Anyone who does podcasts should spend some time listening to talk radio. Not just hearing the words, but analyzing the techniques. There’s a fair amount of skill involved in radio (and especially talk radio) that revolves around the fact that it’s all live and it still has to be good. If you don’t believe me, go spend 15 minutes listening to talk radio and then go listen to one of Dave’s “Sunday Gang” podcasts. The difference is clear.
So… today’s “brilliant” new service? You call a phone number, it records your call, and then posts it like a podcast. So, it’s basically voicemail with an RSS feed. Coooooool.
Some problems with the implementation:
Those are all easily fixed, of course, and hopefully they will be. This is actually a pretty neat service, but there’s nothing even border-line revolutionary about it. What I like about it: it’s easy, it requires zero setup, and the sound quality is passable for phone calls.
But, really, this isn’t anything special. In 45 minutes the same could be replicated with a PHP script and a voicemail service that emails MP3 attachments. This will be a decent offering as soon as they implement PINs for the service and hide the phone number.
Dave wants us to listen to the radio on our TVs. That’s his big new software… we can all gather around the TV, turn on FlickrFan, and listen to some awesome podcasts.
I just don’t even have the words for this. It’s like buying a Tablet PC and using it as a clipboard.
If Dave were the arbiter of blogging (and he seems to think that he is) the definition would change monthly, with his whims, as he found new things about it that he liked and didn’t like. In previous iterations, a blog was reverse-chronological listing of frequent or regular posts to a website. Now the only defining factor is that the blog is the “unedited voice of a person.”
Why the change?
Scripting News used to be a big fish in a little pond. These days, though, the size of the pond is growing exponentially while the size of Dave’s fish is growing much more slowly (to be generous). It’s getting bigger because of professional organizations using blogs. Dave wants to kick them out of the ecosystem so he can be a bigger fish again.
In a story about a YouTube musician who pretended to be an amateur as a publicity stunt, Andrew Orlowski of The Register remembers Dave Winer’s Crying Game moment with podcaster Madge Weinstein:
This isn’t the first example of some unwritten “authenticity” rule being broken, either. You may recall a story from the infancy of podcasting, three years ago. The man who likes to credit himself with inventing podcasts, Dave Winer, was outraged at being fooled by a female impersonator.
“It’s an act!”, he gasped incredulously on air — on noticing, after several episodes, that a podcaster called Madge had a day’s stubble and an Adam’s apple. So outraged was Winer, that he demanded a directive from the podcaster on how he should interpret it: a sort of self-certificate of authenticity.
“I need to know which parts of what’s she’s doing are real!”, he pleaded. (See our story, Harvard Man in lesbian mix-up wants satire clearly labeled.)
As with Winer, this is just control-freakery, beyond anything a record company could envisage. And there’s such a mean-spiritedness about it, too.