Curry - the guy who wanted to automate the loading of audio blogs into his iPod. He didn't coin the term "podcast" but he gave it notoriety. Why gripe about this?
1) People on
2) iTunes may be pushing commercial podcasts in a big way, but it's not all bad. While committees voted and bickered over 1-click subscribing over on ipodder-dev Apple went and implemented the pcast:// namespace. (other podcatchers were using feed://) Click on a feed like pcast://feed.feedburner.com/BitzofBrin and instant subscription. Apple also pushed podcasts into the mainstream which benefited all shows. Even shows not included in the iTMS podcast directory saw an increase of subscribers because new ears were using iTunes to tune in. A lot of the complaining has been from M$ zealots, people left out of the iTMS directory, and people who are opposed to all forms of commercialization. Most podcasters are happy about Apple wading into the podcast waters, however, by a large majority.
3) Bugs. iTMS polls feeds too sluggishly. The listings in the iTMS are often behind by a day (though this doesn't affect subscriptions which tend to be very current because they poll the feed directly). Also, there isn't enough feedback for those who submit their podcasts. I know many podcasts in submission limbo. They are told that their podcast has already been submitted, but it's been six weeks that they've waited for inclusion. Meanwhile newer podcasts submit and get listed within one week. Apple gives podcasts in limbo the runaround known as form letter hell. Interface clumsiness abounds in the iTunes podcast implementation as well. Even subscribing requires one to re-enter the podcast directory over and over again for each podcast the user wants to subscribe to.
4) AAC podcasts are so cool with their chapters and chapter art that they very well could replace MP3s as the default podcast format. Many podcasters offer dual MP3/M4A feeds but I know others that have opted for AAC M4As because the chapters appeal to them and the compression vs. quality is better. Interesting developments there.
5) Apple brought bandwidth to the forefront of podcaster's minds overnight with the release of iTunes4.9. Many people simply weren't ready for popularity. Their servers smoked under the strain. This has had the added result of pushing Bit Torrent distribution support from being an interesting geeky add-on to a vital necessity.
6) The commercialization of podcasts is not necessarily a bad thing as long as there are still unique voices. Unlike mainstream radio, there is room for indies to compete with the big boys (read the article). But there needs to be more growth in podcasting as a medium. The podcast I listed earlier is a good example. Bitz of Brin is a podcast by a 13 year old girl. She doesn't talk about sex or tech. She doesn't play electronica or alternative music. She wants to be a singer and features a cover of mainstream pop/country stars each podcast. Her podcast doesn't appeal to geeks interested in tech. Her music doesn't appeal to the thousands of alternative music fans turning to podcasts for their anti-*IA fix. Her main audience, frankly, isn't listening to podcasts. Yet her voice is unique and part of the whole underground podcast movement.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
I made an error in the url. It should be pcast://feeds.feedburner.com/BitzofBrin
a /viewPodcast?id=73331701 | http://wichitarutherford.libsyn.com/rss/a /viewPodcast?id=76244035 | feed://daveslounge.com/rss)a /viewPodcast?id=74265045 | pcast://feeds.feedburner.com/HarryPodder)a /viewPodcast?id=73330734)
a /viewPodcast?id=73329586)
Other niche podcasts of interest are:
5 Minutes with Wichita Rutherford (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/w
Dave's Lounge (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/w
Harry Podder (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/w
Nashville that nobody knows (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/w
And quicktime vlogs work in iTunes4.9 as well. These two are excellent examples of vlogs:
Josh Leo (pcast://feeds.feedburner.com/joshleo)
Rocketboom (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/w
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming