The other day , a colleague of mine shout out over the booth wall , “ I think podcasting is at its fourteenth minute . ” Of course , he was consult to the proverbial 15 minutes of fame . And of course , I break into laughter . But his comment got me thinking : whereispodcasting choke ?
The main aspect of any new entertainment engineering science is content . It follows that if the content resonates with the audience , the technology will probably take off — attestator MTV ( Video kill the radio star … ) as an exemplar from the last two decades . Podcasting is in its infancy , in this regard . As far as podcasting content live , let ’s look it : among those gems like KCRW’sMorning Becomes EclecticandInside Mac Radiobroadcasts , a draw of podcasts are just a bunch of guff .
It ’s not the content format that ’s young , it ’s the fork of the podcasting engineering . decent now , podcasting is really just radio — it ’s recorded like radio , regardless of the medium a podcast is intend for . And a lot of the individuals and entities who are bring out podcasts are amateur broadcaster . This democratization of depicted object can be worthful — we can hear from mass whom we would n’t learn from usually . But it can also render us with a mess of garbage by people who do n’t have it away what the heck they ’re doing . It ’s like blogging — there are some fantastic news blog and some unfeignedly awful ones by “ citizen journalists ” who could easily “ blank out ” to see their fact .
The problem is that we all necessitate to be able to separate the wheat berry from the chaff to avoid wasting both our fourth dimension and gigabytes of storage . Now that theiTunes Music Store includes free podcast downloads and subscriptions , you ’d call up that the brains behind the memory board are picking and choosing what get in thePodcast Directorycarefully . But they seem not to be — for example , I ’ve line up some idiotic podcasts , like the one for Fox Television’sFamily Guy , which just features some guy cable reading a description of this hebdomad ’s episode . There are n’t even any sound clipping from the show . Who cares ? The danger is that we ’ll just be inundated with a bunch of stuff and nonsense no one wants to listen to . ( But they said that about the net , too , proper ? )
But what does the future tense hold for podcasting ? The answer is in the depicted object — it has to be valuable and of high quality — and possibly even in a different format we ca n’t forestall now . I also think that someone or something , the iTunes Music Store or otherwise , will need to help hearer pluck their podcasts . Otherwise , we ’re probably getting close to Minute 15 .
