Posted on: October 6, 2005 in Technology, Music
Podcasting is just distribution of content
The always interesting Lucas Gonze says:
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen opines: I don’t get why podcasts are distributed as one big file. I would much rather have the shows broken up into smaller pieces which I could synch to my iPod. That would make it much easier to find a given section again later (if I want to quote it) and it would make it easier to stop the podcast and pick up where I left off later. It can’t be hard to do technically — it would be the same as having an album. Each podcast would just be an album in iTunes.
Answer: because Adam Curry had radio on the brain during his early experiments with the thing that came to be called podcasting, and after that thing took off it was too late to change. The movement defined itself as stuff like the stuff that guy does.
I think it will change though. I think that as the public perception of ‘what podcasting is’ shifts from a radio analogy to simply a method to get online content to end users, “good things” will start to happen. Being able to subscribe to your favorite artists in iTunes for example, and having new music place directly onto your mp3 player. This is a new form of audio distribution technology (the whole ’subscription’ thing, being the main differentiating factor), and is much more important then simply a way for amateur radio announcers to put poorly recorded talk shows online (Although that’s cool too).
October 6th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
The “breaking up” of an audio file distributed through “podcasting” has been the worst idea since this whole podcasting thing started. I remember back last September hearing people say, “but it’s not like blogging, break the file up!”. Well, du’oh it’s not blogging - it’s audio. Stupid people will suggestion stupid constraints on something new - let’s all continue creating content and podcasting, and let’s actually let the really smart and creative people to create solutions for all the problems that creep up.
Technologies like Podscope and a better iPod will solve our “searching” problems with podcasting.
October 6th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
Imagine an example of a band wanting to podcast their new album to fans who have subscribed. Each podcast file (an enclosure) would correspond to a track on their album. One wouldn’t concatenate all the audio files together. There are an infinite number of ways to use this technology, and no one approach is going to solve all problems.