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my long, drawn out, and untimely comment about New Mediacracy episode 13

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New Mediacracy is an audio podcast about web video featuring industry producers, directors, writers, and other content creators.   It’s not for everyone to be sure – it’s in the form of a casual conversation which usually means that it goes on for hours.  Being a web video producer myself however, I find it an incredible resource.  Creating web video can be very isolating and it’s nice to hear about other web video creators’ successes and failures in this depth of detail.

Episode 13 of New Mediacracy was a discussion that happened after the first meeting of the IAWTV in Los Angeles.  You can hear the episode here.  What follows are my comments about the episode:

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Great discussion.  There’s so much to comment about in this episode.

First impression: The most surprising thing I realized after listening to this episode is that the actual members of the IAWTV don’t really know much more about what’s going on than we do on the outside.

My thoughts on Steve’s “gatekeeper” frustration:

I’m frustrated by it too but I think that it may partially be an illusion.  I know I’m still over here doing my thing and I’m guessing there are lots of others that we never hear about in other places doing their thing too.  I think an echo –chamber has started up in new media and we’re all beginning to believe our own press.  Nothing has changed.  Everyone can still do their own thing.  Keep doing it.

That being said, I think an overall attempt to re-structure new-media (open media) to resemble old-media (gatekeepers) is inevitable.  I personally see new media not as a new medium, but what old media is becoming.  They are not separate, just in various states of becoming if you will.  The transition is going to be very painful because old media won’t want to give up their control.  It’s going to get worse over the next few years as the old media ways become more and more threatened farther and farther up the big business food chain.

OK, so we all know that.  Big media would rather sue Napster than buy it.  We’ve seen it before.  What I think Steve is reacting to is that it seems that some in new media are actually trying to mold OURSELVES back into old media, presumably to gain some sort of “acceptance” from old media.  I see it too and it’s really sad.  I came from old media.  I jumped off that ship on purpose and I can tell you there’s no reason to go back.  Old media is dying.  All my old-media friends think I’m crazy for doing what I’m doing now but they are also in a lot of pain with their own old-media careers.  Right now, temporarily, old media still has some advantages, like traditional revenue streams, but those are drying up.  Don’t make the mistake of jumping backwards onto a sinking ship.  You’ll just go down with it.  The only way is forward.  (What “forward” means is unknown but I guess that’s the curse of being a pioneer.)

end of rant –

My thoughts about the IAWTV

Unfortunately I don’t think the IAWTV has any substance to it.  There’s a lot of potential there and I see a lot of people (including myself) projecting their HOPES on this organization, but what is the IAWTV really doing right now that is worth saving?  What does it have right now to build on for all those future possibilities?  I don’t see anything.  I just see a big mess.  I think we’re getting distracted trying to solve all the problems with the IAWTV and we’re not noticing that there’s nothing there to begin with.

I think it might be time to put the IAWTV aside and redirect all our energies elsewhere to build the organization we all really want and need, from the ground up.  We can bypass ALL the IAWTV issues by starting up a new organization with a mission and an organizational structure that is aligned with the core values we all care about.  I know there are some who have put a lot of time and energy into the IAWTV and they won’t want to abandon that hard work but that’s not really a good reason to put more work into it.  If there was some core asset that the IAWTV had that was worth saving I would say go for it, but from here, at this point, I don’t see anything.  Just a thought…

Best quote from episode 13: “The Television Academy isn’t called Visual Radio.” – Barrett Garese

all your technology are belong to us!

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All this is mine!

VoloMedia announced today that it has been awarded what it calls the “patent for podcasting.” OK, whatever. Podcasting is so last Tuesday but the government takes a long, long time to approve these things so, what’s this all about. Turns out it was an application from 2003 that doesn’t even mention the word “podcasting” (because the word hadn’t been invented yet.) I think then it’s a bit disingenuous for the company to say it’s the patent for podcasting in the title of their announcement about it. It looks to me like they might be trying to make claims after the fact.

And who is this VoloMedia? I’ve been podcasting for three years. I speak at technology conferences about it. I’ve never heard of VoloMedia until today.

OK so what does the patent claim actually say? Here are the details from VoloMedia’s website. (See you on the other side of this quote. Don’t get lost on the way 😉

For reference, below are the claims issued under U.S. patent 7,568,213:

1. A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising automatically providing the user with an indication of the availability of updated episodic media via the channel dedicated to the episodic media in accordance with the subscription request.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising synchronizing the updated episodic media automatically downloaded to the computing device associated with the user with a portable computing device communicatively coupled to the computing device associated with the user.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein synchronization of the updated episodic media automatically occurs in response to a predetermined user setting.

5. The method of claim 3, wherein synchronization of the updated episodic media occurs in response to a request received from the user.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the updated episodic media is made available to users not associated with the computing device over a local area network.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the automatic download is further based on a priority assigned to the channel.

8. The method of claim 3, wherein the channel dedicated to the episodic media is reduced in size during synchronization in order to fit available cache storage within the portable device.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the channel dedicated to the episodic media is modified in size by removing one or more episodes of episodic media.

What a bunch of vague gobbly-gook. This patent claim could apply to iTunes, my DVR… heck it could even apply to Twitter and Facebook. There’s no mention of an RSS feed at all which is essential for a podcast. I don’t think this patent is enforceable but they could certainly cause trouble for a lot of people.

What’s happening here reminds me of what happened a hundred years ago to the emerging motion picture industry. Several companies got together and formed the “Edison Trust” and tried to control the industry with their patents. The “independents” as they were called (the ones shut out of the trust) moved to the west coast to get as far away from the trust as they could. They concentrated on story and longer feature length films that were easier to market. In the end “content” beat out the control of the technology.

So, what does it all mean? Tom Webster over at Edison research has some good thoughts. Leesa Barnes over at Marketing Fit weighs in as well. But all in all, Alex Lindsay from Pixel Corps may have said it best on twitter:

OK… whoever approved this at the Patent Office… I want my tax dollars back for your salary… youre an idiot.

Yep.

It’s official! Podcasting now in the dictionary

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“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.”