Saturday, November 13, 2004

Attention Scarcity and Podcasting/Broadcatching Here's another post I missed from Lucas Gonze: Great thoughts here!  But the numbers being compared by Ernest (reading dozens compared to listening to a handful)  don't really tell the story.  One good podcast could easily cover the material contained in 100 text posts in much more depth.  Sorta like a good news broadcast.  There are many differences about the two that are not fair to compare based solely on post counts. The point about it being difficult to perform work while listening to a PODCast could sometimes be true.  But not always.  Trying to read weblog posts while performing work that demands full attention is also difficult.  The truth is that PODCasting won't be for everyone.  Just like everyone doesn't listen to Radio, PODCast won't work for some life/work styles.  But for the people that do listen to Radio daily (ie. commuters, etc.) or MP3 players (ie.  People working out, etc.) PODCasting will be an interesting, welcomed option. And lastly on the point about "less attention will probably mean that the distribution of attention for the most popular shows will be quite steep" I would just add that this problem will be solved and change as more metadata about the content covered in the PODCast starts to flow out from the PODCast providers.  Ernest Miller, Attention Scarcity and Podcasting/Broadcatching I can read dozens, if not more, blogs every morning (thank you, aggregator!). Depending on their length, I can only listen to a handful of audio shows everyday. It is very difficult to read or perform work while listening to a talk show. Less attention will probably mean that the distribution of attention for the most popular shows will be quite steep. [...] I don't have as much attention to spend on audio, I don't want too many digressions. I love Ernest's first point about distribution of popularity, but what attention scarcity brings to my mind is bandwidth efficiency, because a feed reader could limit the amount of stuff downloaded to the amount that will fit into available listening time. 11:11:26 PM  comment []    trackback []     I somehow missed the following post from Lucas Gonze.  Thanks for remembering and most importantly taking the time to acknowledge Lucas. In which I revel in Schadenfreude Holy shit. Now even Dave Winer -- a man who's never given attribution when he could take it instead -- is objecting to the deification of Adam Curry. Here's what he says in an item titled Setting the Record Straight on Podcasting: Now that the buzz has grown so much, which is basically a good thing, the distortion level has gotten super-high and Adam is becoming the sole inventor of the art and technology. Part of me doesn't care, but some of the stories that are coming out are incredibly mean. I'm tired of fighting for credit, but I'm equally tired of inventing stuff and popularizing stuff, which is really hard work, and having other people make the money and get the credit. Interesting perspective! If Dave is getting ripped off, Harold Gilchrist is getting it a lot worse than that -- it was Harold who patiently evangelized and worked out the bugs during the two years that audioblogging was in the wilderness, not Adam, and not Dave. Adam and Dave were off in their own worlds. And then again, I'm getting ripped off too. Dave claims that he presaged Adam's thing because he was doing podcasts in June. I remember Dave's first tentative audioblogs, because they were so little and so late -- by then Harold had been audioblogging on a daily basis for over a year, IT Conversations had been on the air for over a year, and Webjay had already served up somewhere between five and ten thousand RSS feeds with audio enclosures. Dave asks "should we just overlook that the story being passed around is wrong, and getting wronger every day, or should the bloggers and podcasters care to have the real story get out there?" My advice to Dave is simple: join the club. Podcasting brought in a lot of new users and catalyzed a lot of hacker energy. Also, Adam Curry's tool to copy audio files over to a portable MP3 player really is handy. These are unambiguously good things; if you're doing real work and not just self promotion, they'll be good for you as well. Podcasting will only hurt you if all you're doing is self promotion. In that case, your misfortune speaks for itself. 10:57:54 PM  comment []    trackback []     Adam's PODSquad concept Adam Curry has this new concept which he is calling the "PodSquad show list".  From what he's saying it sounds like it's a list of podcasts that he subscribing to.  I don't know if he invisions the list to apply to his channel or individual items in the RSS feed or maybe both. Applying this concept through OPML on a individual RSS feed item basis would expose metadata to the underlining blogosphere architecture. Sounds like something that would definitely make sense to include into a future release of the "PODCast browser" if we can find an easy way for podcasters to include it into their feeds.  I hope Adam keeps talking the concept through on the "Daily Source Code" until it sticks and somehow gets into the RSS feed. Daily Source Code November 11 2004 -> http://adam.opml.org/DSC20041111.mp3 5:11:03 AM  comment []    trackback []     Listening to the Gillmor Gang for November 12, 2004 This is the first Gillmor Gang show I listened to in recent weeks.  The gang has a pretty good conversation about business models and PODCasting toward the end of the show.  IT Conversations -> The Gillmor Gang: November 12, 2004. (The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations) This week The Gang starts off wondering about Chris Stone's departure from Novell, which he was steering back towards the Linux market. And what about Sun? Are they serious about Linux on the desktop, or is that just a poker chip, a placemark for their real move into software-as-service? Speaking of software-as-service, The Gang dives head-first into Google. Jon says Gmail is "seductively powerful," but is Google on the path to becoming The Borg? Will we have to turn to turn to (gasp) Microsoft to save us? Or will Google continue to be our best buddy? The show concludes with a discussion of podcasting: its potential business models and its ultimate effect on Big Media. Michael Vizard, editor-in-chief of CRN Magazine, joins The Gang this week. 3:43:40 AM  comment []    trackback []

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