Reports from the Asylum

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.