Reports from the Asylum

It’s been years since audio podcasting was flavor of the month. Video, Facebook, location-based, mobile—everything else seems to be getting more attention. But even though the hype has passed, podcasting is still going strong. Here are a few of the things real businesses and individuals are using their podcasts for.

Build Buzz About Your Book

Podiobooks.com launched in 2005 as a way for authors to self-publish their books in audio format. (It’s still around, if that’s what you  want to do.) This year, Tee Morris and Philippa Ballantine are using a podcast anthology to promote their traditionally published book, Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel.

Market Your Members-Only Webinars

RainToday’s podcasts feature interviews with and excerpts from their webinar leaders. RainToday webinars cost $99 apiece; membership is $299. Members have access to complete webinar recordings and special podcast content.

Provide Extra Value to Your Expo Advertisers

Book Expo America records a series of interviews with booth holders and releases them on the BookExpoCast.com podcast channel in advance of the conference. This allows exhibitors to reach people who never make it to the expo hall.

Find Clients for Your Consulting Business

The Intrepid Group started a podcast interviewing members of its target market and converted nearly 1/3 of the guests on its Intrepid Radio Show into clients.

Improve the World’s English

Mignon Fogarty has a veritable empire of Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts now, but her flagship Grammar Girl show is still going strong. These short weekly podcasts have proved to be an effective way to deliver tips about such things as manners, parenting, health, and money, in addition to better writing.

Meet Authors and Celebrities

People with books, movies, TV shows, and products to promote want to be interviewed. Even if you’re not a well-known podcaster, you can get prominent people to come on your show to talk to you. Anna Farmery started doing this with The Engaging Brand in 2006. She talks to people like Tony Hsieh and Nancy Duarte about leadership—and incidentally gets clients for her consulting business.

Become the Go-to Source of Information

In 2010, Daniel J. Lewis started The Audacity to Podcast, a show about using Audacity (the free, cross-platform sound editor) for podcasting. Want to know what new technology is affecting the world of business communications and PR? Listen to For Immediate Release. (In fact, you can become a social media expert just listening to that show.)

Build a Community

Marketing Over Coffee has been a great source of tips on everything from SEO to trade shows to direct mail for years, but in 2009 hosts John Wall and Christopher S. Penn created a LinkedIn group, and in the past year that group has grown to 1492 members and become a place where listeners interact with each other rather than placing the burden of all their questions on the show’s hosts.

Connect with Your Congregation

Religious institutions are enthusiastic podcasters. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco records sermons and posts them to its website and on iTunes for those who can’t come to worship in person. Temple Isaiah’s Your Jewish Neighborhood podcast explores topics like Pesach music and “What Jews wish their Christian friends knew about Judaism.”

Have Fun

Listen to Episode 100 of the WordCast Podcast and tell me these people have not been having fun producing this show. There’s no question that podcasting is more fun when you have a co-host or two. (Some podcasters would say, when you have a drink or two…)

What will you do with your podcast in 2011?

If you know what, but aren’t sure about how, join ‘Professor’ Goetsch at TechLiminal in Oakland on June 11th to learn how to podcast without going crazy.

Something has been happening while I wasn’t paying attention. In theory, I should be keeping an eagle eye on all things podcasting, but there hasn’t been that much news about podcasting.

Actually, that’s the problem. For a change, no one saying that podcasting is dead, but that’s because no one is saying much about podcasting at all. A Google Trends search reveals a steady drop-off in searches for the term “podcasting.”

Searches for the term “podcast”—which would include searches for podcasts on specific topics—have plateaued and are creeping downwards, as well.

Even Podcasting News publishes a lot of posts about topics other than podcasting. It’s been years since the Podcast Expo got swallowed up into BlogWorld, where podcasting is now scarcely more than a footnote.

But somehow I thought that podcasting would still be the star attraction at PodCamps. Admittedly I haven’t been to a PodCamp since 2007, when the Podcast and New Media Expo was still in Ontario, CA and podcasting was still pretty much at the high point of the hype cycle. There hasn’t been a PodCamp close enough for me to attend.

But in 2006 and 2007, PodCamps were about podcasting. There was no shortage of things to say about podcasting, and other topics were always discussed in relation to podcasting.

Not so any longer. A couple of weeks ago someone urged me to attend PodCamp Toronto on February 26^th. Now, I would love to go to PodCamp Toronto to see all my East Coast social media friends. I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun. Events like that usually are, regardless of the sessions.

But I was shocked when she said “PodCamp is about everything and anything new media—not just podcasting,” as if that would make me more likely to attend, or organize, a PodCamp. You’d better believe that if I organized it, it would be about podcasting. (Alas, between running the East Bay WordPress Meetup and serving on the board of the Bay Area Consultants Network, I am already doing more of that kind of thing than I can handle.)

I checked the schedule, and it’s true. Perhaps a third of the sessions at PodCamp Toronto are about podcasting, if you count the ones where people are podcasting live but actually discussing the usual topics of their podcasts. PodCamp Boston is even worse—maybe a sixth of their sessions are about podcasting.

All of these other subjects are interesting, yes. But why call it PodCamp if you aren’t going to focus on podcasting? Why not Social Media Camp?

The spread of smartphones and the introduction of tablets, combined with the boom in “apps”, means that podcasters have a much better technology infrastructure than we did back in 2006 and 2007. But most of the services that once existed for audio podcasters have disappeared.

Unless podcasters call attention to themselves as a potential market for software developers on the iOS and Android platforms, no one is likely to create any new services to take the place of the ones that no longer exist. People are still producing and listening to audio podcasts, but independent podcasters have dropped out of the public eye.

There are lots of conferences where you can learn about blogging, Facebook, and Twitter. There aren’t many—by now, in fact, there may not be any—where you can find a comprehensive treatment of podcasting, from the 101 basics to the new opportunities presented by changes in technology since 2005. If we aren’t careful, podcasting could end up homeless.

And that might be a fate worse than death.

David Strom and Paul Gillin just interviewed Doug Kaye of the Conversations Network over on MediaBlather. The segment that particularly struck me was the discussion of how audio podcasting is faring by comparison with video, and, more poignantly, by comparison with what we expected of it back in 2006 and 2007 when we were sure podcasting would take over the world.

There were lots of reasons to think audio podcasting would always have the edge over video. It’s more portable. You can multi-task while you listen to it. The file sizes are smaller. You can record it anywhere. It’s easier to edit. It’s more interesting. (Oooh! Did I say that?)

But.

There are three factors Kaye points to in the ascendancy of video.

Short-form vs. Long-form

Most online video is short, well below YouTube’s 15-minute maximum. The exceptions are things like the TED talks—but those videos have a six-figure production budget. Watching one video doesn’t require a big commitment.

While some audio podcasts are only a few minutes long (Grammar Girl comes to mind), fifteen minutes is actually on the short side for an audio podcast. You want something long enough to get you through your commute, but that means prospective listeners have to put in more time to decide whether to subscribe.

Sharability

It’s easy to share a video with someone else—just send a link. While many podcasters do have players embedded in their sites so that listeners can send friends links to particular episodes, it’s not quite the same, and doesn’t often happen. (Unless, of course, the friend recorded the podcast episode himself.)

Doug Kaye pointed out that while there are dozens of free hosting services for video, there’s almost nowhere you can host an audio file for free. That’s because of the third factor.

Ease of Advertising

It’s harder to put ads into audio. In particular, it’s hard to do it unobtrusively. With video, you not only have pre-roll and post-roll options, but overlays and ads on the page that the video is embedded in.  And advertising is the monetization model that everyone in media knows and understands.

And there you have it, really. Podcasting turned out not to be a way to get rich quick. So everyone who wanted instant money got out.

For listeners, of course, the comparative absence of advertising on independent audio podcasts is one of their advantages. But because it’s harder to commercialize them, they’re more likely to grow steadily than explosively.

Nevertheless, I foresee continued growth, rather than a dieoff. As Shel Holtz likes to say, “New media don’t kill old media. Old media adapt.” Long-form audio podcasts continue to attract strong and loyal followings. Not all material is suitable for short video, and not all of us enjoy watching it.

Me, I postpone clicking on those links from friends as long as I possibly can. I’m just not a video person.

Listen to the entire interview on the MediaBlather show page.

The San Francisco Podcasting Meetup group closed on Friday, April 9th, 2010, because none of the 311 members was willing to take on the job of meetup organizer. The most recent organizer had put out calls asking for volunteers to replace him as long ago as August 2009, but no one stepped forward.

I did think about taking it on (it would be a logical thing for the Podcast Asylum to sponsor), but, as I told the person who tried to volunteer me for the job, I’m already running another meetup and it was more than I  could take on.

I’m sure the other group members also have commitments that prevent them from volunteering, but I suspect there were other, more important factors in the demise of this meetup.

For one thing, the group hasn’t actually met for at least six months. I think the last time I attended a meeting was in 2008. There were not many people there, and we were in a cafe that was difficult to reach by public transport, not a good place to park even for those of us with magic blue placards, and had no projection facilities for speakers. The location before that was the back room of a restaurant, slightly more private and definitely more convivial (as well as closer to BART), but also not the best place to give a presentation.

So the closing of the meetup group doesn’t change much in the lives of Bay Area podcasters. We weren’t meeting in person, and we weren’t using the discussion group or mailing list features, either.

Does this mean podcasters have run out of things to say to each other? There was a time—before I ever joined the group, alas—when the San Francisco Podcasting Meetup met every month and had 30 or 40 people in attendance. Of course, that was back in the days when podcasting was fairly new, and most of today’s veteran podcasters were still figuring out how to do things.

It was also the era when many people seemed to think that podcasting would be a way to get rich quick, so they jumped on the bandwagon and showed up to learn about “monetization.” (It is definitely possible to make money from podcasting, but you need either a large audience or a wealthy and devoted niche, and you don’t get either of those overnight.)

It’s now 2010, and the earliest members of the meetup, if they are still podcasting, have solved their technical problems. They’ve chosen their microphones, their mixers, their audio editing software, their method of recording Skype calls. They’ve read—and sometimes written—books about podcasting. They’ve made their decisions about whether to have advertising or sponsorships or ask for donations or go with a premium podcast model, about where to host their files and how to generate their RSS feeds.

In other words, there just isn’t that much left to talk about for experienced podcasters. If you read the Podcasting News blog, you’ll see that not only don’t they post as frequently as they used to, most of what they write about isn’t podcasting. It’s WordPress, or blogging, or the iPad.

Innovations in portable media players in the past few years have focused on video and books, not audio—and particularly not on creating a device that makes it easier to find and subscribe to podcasts.

So what is a podcasting meetup to meet up to discuss?

There are still people who are just coming to podcasting, who don’t know about things like ID3 tags (and how iTunes changes them) or the Levelator. One option would be to re-focus the meetup around newbies and turn it into an informal podcasting course, with the more experienced members taking it in turn to present how-to sessions. That’s still an essentially finite project, but if you’re meeting once a month and going over, say, everything that’s in Podcasting for Dummies and Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies, you’ll get through a couple of years and you might build up some momentum.

Or you could survey those experienced podcasters and find out what issues still bother them—or what they’re running up against that wasn’t a problem when they started. There are still things to talk about, like how to know when to stop producing your show versus retooling it and how to handle increases or decreases in popularity over time, or the storage requirements you face after five years of podcasting and the question of what to do with your archives.

Now that the novelty has worn off and the hype has gone away, your members would be the truly dedicated and the newly starting. So what would you do with a podcasting meetup?

On February 19th, 2010, fellow FIR correspondent Eric Schwartzman interviewed Steve Lubetkin of Professional Podcasts for On the Record”¦Online. (At least, that’s when he posted it the interview; I didn’t get around to listening to it until rather later than that, due to the backlog in my new Sansa Clip+. )

Though I’m interested in all things podcasting at any time, the specific subject of the interview, “Podcasting for Business Communications,” was of particular interest because of a LinkedIn question I’d just seen: “What is the current state/future of corporate podcasting?”

One respondent said “Though there are some things to appreciate about podcasting, as a corporate investment it’s headed the way of the fax machine, but more quickly.”

None of the rest of the respondents agreed, though some of them (such as ”˜Professor’ Donna Papacosta here at the Podcast Asylum) might be said to have slightly biased opinions. Yet who would know, if not people who produce podcasts for corporations?

Steve Lubetkin certainly didn’t give the impression that his business was experiencing a rapid die-off. The quote Eric chose to highlight in his detailed show notes is

B2B podcasting is, for the most part, not about reaching large audiences. It’s about reaching individuals with an immediate need for the marketer’s product or service. So instead of getting in front of thousands of people who may or may not have a need, podcasting is about automating the awareness, consideration, research and evaluation phases of general buying cycles.

Which is to say, massive numbers aren’t even the point, never mind an indicator of whether the medium is viable. (Though I am taking this quote out of context.)

Eric’s rant about the number of Gold Quill entrants who claim to have podcasts and don’t (because there’s no RSS feed associated with their audio files) warmed my pedantic little heart. Indeed, I feel a syndrome coming on. I just can’t decide whether to call it “Podcastus Imitatus” or “Podcast Envy.”

Listen to the whole interview over on the OTRO website.

I’m one of those pigheaded holdouts who doesn’t own an iPod. That means that iTunes, in addition to being a pain in the anatomy, is useless for syncing up my Sansa Clip with my computer. That’s why I never use it unless a client project requires it for something.

If I had the Sansa in MTP mode, it would talk to Windows Media Player, but Windows Media Player is not a podcatcher. And past the point of some update or another to Windows XP, my computer no longer recognized the Sansa in MTP mode, and I had to switch it over to MSC mode anyway. That means that my computer looks at the media player as if it were any other external drive, so the way to get new podcasts onto it was to drag and drop them through Windows Explorer.

Now, I never really minded doing that; it’s not as though it’s difficult, and it doesn’t take very long. Automatic synchronization still seemed like a nice idea, but it didn’t seem as though anyone was going to bother offering the service without tying you to a particular product like the iPod or Zune.

And podcatcher development seemed to have pretty much dried up once iTunes became dominant. Nevertheless, I was in the market for a new one. I’d started using Ziepod rather than Juice once I became a two-computer family on a regular basis, because of the option to selectively download podcasts. But for the last month or so Ziepod has crashed almost every time I’ve started it, requiring  a restart, and development seems dead in the water. (Another one of those Windows updates?)

Then I read the Lifehacker post on the Five Best Podcast Managers. The top score went to gPodder, a tool I’d thought was only for Linux.

After reading the review, I hopped over and downloaded it, then unzipped it and tried it. (gPodder is one of those self-contained tools that runs right out of the folder it comes in; you don’t need to install it.) I then imported an OPML file (interestingly, it couldn’t read the one that Ziepod produced, but I had an older one sitting around), updated a few podcasts, and checked it out.

gPodder displays podcast album art, which neither Juice nor Ziepod does—a nice touch. You can mark episodes as old so that it won’t download them. It tells you how many downloaded episodes are waiting to be played.

And you can sync it. Once you tell it where to find your MP3 player and set a few more parameters, just select Device | Sync episodes to device (or press CTRL+S), and you’re off. I get a mysterious error message at the end of my sync process, but it still works.

I’m delighted. I don’t know that this will save me enough time to notice, but I’m still glad to be able to sync my podcasts automatically.

Now, if anyone is actually reading this, someone may write in and tell me that there’s something else out there that does this. In which case, I’m all ears, and I’ll be happy to test it and write about it.

It’s been months since Michelle Rafter interviewed me for The Geek Weekly, so I had entirely forgotten about it by the time today’s article, ”˜The Business Benefits to Podcasting,’ appeared.

It’s possible that the timing of this particular article has something to do with Leo Laporte’s speech at the Online News Association conference on October 2^nd. (You know, the one where he said podcasting is dead because it’s too hard for listeners—that’s known as ”˜linkbaiting’—but simultaneously revealed that he grosses $1.5 million annual from his This Week in Tech podcast network.)

Funny, that sounds pretty healthy to me. Healthy enough, in fact, to provoke people into the very get-rich-quick delusions I warn people about in my interview with Michelle.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:25 — 2.5MB) | Embed

In her report for FIR 471, ”˜Professor’ Goetsch shares her thoughts about VoloMedia’s so-called ”˜podcasting patent.’

• The patent appears to focus on retrieving rather than producing podcasts
• The company states through its PR agency that it has no intention of interfering with independent podcasters
• For some reason, Volo seems incapable of getting that message out to the public, and uninterested in responding to the blog storm

Links: Quit Panicking About the Volo Podcasting Patent

This Report from the Asylum is brought to you by Locus Confusus.

It’s true that the headline of VoloMedia’s press release boldly claimed ”˜VoloMedia Awarded U.S. Patent for Podcasting.’ And with a headline like that, you can scarcely blame podcasters for responding with anxiety, distress, and outrage. The many commenters on the announcement in Podcasting News seem determined to prove that Volo did not invent podcasting and to condemn the company as a “patent troll” in search of money via lawsuits and licensing fees.

VoloMedia founder Murgesh Navar’s first  blog post explained the reasoning behind the patent, but entirely failed to answer the question in every independent podcaster’s mind: “Are they expecting podcasters to pay them for the right to go on producing podcasts?”

My own examination of the patent in the USPTO database suggested that the patent actually had nothing to do with the production of podcasts, but rather with the reception of podcasts. Take a look at this abstract:

A personalized media service provides, e.g., user customization of radio channel selections, immediate availability of multiple preprogrammed and/or customized channels, the ability to intersperse different types of content including periodically refreshed information content, availability of personal radio functions on devices such as car audio systems, PDAs, smartphones, MP3 players, etc. Available channels include, e.g., pre-programmed channels selected for the user based on an interest profile, user-owned content, user-specified recorded content, etc. An audio user interface facilitates user selection of programming and user purchase of currently played audio material. An overall radio experience is thus provided that combines the customization and flexibility of digital media with the immediacy and ubiquity of radio. Video materials may also be accommodated.

To me, that looks like a patent for a podcatcher. I decided to e-mail the PR contact listed on the press release and ask about it, rather than bang my head against the jargon and patent-ese available on the website.

This was the answer I received from Brian Posnanski at Gravitas PR:

First let me say—and Murgesh would firmly repeat—that VoloMedia is a big fan of podcasters and what they are trying to do. Downloadable media needs support, not roadblocks, and the last thing the company wants to do is become an impediment to the growth of podcasting and downloadable media. Suffice to say that the patent is not going to hinder what podcasters are doing… Everyone will go about their business as they have before.

Whew! But why couldn’t Volo have said that in the first place? Or even the second place? Brian provided me a link to a second blog post by Murgesh Navar, and while this one assures readers that Volo is not a patent troll and explains its quite laudable goal (to produce a means by which users can seamlessly find, listen to, download, and subscribe to podcasts as easily as they browse the web today) and points out that it has created useful free services for podcasters, he never manages to say in plain language that podcasters are free to go on podcasting without having to enter into any kind of commercial relationship with VoloMedia.

It’s just possible that Navar and his team are starting to regret that eye-catching headline. If they’d just said “VoloMedia Awarded Patent to Make Podcasts Accessible to Everyone,” they’d probably have been cheered by the very people out vilifying them across the blogosphere.

Anyone who thinks podcasting is dead—and I’m not sure anyone believes that; I think they just say it to provoke blog comments—needs to take a look at social bookmarking site Delicious.com. (I know switching the name and URL to ”˜delicious.com’ was the sensible and obvious thing to do, but I put so much effort into memorizing ”˜del.icio.us’ that I now feel cheated.)

The better to put more fresh and useful information on this blog, what with actual audio postings being so rare and so time-consuming to produce, I decided to install the Postalicious plugin for WordPress about a week ago and have it suck in everything I tagged with ”˜podcasting.’

Then I realized it would make sense to set up and subscribe to a feed for everyone else’s podcasting bookmarks. I’d long since done this with some other topics: ghostwriting, because that’s my ”˜day job,’ and naming, because I do some consulting work (yes, creating names for new products) for a naming company.

If a dozen items a week get tagged with ”˜ghostwriting,’ it’s a busy week. ”˜Naming’ is a more popular tag—I get perhaps a dozen new items in the feed each day, though the great bulk of them refer to baby names, CSS (or Java, or whatever programming language) class names, or domain names, rather than to product and company names. I delete those unread.

I never expected to find a couple of dozen posts per hour in the ”˜podcasting’  feed from Delicious. It’s almost as hard to keep up with as Jeff Pulver’s Twitter stream. (Harder, actually, given that Jeff’s tweets don’t necessarily contain links I have to check to decide whether to bookmark them myself.)

Many of the sites that I can now see bookmarked in near real-time (or should that be ”˜near-real time’?) have been around for years. The download page for Audacity. The AudioShell ID3 tag editor. A ”˜podcast recipe’ seminar from Apple. Basic how-to information for beginners.

The conclusion: there are a lot of people out there who are just getting started podcasting and want to know more about it. It’s a good time to be a podcast consultant.