Tuesday, April 03, 2007
No iPod Needed
Jason Van Orden has been educating folks about how they don't need an iPod to "consume" podcasts, which is a very valuable thing. And other folks have been doing some creative work around it, too...
I’m really glad people are starting to move in this direction. I did a presentation on “Getting Started Podcasting” at a women-and-media conference at MIT this past weekend, and when I told folks that you don’t need an iPod (I’ve been podcasting since late 2005, and I don’t even own one! I’ve held one in my hands once or twice that I can remember), the relief was palpable in the room.
I think that linking podcasting with iPods really introduces an imaginary class barrier — people think it’s only for rich folks who can afford to drop a couple hundred bucks on a 21st century version of a transistor radio, and they think that it’s totally out of their reach.
This is awful news for people who could really get a lot of mileage out of podcasts -- activists, people on the fringes of mainstream media, and others who are looking for alternative means of communicating their messages. Podcasts are probably the cheapest and most effective way to communicate complex ideas quickly and to a broad audience, that we've ever had. But people are dismissing them, because they're technophobes or they associate podcasts with haughty gadget-heads who use their MP3 players as status symbols.
But when people stop and consider the full truth about podcasting, and it sinks in that PODdcasting is more about Personal On-Demand Digital media, and that they can do it (on the cheap-and-grainy) with a sound recorder of just about any kind (plus a patch cord), and a computer with Audacity… or even just a telephone and a free conference call service that lets you record your calls for free… things start to look a lot different.
And then we get to the real power of podcasting.
Maybe we need to change the name to PODDcasting — Personal On Demand Digital - casting, to decouple the concept from Apple…
Just an idea.
In any case, I think that our early adoption and our early segmentation into a niche of our own may have worked against us. Now comes the challenge of educating people about this topic.
In fact, I’m shifting the focus of my own site Podtopia.net away from providing podcast services, to providing training and outreach and tutorials — education for everyone — to help address this issue and make the world safe for podcasters and podcatchers everywhere.
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I’m really glad people are starting to move in this direction. I did a presentation on “Getting Started Podcasting” at a women-and-media conference at MIT this past weekend, and when I told folks that you don’t need an iPod (I’ve been podcasting since late 2005, and I don’t even own one! I’ve held one in my hands once or twice that I can remember), the relief was palpable in the room.
I think that linking podcasting with iPods really introduces an imaginary class barrier — people think it’s only for rich folks who can afford to drop a couple hundred bucks on a 21st century version of a transistor radio, and they think that it’s totally out of their reach.
This is awful news for people who could really get a lot of mileage out of podcasts -- activists, people on the fringes of mainstream media, and others who are looking for alternative means of communicating their messages. Podcasts are probably the cheapest and most effective way to communicate complex ideas quickly and to a broad audience, that we've ever had. But people are dismissing them, because they're technophobes or they associate podcasts with haughty gadget-heads who use their MP3 players as status symbols.
But when people stop and consider the full truth about podcasting, and it sinks in that PODdcasting is more about Personal On-Demand Digital media, and that they can do it (on the cheap-and-grainy) with a sound recorder of just about any kind (plus a patch cord), and a computer with Audacity… or even just a telephone and a free conference call service that lets you record your calls for free… things start to look a lot different.
And then we get to the real power of podcasting.
Maybe we need to change the name to PODDcasting — Personal On Demand Digital - casting, to decouple the concept from Apple…
Just an idea.
In any case, I think that our early adoption and our early segmentation into a niche of our own may have worked against us. Now comes the challenge of educating people about this topic.
In fact, I’m shifting the focus of my own site Podtopia.net away from providing podcast services, to providing training and outreach and tutorials — education for everyone — to help address this issue and make the world safe for podcasters and podcatchers everywhere.
Labels: audio, digital, iPod, media, MIT, podcast, podcasting, women, YouTube
