Reports from the Asylum

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.