Ok, if you read this blog or listen to our podcast, you may start to think my sole ambition in life is to coin some kind of podcast catchphrase. Podywood probably wont make it, and neither will podlebrity, but the concepts are very real. What I’m talking about is these overnight sensations that are popping up all over the web. The Obama Girls, the Smoshes, the Soulja Boys. Now I realize that you all don’t call some of these guys podcasters because they dont have RSS feeds, but I consider it all podcasting, and I the people doing it are getting to be such big celebrities that there may soon be a market for podlebrity gossip.
If I had time, I’d love to put together a little podcasting tabloid… or podloid if you will, what discussed all the juicy news from the podoshere. I think it would be a lot of fun, but for now I really enjoy this show called viralcom that is capturing it beautifully.
This show is obviously a joke, but I think this is becoming a reality to some degree.There are already little union issues popping up regarding web clips, and the brains behind some of these Internet created celebrities are being singed on by the likes of CBS.It’s not unrealistic to expect that high schoolers today will grow up admiring people like KevJumba and HappySlip rather than Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. Stay tuned… or shall I say stay tubed.
During the course of developing one of the original DailySplice features, we spent a lot of time researching how to join MP3 files together so they would play back properly in any MP3 player. If an MP3 doesn’t have a consistent encoding scheme, some players will get confused and stop playing. Since we wanted to package a bunch of audio files into one, we had to reencode each file into a standard format. (A plethora of different encoding schemes were used among the source files. Different bitrates, sample rates, stereo/mono, etc. The goal was to find an encoding scheme that yielded good sound quality while minimizing bandwidth. It took a couple attempts to find something that worked.
We decided to use the LAME library as the API for reencoding the audio. That was a relatively easy decision; it’s licensed with LGPL, open source, and easy to use. LAME is also renowned for its sound quality. There are few (perhaps none) encoding tools that surpass LAME’s quality.
The difficult part was finding a combination of MP3 properties that yielded good sound quality and low bandwidth consumption. MP3 audio has a number of factors that affect sound quality:
bitrate: The number of bits required to encode one second of audio. In general, the higher the bitrate, the better the sound quality. For music, the bitrate is usually about 192 kilobits per second (kbps) or 192,000 bits per second. For speech, it’s usually much lower. 64kbps or less.
sample rate: The number of samples per second (in Hz) taken from the analog signal (microphone or whatever) used to construct the digital signal. Once again, a higher sample rate implies better sound quality.
encoding mode: How to distribute the bits within the audio file. The most common encoding mode is Constant Bit Rate (CBR) which means that every second of audio takes exactly the same amount of bits. Another one is Variable Bit Rate (VBR) where some parts of a file can use more or less bits than others. For example, when people are talking, more data is needed to encode the conversation, but when it’s quiet, less data is needed.
channels: Is it mono or stereo?
The first attempt used CBR to encode all the files into the exact same format: 64kbps as the bitrate, 32000hz as the samplerate, and since we were working with a lot of music, stereo.
After transcoding a set of audio files, they would be joined together. MP3 is easy to join together if all the pieces are in the same format; you can simply concatenate the files together and it should play just fine.
Unfortunately, the first encoding scheme seemed to cause a lot of players to hiccup. We never figured out precisely what was going wrong, but after fiddling with different bitrates and samplerates, we didn’t make much progress.
We changed the encoding mode to VBR and players seemed to play the audio reliably, although most players reported an incorrect duration. It could be upwards of 15 minutes off for a 1-hour-long MP3.
Anyone can pick up a microphone and start podcasting in a matter of minutes. You can podcast about anything, and you can do it on your terms. It’s easy. Podcasting is for everyone.
Sound’s pretty inviting? Well, maybe. It’s one thing to start podcasting, it’s another thing to get accepted.
I’ve been out in the podcasting community under a number of different guises. I’ve been the new guy (as I am now), and I’ve been fortunate enough to see the world thought the eyes of the 500 pound gorilla.
I must say, going in fresh is eye opening. There are a lot of huge egos out there that you’ve got to go up against. It’s not like YouTube, where you’ve got a bunch of little brats running around leaving random hurtful comments (although I this may happen anyway, so be prepared), it’s more like an exclusive club where a you’ve got to run though the gauntlet a few times before you start to earn any respect.
I’ve recently been back at it in the world of online communities. My skin is pretty thick, and I already have a sense of what it’s all about, so it’s generally be pleasent and fun for me. But I’m seeing a lot of new people come in, try to say hello, and get chewed up and spit out by the few most vocal members. I always go and check out the podcasts from new people, and feel bad because it’s usually a couple of high school kids just enjoying life and trying to take an active interest in podcasting. When they get chewed out on their first into an online community, they quickly get their feelings hurt, leave some embarrassing reply, and sometimes run away with their tail between their legs. Does that sound like podcasting is for everyone?
So if you’re new, realize that no matter how good or genuine you are, you are going to get beat up. Think of it as an initiation. Although you probably wont have to deal with many 13 year old boys from trailer parks, you will run up against a lot of massive egos. If you go in with that in mind, you’ll do well just fine.
One of my burning questions is how many podcasts are out there, and how is that number changing on a month-to-month basis? Over the next month or so, I want to put a system in place to maintain an up-to-date estimate of this number.
We are in the process of building a set of services to give newcomers easier access to the massive pool of podcast content (keep reading for actual numbers). To make a scalable service, we need a reasonable estimate of the size of the data set. Running an algorithm for 100 podcasts is one thing, but running that algorithm for 100,000 or more takes some careful technical planning.
I surveyed some of the larger podcast hosts and repositories, and as of May 8, 2008:
podcast.com claims to have over 60,000 podcasts indexed.
podcastpickle.com has over 9000 podcasts (319662 episodes)
dailysplice.com has over 1100 podcasts (70000 episodes)
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the numbers for libsyn, one of the most prominent podcast hosts on the net. About 30% of DailySplice’s indexed feeds come from feedburner, indicating that the number of podcast feeds out there is approaching 700,000.
The other question I have is what proportion of those are regularly updated. Of DailySplice’s feeds, over 1000 ( 90%) have released an episode within the last 3 months. However, we have a relatively new directory, so many of the podcasts in there are popular and/or recently created. I’ll revisit this question once we’ve indexed more legacy content.
If anyone has more accurate estimates, I’d love to hear them! Stay tuned for updates to this topic.
I’ve been chatting with a lot of podcasters these days and have started to think more about the subcultures that start for form around a podcast or genre of podcast.
100 Word Stories is a prime example. The concept here is to write a story in exactly 100 words (known as drabble). Well Laurence over at isfullofcrap.com has been doing this for quite a while. He doesn’t just have a following, but a whole community of authors doing these things and sending them in.
I noticed the same when I was working over at Praxis Language on their first project called “ChinesePod.” When I started work there in the fall of 2006 there was a budding community, but no one at the company really understood it. One guy had started a forum for the podcast and within that other “cult leaders” started to emerge. This was completely spontaneous and unsolicited, and in fact my job was based around infiltrating this community and trying to understand what exactly was going on!
Recently a veteran podcaster posted in Podcast Alley, “Where has podcasting gone to?” I guess he used to be active in the Alley and came back to check the scene as he launched his new podcast. He was concerned because all his old friends were gone. Someone pointed out that they disapear from the Alley because they get their own community… and I think that hits the nail on the head. If you’re doing something cool and unique, eventually you will move past the generic podcasting communities and enter into the realm of a podcast subculture.
One potential problem with this, as it we found with ChinesePod, is that once the subculture forms it kind of thrives on itself and doesn’t pay much attention to attracting new members. People keep coming back either from bookmarks or a tight-knit network of links and growth levels off. On top of that, the initial leaders tend to be pretty dominant and all these little rules and inside jokes form, which is intimidating for new visitors.
What we need is a way to for people who are new to podcasting to locate these little pockets of goodness and/or querkiness and feel comfortable getting involved. We’ve half started on tackling this at DailySplice with our groups feature, which you’ll see tucked away in the “Share” section… but we’ve got a ways to go and could use some feedback and requests to guide the direction for that if you are so inclined =)
Here’s a term I’ve heard passed around these days as I’m doing rounds in the corporate world: “Podcast Strategy.” Almost every company I’ve talked to in the past while has at least thought about podcasting, but barely anyone knows what to do. It’s one of those buzz words, perhaps even pre-buzz, that gets tossed around the board room but no one is familiar enough with it to go an implement anything.
A visit to Google wont help much either. Type in “podcast strategy” into Google and you’re first page of results give you one decent article about a corporate podcast strategy, couple of old articles about podcast consulting, a bunch of podcasts about business strategy, a few press releases about company’s launching a podcast, and a few broken links.
So if everyone is talking about a podcast strategy, and no one knows where to start, where are all the podcast consultants? Specifically, where are the consultants that specialize in a corporate podcast strategy? I’m sure there are a few, but after spending 10 minutes in Google I can’t find any… and that means you’re well hidden if you are out there.
I say well hidden because, from what I’m seeing, a “podcast strategy” isn’t something anyone in any of these corporations is going to spend time trying to research. Yes, they talk about it. Yes, they want to do it. And Yes, I think if they happened across a good podcast consultant it would be an easy sell… but at this point it seems to be a “push” market, rather than “pull.” By that I mean nobody is going to spend any time looking for you, but if you reveal yourself you likely to get in the door pretty quick.
So I guess what I’m saying is, if you know podcasts and you’ve got some free time and a little bit of ambition, go organize some thoughts about corporate podcast strategy and start knocking on doors. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t start making big sales in a matter of days. I must admit, I’m thinking about it myself!
There’s an interesting phenomenon on YouTube. It’s a popular genre videos that consists of absolutly horrible and/or pointless videos. Some of the masters of this genre include:
I got to thinking, where is the genre in podcasting? I listen to a lot of podcasts and I’ve yet to come across a podcaster who’s claim to fame is being awful. There are of course, awful podcasts (ours may very well be one of those!) but I don’t know of anyone who is so bad they are good.
Why is this? Here’s my thoughts:
In order for bad content to become popular, it’s got to be viral. When it comes to the viral effect, it really doesn’t matter if content is bad or good, it’s just got to envoke some kind of feedback. That could be in the form of a rating (good or bad), a comment (adoring or nasty), or with a link (”check out this hilarious guy” or “check out this moron”).
So my conclusion is that podcasts must not be viral. When was the last time you sent an episode of a podcast to a friend? When is the last time you rated a podcast? When is the last time you commented on a podcast? I listen to tons of great podcast every day, but I rarely send them to anyone, rarely comment, and never rate them. It’s just not easy enough.
The content defiantly has the potential to be viral, but the infrastructure isn’t there to make it viral. At least for the time being. Where is the link in iTunes that lets you quickly send it to a friend? Why can’t I rate a podcast directly from my iTunes podcast panel and have that rating get reported in the store? Why can’t I comment directly in iTunes? Imagine how much easier it would be to find great podcasts (or crappy ones) if you could do all this in iTunes as easily as you can on YouTube!
I kind of see podcasts as this big ball of energy just waiting to be released. Someone is eventually going to come along with a site that has all the right wiring in place for viral activity in podcasts, and some blogger will come along and hurd the sheep and bam! Podcasts will be everywhere overnight.
Until then though, if you want to become famous for being an idiot don’t distribute your content with RSS.
I love toilet humour. It’s low-brow, shameful and rude, but if it’s in the right setting and people don’t take it the wrong way, it’s prett’ darn funny. I found a short video podcast called Ask Blackie, where the host Jamal, a puppet caricature of the stereotypical african american, answers viewers questions. His racially charged antics are hilarious and offensive to any visible minority (or majority for that matter). It ends with his friend “Kraka” exposing a weekly racial slur, usually about white people. Overall, this podcast has my kind of humour (rude and dirty) and high production quality. If you’re not easily offended, give it a watch!
Now, I’m not just trying to be facetious, but I think the Ninja’s definition is the only one that captures the true meaning of podcasting. The dictionary suggests that you’ve got to have web-based audio on an RSS feed and you have to distribute it to subscribers to say you have a “podcast.” About’s definition is a little more loose, saying it need’s only to an audio file on an RSS feed, also mentioning that the RSS feed is just a means to “broadcast” the audio over the Internet. Wikipedia’s broadens the definition even more by saying it’s just got to be a digital-media file on a syndication feed.What all these definitions lack is the concept of repeated publications; the “factory” in the Ninja’s definition. If someone made a weekly media update of his travels around the world and sent it out to anyone who asked for it every Friday at 12:01am via an automated email mailing list… that would fail all the formal definitions. But the Ninja would say that someone is publishing some interesting media and distributing it on a regular basis over the Internet, so it’s a podcast. And I’d have to agree.
Here’s an example of a student who recorded a single interview session as a class project, listed it in a xml file dedicated solely to that mp3, and submit it into our directory without the intention of ever releasing any other episode. According to the formal definitions, that’s a podcast. The Ninja would probably call that “brine,” and I would tend to agree with the him again. That is not a podcast.
The formal definitions get deep into the technical requirements of a podcast and ignore the true concept of what makes a podcast a podcast. Unfortunately, computer’s have a lot easier time understanding technical definitions, and so the formal definitions also define what directories will call podcasts… including DailySplice. The problem we’re having is the same problem all the other directories have, we don’t really have a “podcast directory,” we have a directory of xml documents that contain media enclosures. If you wrap your media file in an RSS feed like the above mentioned student did, we’ll list it.
What we can do though is analyze the publishing habits of a “podcaster” and, over time, determine if that RSS feed is really a podcast or just an mp3 file wrapped into an xml document. This is exactly what we try to do. Our podcasts are ordered by something we call “PodRank,” which, in part, is a measure the “podcastness” of an RSS feed based on the non-technical aspects of what constitutes a true podcast.
Of course, as soon as you steer away from the formal technical definitions you start to get a lot of grey area and everyone starts to develop their own opinions. One of our goals is to make it easy for you to find podcasts that match your own criteria. Our advanced search is one feature we’ve included on our site to help make this possible. Here you can define criteria like number of episodes per week or average duration to ensure search results meet your own definition. Please leave feedback on how this is working for you and what factors you think are most important. We look forward to bring you the most real “podcast” directory soon!
With podcast audiences growing at about 20% per year, the number of podcasts available online is likely to soar. Although a rise in the growth rate of podcasts would be great for producers and advertisers, listeners would be faced with the same dilemma they have now: is there something in Podcastland for me and how do I find it?
Two major problems are preventing podcasts from entering the mainstream. The first and probably most serious is a misunderstanding of what podcasts are. Podcasts are seen as a niche media format, and for that reason many people dismiss it as too technical. Between 2006 and 2007, there was a huge increase in the number of people who have heard of the term ‘podcast’, but a substantially smaller increase in the number of people that began listening. This indicates that people have been introduced to podcasts, but for some reason(s) are not subscribing. I believe that this is primarily due to misconceptions about podcasts and who they’re suited for; we need to dismiss the notion that podcasts are too complicated, techie, or specialized. And no, Dad, you don’t need an iPod.
The other problem is finding interesting podcasts. In chemistry, there is a concept called activation energy that is defined as the amount of energy that must be overcome for a chemical reaction to occur. If the energy cannot be provided, the reaction won’t take place. I’m sure you’ve figured out my metaphor by now. Yes, finding podcasts is a time-consuming, difficult task, especially for the uninitiated. First, you have to browse a directory, find a bunch of podcasts that seem interesting, download them, sample them, prune and maintain them. The activation energy is too high.
Lots of people are giving it the ol’ college try. There are oodles of directories out there, but most simply aggregate the RSS feed’s contents and provide a play function. Newer services add some more advanced features such as organizing podcasts by production date or allowing people to create a playlist of their favorites. Unfortunately these directories do little to solve the more complex problem of reducing the effort required to get involved. They focus too heavily on organizing content in predetermined categories in a DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory fashion, which is helpful if people already know what they’re looking for, but for users that are just getting their feet wet, this kind of organization falls short. Newcomers must still spend a great deal of time finding interesting content, a chore that will become more and more tedious as the amount of content increases.
One of DailySplice’s main efforts is to ease the burden of finding good shtuff. DailySplice organizes its directory using a metric called Podrank, an algorithm that determines the popularity and dependability of a podcast. For any category, the directory will show the most popular and consistently updated podcasts. In addition, the directory derives some helpful information about a podcaster’s publication habits, including when new episodes are expected and the expected running time of an episode.
As the number of podcasts and listeners increases over the next few years, we will need more intelligent ways of providing would-be listeners with relevant content. The objective is to reduce the amount of clicks and time investment required to find a slate of good material and listen to it on a regular basis.
Anyone can pick up a microphone and start podcasting in a matter of minutes. You can podcast about anything, and you can do it on your terms. It’s easy. Podcasting is for everyone.
