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:

DaxFlame: Retarded or Resmarted?

Chris Crocker: You’d cry too.

Magibon: Just look at me… Literally.

Mr. Pregnant: So horrible, you can not look away!

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.