Scripting News, Trade Secrets and Ego

December 9, 2004 | Audioblogs and Podcasting, Rants and Raves | By: Mark VandeWettering

My rant begins with Dave Winer’s post on Scripting News, from which I quote:

Here’s the Trade Secrets podcast I promised yesterday where we explain where Adam and I see podcasting going. Since it’s a travel day (flying to Boston for the I&S conference) there won’t be much to read here, so I’m asking for forty minutes of your time today to listen to this cast. I don’t think you’ll regret it. We’re at a moment when this new activity is starting to make sense in a broader way, and the next set of problems are evident. The problems are industry-size, that is, it will take an industry to solve them. Hope you enjoy the story!

While I didn’t actually hear alarm bells, I did feel the hair on the back of my neck prick up. I don’t listen to Trade Secrets much anymore, but Dave said it was important, and that I wouldn’t regret listening to it.

Well, I do regret it. I’ll summarize what took Dave and Adam forty minutes to meander around:

  • Dave is still upset that Adam gets credit for inventing podcasting. Not with Adam, but with the world.
  • Dave and Adam are working on a business based upon podcasting. No real details were announced.
  • The people who are working on iPodder scripts? They aren’t listening to Dave and Adam enough, and they should because they are the number one podcast.
  • Dave and Adam need to make money off of podcasting so they can go on and do the next big thing.

I suspect I might be in the vast minority, or perhaps even alone in this, but did anyone find anything of interest in this podcast? I’m sure it is all of intense interest to Dave and to Adam, but why should we care about what they are doing? When Dave says “listen, you won’t regret it”, I feel that you have to deliver some reason for us to care. I don’t think they gave us any reason whatsoever to care about what they are doing.

We know, you invented podcasting, but the cat is out of the bag and kitty doesn’t want to go back in. While you guys might hold the number one slot now, here’s an update: it won’t last. Just as nobody goes back and watches Edison’s early motion pictures (okay, I do, but very few do) being first doesn’t give you any real guarantee of immortality. As a consumer, I’ve moved beyond your podcasts, because you continue to talk as if the medium was important and your role in developing the medium is somehow important. You can go on and get interviewed by the BBC and CNN, you can be approached by radio and television executives, but none of that matters in the slightest to me. That world has nothing to do with what I do, and has nothing to do with what interests me.

I’m just a hobbyist. I do my podcast because it is fun for me to. The topics I choose are designed to appeal to me, and to the extent that my interests are eclectic, my popularity will always be limited. I am not going to hire production staff or run gigabit networking to my house. I’m not going to play RIAA music, or interview movie stars or music celebrities. Why? Because we already have big media to do that. Duplicating existing big media on handheld devices isn’t innovative or interesting, just as having traditional journalists publish blogs isn’t interesting. What is interesting in my mind is the ability of everyone to participate in the exchange of rich media to communicate with each other. And we can do that now.

Podcasting appeals to me because nearly anyone can do it. On any budget. For any reason. To communicate with family. Or their community. Or their church. Or people with similar interests. Or people who don’t know what their interests are. Or people who just need something different to listen to. There aren’t any real obstacles to doing it, at least to anyone who wants to actually do something. We certainly don’t need an industry to make that happen: it’s happening already.

Comments

Pingback from Flutterby!
Time 12/12/2004 at 9:09 pm

MarkV has two great notes on “podcasting” and the net in general. Scripting News, Trade Secrets and Ego : Duplicating existing big media on handheld devices isn’t innovative or interesting, just as having traditional journalists publish blogs isn’t interesting. What is

Comment from Brian Cantoni
Time 12/9/2004 at 8:24 pm

Mark, you’re spot on with this one. I too just finished listening to today’s Trade Secrets and was also underwhelmed. On the one hand you’d like to give kudos for them for getting the podcast airplane off the ground, but do we have to continually revisit the issue of credit?

You have the right analogy: the cat’s out of the bag now and the future is in the hands of the many, not just the two.

Comment from mneptok
Time 12/9/2004 at 8:48 pm

“Inventing” podcasting? Huh?

This isn’t invention, it’s combination.

“Hey I have a website! Hey, with Internet connections averaging faster, and me being able to easily record audio clips, I could put audio clips on my website!” That’s symbiosis, not invention, IMO.

If you want to get paid, guys, really *invent* something. Don’t just combine two existing technologies into something blantantly obvious. I say “blatantly obvious” because I was a DJ on college radio back in the day. *Tons* of people wanted to know how to get a show. There’s a huge interest by many people to be heard, not just read. If you hadn’t started podcasting, someone else would have within a year. Bet on it. It’s obvious, it’s easy, it doesn;t need to be “invented.” It just has to have a motivated individual (or 2) combine the extant technologies in the correct recipe.

This is /. “FIRST POST” syndrome carried to a level approaching absurdity, I think. But what the heck do I know?

Comment from D’Arcy Norman
Time 12/9/2004 at 9:07 pm

Yeah. Have to agree with you. Although I still find the Daily Source Code entertaining, I stopped listening to Trade Secrets and Morning Coffee Notes a long time ago. Adam seems quite down to earth and cool about this all, but man is Dave full of himself. I mean come ON! Constantly (constantly) harping that he invented RSS, and we’d be nowhere without him. Actually, Dave jumped the shark for me with the outburst at BloggerCon3 about it being “his conference” and that he didn’t want certain topics discussed. Stank to high heaven of a kid threatening to take his toys home if we didn’t like him best. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that…

Anyway – he’s probably a nice person, but I just can’t stand to listen to him anymore. At least Adam appears to be having fun with it…

Editor’s note: It’s interesting that you mention that outburst at Bloggercon 3, because that was the first time that I began to think there might be something odd going on. His “it’s not your conference” comment shattered all illusions that we were participating in a community like the blogosphere: where your ideas are forced to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. When I hear him talk now, it is colored through that outburst, where he acted as final arbiter of what was worthy of discussion and what was not.

The medium will be free and open, not because Dave wanted it that way, or because he designed it that way, but because a free and open medium is what people want, and they will resist efforts for any individual or group to control it.

Comment from Nicole Simon
Time 12/10/2004 at 9:50 am

Dave might like it or not, it was and is not his podcast which got people attracted too podcsting, but Adam Curry’s. T

The best Adam can do is play promos and promote podcast so listeners can discover new podcast which they will then go on listening.

And no, I don’t ‘obay’ to somebody just because he tells me to.
Nicole

Comment from Steven Muller
Time 12/10/2004 at 3:47 pm

I discovered podcasting very recently and I have been listening to some of the ‘big guys’ and trying to sound out as many other feeds as I can. There is a theme developing and your post sums it up well – those with a business bent want to find the business model and start extracting the bucks, I just hope they dont grab all the headlines and turn new listners off cos there are some great shows demonstrating creative approach to the presentation of ideas and information. Keep blogging, keep podcasting, keep listening.

Editor’s note: I’m with ya Steven. Good advice, and thanks.

Comment from Dan Lyke
Time 12/11/2004 at 3:07 pm

Ages ago I pulled Scripting.com off my daily rotation. After this broadcast, anything audio with Dave Winer in it is definitely off of my regular rotation, and it’ll probably be a cold day down below before I’ll manually download it.

Adam is still #1 because he has a voice that works for radio, and because he’s filling the role that Dave filled in the early years of the weblog revolution: The center of the community, the person who introduces us to new sounds, who pulls different podcasters together and makes us feel important.

But something will happen, just like 2001-09-11 happened, and the attention of the wider community will be pulled to podcasting in much the way that the Pentagon and WTC attacks pulled the attention to the political “warbloggers”, and all of a sudden that tiny little niche won’t matter any more.

Maybe it’ll be a good thing, I’d love to see, say, Coverville able to pay its bills (Sorry, Mark, but as much as I love your show, it’d take a huge change in the culture for your topics to become popular, and I’m not sure I’m ready for a plague to kill off that many people), but more likely it’ll be either the Gizmodo “sell more gadgets” or the Drudge/Instapundit uninformed ranting and rumors model.

I think there’ll be two groups that’ll make money specifically from this:

1. A company which solves the hosting issue, bandwidth, disk space, the difficulty of P2P feeds, and puts a nice interface around things, ala LiveJournal.

2. The few people who become the breakout stars of the medium.

While the first has a little bit of appeal to me, and maybe Adam has the connections to make that work, the second has none at all. What’s drawn me to blogging has been that long tail, finding the Howard Stern of the medium bores me.

And the whole “invented” thing bugs me too. People have been doing web distributed audio for at least a decade. Yes, Dave did RSS enclosures and Adam automated the downloads, and that’s commendable and all: Thanks, guys. Now get over it.