CAT won a contest on the revision3 website and we were able to attend the recording of diggnation episode #207 at the MSNBC.com digital cafe in Rockefeller Center. Rachel Maddow was a guest on the show and she made us cocktails!
We had a great time! Check out all the pix I uploaded to flickr.
“Podcasting” is one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s new words for December 2008. It looks like this is relatively soon for a new word to be entered since one of the other words for December is Rashomon, which has been around since 1951.
The first reference to the word podcast is possibly this post to the Yahoo group ipodder-dev from September 2004. That’s just a bit over four years from made-up-word to “near-ubiquity in 2008.” The power of the internet is on display.
The only thing that disappoints me is that the new podcasting entry only mentions audio. Can a video podcaster get a little love? I guess the video podcasters will just have to wait for a future dictionary update to go main-stream.
I came across this information on Twitter from @GrammarGirl and @MWGblog. Ain’t Twitter great? It seems these days that everything you hear, you hear first on Twitter. Maybe Twitter will be in the dictionary some day. I just hope they don’t call an individual message a “tweet.”
I’ve only watched a few episodes so far. I’m not sure how interesting this particular story is going to be but, wow, imagine the educational possibilities.
Years ago I worked on a series of choose your adventure type educational videos for kids. They were supposed be on laser disc so you could make decisions with the remote but they ended up non-interactive on VHS. Schools just didn’t have the equipment to play laser discs. Easy access to YouTube makes this kind of thing much more viable.
It’s been two weeks since YouTube went widescreen. In my travels around the “internets” I’ve come across quite a few embedded YouTube videos that use the new 16×9 player. I didn’t expect to see so many so soon. It’s quite refreshing. I’m surprised at how much of a difference it seems to make. The new player gives a refined first impression I guess, so you start off the video on a positive note rather than, “Hey look, another YouTube video. I wonder if it’s crap.”
It’s good to see YouTube finally modernizing their player and their site. I’ve heard that stereo audio and real HD resolutions are coming but I haven’t confirmed it. Can’t seem to find the recommended video specs in the YouTube help pages either. I know I’ve seen this page before and I’m sure the specs have changed with the new player. Anybody know what the new specs are?
I came across this cartoon the other day.
It’s called “Word of Mouth” but I think what it really illustrates is that impressions that are closer to you are more valuable than others. It speaks to Old Media v. New Media – Traditional Advertising v. Social Networking. The friend isn’t even promoting her drink, she’s just sitting there, yet that influence is more powerful than all the overwhelmingly powerful noise of traditional advertising.
This is the power of Social Media. A video podcast (for example) that has a regular community surrounding it creates a small family. The number of viewers is perhaps smaller but the impressions are much more effective and valuable. I think this needs to be taken into consideration when setting a price for ads or product placement.
Yea, I know, many advertisers and agencies don’t get it. That’s the mantra. But you know what? I think many of them do. They sit around and think about this stuff all day just like we do. I think some of them want to feign ignorance so they can get something valuable for free. Don’t fall for it. A simple mention in the right video podcast is much more valuable than a magazine ad or a banner on a website.
For those that don’t know Tom Green has been doing a talk show called Tom Green’s House Tonight from his living room for about two years. New Tee Vee went to his house for a behind the scenes video tour.
Here’s another tour of Tom Green’s house where we get to see all his plants and what’s on the roof:
Looks like podshow is re-organizing and changing their name. I was never really sure if Podshow was going to succede. Here’s why:
In 2005 I was heavily invested in my broadcast television career. I saw the writing on the wall however and I was fond of saying, “It’s 1955 and we’re still making radio drama. Pretty soon somebody up in corporate is going to figure out that it’s cheaper to hire one guy to spin records all day and we’ll all be out of a job.” I decided to jump off the old media ship, take a risk, and try something new. But what?
I eventually decided that podcasting was the way to go in part because of what I was hearing from Adam Curry on the Daily Source Code. I followed the launch of Podshow in 2006 mainly by listening to the DSC and Podcast411. I was also studying video shows like, Rocketboom, Tiki Bar, diggnation, Rumor Girls, and GeekBrief.tv. The later two shows were with Podshow.
In the summer of 2006 CAT and I started working on Let’s Knit2gether as a new media test case. We wrote some episodes, started shooting, finished a pilot episode, learned about RSS, and put up a WordPress blog. We stayed up all night for about a week and finally posted our first episode literally hours before getting on a plane to Ontario, California for our first Podcast Expo. We were determined to be podcasters when we arrived and we were. We had one episode!
At the expo we soaked up everything. We were still new to the game and we needed to learn as much as we could from everybody else. When we were leaving to go back home I remember turning to CAT and saying, “Where was Podshow? It was supposed to be this big deal and they didn’t even have a presence here.”
After we got home I found out that all of “Podshow was there in full force!” They were riding around in limos and having a grand old time. What? We were all over that place, actively searching out as much information as we could find, and we didn’t even notice them. Podshow was obviously in a serious bubble. I wrote them off right then and there. Any company that gets into a brand new industry and thinks they are the center of the universe separate from everyone else, is doomed to failure.
So now they have a new name, Mevio. OK, setting aside the fact that companies typically re-organize and change their branding right before they go out of business, maybe this will work for them. Hopefully this is actually a new direction and not the same old thing with a new name. They seem to be trying to do something more like Revision3 who, in my mind, are doing things right. We’ll see…
Yesterday at Roosevelt High School in Fresno California, a police officer shot and killed a student after being attacked with a baseball bat. I believe the person who took this video of the press conference that followed is a newspaper reporter for the Fresno Bee.
This is a response to a post on Michael Geoghegan’s blog called Podcasting – It’s a Community Not an Industry.
Podcasters, it is time you face the facts. If you are waiting for a podcast advertising service to ride in on a white horse and rescue you from your monetary woes, let me help you: start looking elsewhere.
Over the past year we’ve basically come to the same conclusion as Michael. The various new online ad “networks” aren’t going to do much for you as a podcaster.
The promise of joining an online “network” and automatically getting ads (and payment) as you focus only on making your content has always seemed a dubious promise to me. I do a video podcast about knitting which I think is a strong niche with lots of potential. In the various meetings we’ve had with these online “networks” it’s always been about raw numbers with very little consideration of the strength or subject of your content. There seems to be a blind focus on grabbing eyeballs, and advertising as the only way to monetize those eyeballs. Last year pre-roll ads were the answer. This year it’s overlays. The online mainstream media and all the VC money seems to be focused on developing advertising technology ONLY. No other options are being explored with such vigor. However, this is a new industry. Everything is changing very fast. There are a LOT of things that aren’t going to work. We really need to be exploring many new, different, out of the box models to find a FEW that are really going to be successful and repeatable.
The focus today seems to be to try to give the traditional ad buyers exactly what they want. The problem is, all they want is what they know. And all they know is what works for them now on TV and radio. I don’t think a traditional broadcast model is going to work for podcasting. We’re seeing a paradigm shift in the media industry. The Digital revolution is separating content from delivery technology. Shows go everywhere and aren’t confined to the specific distribution technology they were created for. At the same time the content producer is moving closer to the consumer. In the TV broadcast world there are lots of middle men. There’s the producer of the show, the cable channel corporation that pays for the show, the cable TV systems that delivers the show, etc. etc. before you can see it in your living room. With podcasting it’s, producer –> internet –> viewer. Any monetization model is going to have to leverage this greater simplicity. The mass media models from the past aren’t the answer and that’s all anybody seems interested in trying to develop.
So, I called podcasting an “industry” above and I guess I should probably respond to what Paul Colligan posted on his blog about podcasting NOT being an industry. These days I use “podcasting” as more of a synonym to New Media. The whole landscape is changing and constantly morphing into something else. It’s harder and harder to be strict about the definitions of specific technologies. For example: Our show Let’s Knit2gether is technically a podcast because it’s downloadable with an RSS feed but on the new AppleTV you can just click on it and play it. Does that make our show NOT a podcast? We also sell DVDs. Is our show a podcast when it’s on DVD? I don’t know anymore. In any case the media industry is changing rapidly. What it is becoming may be unknown (and un-nameable) but I still think it’s an industry.
A final thought. There’s so much more in Michael’s post to address. CAT and I have been talking about it all day. I think I’m going to cut it off here though and save the rest for future posts. When I made the decision a few years ago to shift my broadcast TV career into New Media I expected it to be a wild ride with plenty of excitement and change. I have not been disappointed in that respect and I’m sure there will always be plenty to comment on next time.
Check out these interviews Zadi and Steve got at the Spirit Awards.
“You can’t see paintings on the internet.”That really struck me. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t make much sense to me. I went over to the epic-fu community site and left the comment:
…you can’t slice a tomato with a karate chop either.
It’s interesting how some filmmakers in the video totally get it and some don’t. I guess we all move into the future at different rates.