Why podcasting is failing

However, I'm not really convinced by the use of the word "failure". Podcasts may be less successful than their most breathless hype predicted... but what invention isn't?

Podcasts are a modest success. They're modest, in part, because the masters of podcasting turn out to be radio producers. This is completely unsurprising -- the radio folks have been evolving their audio production skills in a competitive environment for nearly a century -- and it's the very un-surprisingness of it that keeps the phenomenon under the radar. Who besides advertisers knows or cares what the audience of a radio program is? Radio hasn't been the stuff of tech news since the 1930s.

The other problem with podcasting is that the term is badly chosen and too narrowly defined. The word is associated with downloading (rather than streaming), audio (rather than video), RSS (rather than simple web links), the use of portable devices for playback (rather than PCs), and amateur production (rather than pros). Youtube and its clones represent the same core phenomenon as podcasting -- ubiquitous, cheap distribution of audio and video over the web -- except that they offer better UI and lower costs for users, producers, and advertisers. But somehow the word "podcasting" isn't used for Youtube.

It's not the podcasting phenomenon that's "failing": It's the word "podcasting", and the specific constellation of technologies that it implies.

Amateur podcasts by contrast can go on for however long the interviewer would like. The result seems to be an unstructured rambling chat rather than a to-the-point discussion, and you can’t skim it like a blog post or text article to pull out the valuable points – you have to listen to the whole danged thing.

Perhaps if podcasts were set to have a hard limit of ten minutes we’d see a spike in quality? Much as Twitter forces a condensed to-the-point blog.

For two years I worked at RSS company where technology didn't matter: what mattered was that people were too tired to learn yet another buzzword. Even now, while immensely useful, RSS is still used mostly by geeks.

Just use plain English goddamit.

I don't care much for video podcasts, since I'm driving.

If I'm at a PC, I'd much rather read a transcript of the podcast - it's much faster for me to read than to listen.

I heard her talking about podcasting once and she was told at a conference in January that podcasting was the future and teachers should be integrating it into their classrooms and this and that.

That said neither of us could figure out how to best introduce podcasts into a classroom without them being at best a simple distraction(neither could the presenters it would seem as they gave no ideas either).

That fact is though that there are a lot of new teachers that will take these peoples word as gospel and try to introduce podcasting into their classes which is the start of the cycle.

So podcasting may not be a huge success now but possibly the kids that are currently in elementary school will be the first group to truely embrace the idea of non-live radio?