Month: February 2007

Podcasting Northern Voice 2007

Post ImageI am leaving bright and early tomorrow morning for Vancouver – Megan, Dickson, Sharon and I are heading to Northern Voice 2007. It’s a conference I look forward to every year. I’m especially excited about this year because we have volunteered to record all of the sessions! Here’s what I sent to Darren:

We’re hosting at http://northernvoice.podcastspot.com, which is all decked out in the new Northern Voice theme. Currently we’re planning to record all of Saturday’s sessions in audio, and as much as of Moosecamp as we can. We’ve also got a couple video cameras to record some sessions and “roaming” footage. There’s four of us, so we should be able to get it all.

We’re probably not the only ones who will be recording stuff however – the people who attend Northern Voice are a creative bunch, so there will likely be lots of microphones and video cameras floating around. Bottom line: whether you can attend or not, you’ll be able to listen in.

We’re also offering a special Northern Voice promotion at Podcast Spot. If you enter the discount code NV2007 when you sign up, we’ll give you an extra 100 MB of upload quota for free! It’s just another way we’re celebrating our favorite Canadian tech conference.

If you have any feedback on our Northern Voice podcast, I’d love to hear from you. As Megan knows, I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, so I’ll be doing my best to make sure everything sounds and looks good. We should have our first “introduction” episode up sometime tomorrow.

Read: The Podcast

Wanna buy Odeo?

Post ImageHard to believe that just two years ago Odeo was a star. Heck, they even have a star in their logo! Over that period of time, they have slowly but steadily faded from the spotlight. And now even Odeo’s founders don’t want to keep it around:

It seems likely Odeo is worth more to someone else than it is to us at this point, so we’re looking for a new home for it.

We’re open to a variety of scenarios – from cash offer to an equity position. Our main concern is the ability to focus on Twitter and to see Odeo live on in some legitimate form.

All of my criticism of the service aside, I’d buy Odeo if I had the capital. The way I see it, Odeo has two main assets: a huge database of media and lots of “online presence” – that is, lots of incoming links, good search engine rankings, etc. Tons of potential.

To his credit, Evan Williams says that Obvious will continue to run Odeo if they don’t get any attractive offers. Not sure if that’s the right thing for Odeo, but at least it proves that Evan and his team still care about it.

Read: Obviously

Podcasting is just getting started!

Post ImageAlex Nesbitt wonders over at Digital Podcast if podcasting is podfading. I don’t think it is, and I don’t think the graphs that Alex presents prove anything. Scott Bourne wrote a response today, but I think he sorta danced around the big point. He says:

Another reason that I think podcasting is still going strong is the confusion over the word. While people may not be searching the word “podcasting,” as often as they were a year ago, they are searching other phrases such as “online media.” Podcasting has never been a good word to describe what we do.

I do think it’s important to admit that podcasting, regardless of what you call it, is TEMPORARILY slowing down.

Scott is exactly right – the name is the root of the problem. Podcasting as a word is becoming both more encompassing and less unique. For example, we use podcasting at Podcast Spot to refer to audio and/or video, as long as it has an RSS feed attached. I have seen people use it more liberally than us too. This is quite different from 2005 when a podcast meant an MP3 file inside an RSS feed.

The heart of the issue though is not the name confusion itself, but the fact that because of the name confusion, we don’t have a good way to measure the growth of our industry. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, unless you try to measure it.

As a result, I have to disagree with Scott’s assertion that podcasting is temporarily slowing down. I don’t think it has slowed down at all – it has just become much more difficult to measure. Any “slowing” is merely an illusion.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the metrics to back that statement up. It’s an educated gut feeling at the moment.

All of that said, I think we’re just getting started. There’s tremendous potential for growth, and 2007 could be the year that it really takes off.

Read: Scott Bourne

Notes for 2/18/2007

Here are my weekly notes (this is probably the earliest in the day that I have ever posted them):

Co-Inventor of the TV remote dies

Post ImageSad news today for all you couch potatoes out there. Robert Adler, co-inventor of the TV remote, has died of heart failure at the age of 93. He had a pretty amazing career:

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

And no, he isn’t guilty about possibly contributing to the rise of couch potatoes:

“People ask me all the time — ‘Don’t you feel guilty for it?’ And I say that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Well said. Thanks Mr. Adler – I don’t know what I’d do without the remote.

Read: Yahoo! News

Ringtones are a complete rip-off

Post ImageI’ve never purchased a ringtone for my cell phone, and I don’t ever intend to – they are just too damn expensive. How expensive? On Telus, ringtones cost $3.50 CDN each. With Bell, they range from $2.50 to $4.00 CDN each. And on Rogers, comparable ringtones start at $3.00 CDN each, excluding a 75 cent download fee.

So after a little math we get an average cost of $3.50 CDN for a single ringtone. What else could you buy for $3.50?

  • My favorite – two items from the McDonald’s Value Picks Menu. And for 49 cents more, you could get one of the Value Meals.
  • You could purchase three complete songs from iTunes.
  • Two 710 ml bottles of Gatorade at Wal-Mart.
  • Almost two Grande coffees at Starbucks, or two Extra Large coffees at McDonald’s.
  • You could store 20 GB of data at Amazon S3 for a month. Or 1 GB for 20 months. Or you could transfer up to 15 GB in a month.
  • Any one of the 63,275 items available on eBay in just the DVD, HD-DVD & Blu-ray category that are less than $3.50.
  • A breakfast sandwich from Tim Horton’s.
  • And of course, three items from pretty much any dollar store!

Can you think of a worse deal? Cupcakes are expensive. Perhaps gas – you could only get 4.3 liters in Edmonton today for $3.50 CDN. Transportation in general sucks actually. One trip on ETS costs $2.50 CDN.

The high price of ringtones is just sick. Why pay Bell $4.00 for a ringtone when you could pay them $5.99 and get an entire movie streamed to your phone? It’s absurd.

Please don’t buy ringtones – it only encourages the wireless carriers to charge such ridiculous prices.

Podcast Advertising Report Roundup

Post ImageeMarketer has managed to garner a ton of buzz today about their forthcoming report on podcasting and marketing in which they estimate that $400 million will be spent in the space by 2011. My only real comment on the report (since I haven’t seen it) is this wonderful quote from NewTeeVee (on an unrelated post):

“The great thing about forecasts is that no one remembers the exact amount when the future finally rolls around.”

Here is a quick roundup of some great quotes from posts discussing the report:

“If you build it, they will come! Or in other words, concentrate on bringing podcasts to a bigger audience, only then can you make advertising work.”
– Marketing Pilgrim

“The increase of video podcasts, which lend themselves to the kind of video ads that marketers are accustomed to developing for television, has also increased advertiser interest.”
– BusinessWeek

“Show me an advertiser that wants to generically market to Podcasts with listening audiences of dozens.”
– Paul Colligan

“Currently, despite some 90,000 podcasts available on the Web and close to 90 million iPods in the market, podcasting is universally thought of as a supplemental medium by advertisers.”
– Mediaweek

“Every once in a while someone accidentally runs into a magic lamp and a guru pops up telling us that Podcasting has already had its 15 minutes and is a fad that is ready to pass.”
– 901am

“Unfortunately, for all you indy podcasters out there, this does not bode well. With all of that competition for ad dollars, the money is going to flow to folks who have ad sales reps.”
– Micro Persuasion

“While I would love to see 400 Million dropped annually into the space, the podcasting listening and producing community is going to have to get a lot bigger.”
– Geek News Central

“As I’ve said before, I think the bigger growth could come from simply making the entire creation process easier.”
– The Viral Garden

I like the last two comments best – they are spot on.

Happy Valentine's Day – Web 2.0 Style

Post ImageYup, it’s that time of year again – Valentine’s Day. As Wikipedia says, it’s “the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other.” Apparently, it’s also a great marketing opportunity for web companies. Svetlana Gladkova over at profy shares with us seven special Valentine’s Day logos:

I think that Valentine’s Day must really be a Web 2.0 holiday with so many companies engaged in it – even important enough for Google to use a special logo (definitely created in a hurry but still).

Google, Orkut, LiveJournal, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask, and Yandex all have special logos. And if that wasn’t enough, Social Signal has a Web 2.0 Valentine just for you. Very clever! Seriously, check it out, it made me laugh!

Read: Web 2.0 Valentine

Return of the portal? Not exactly

Post ImageOm Malik’s latest column in Business 2.0 deals with the topic of “hyperaggregation” – which is a fancy way of saying “aggregating the aggregators”. Basically, there is too much content available on the web from sites like YouTube and Flickr, and web software is evolving to help us consume it all. Om says:

Since the dawn of the Web, we’ve been plagued by too much information and too little time to consume it. It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos, and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.

Sounds a heck of a lot like the “portal” of the late 90s to me.

At least, that’s the first thing that came to mind. I thought about it a bit more though, and realized that hyperaggregation != portal. The main difference is that with hyperaggregation, you have control in most cases. Either explicit control, by entering tags or topics that you are interested in, or indirect control, by making a certain video the most popular. In the portal world, it was the portal alone that decided what content made it to the front page.

My gut “portal” thought wasn’t too far off though, as even Om admits:

Perhaps the biggest opportunity in hyperaggregation is for the biggest traditional Internet companies – the AOLs, Yahoos, and MSNs of the world.

I have to agree with Om. MSN shouldn’t be building their own video hosting service, they should be building the best video aggregator instead. Increasingly it will be the aggregator that people turn to first when looking for content.

Read: Business 2.0