The Downside

Within 5 years, you won’t hear the word podcast. You’ll forget the word podcast. It will go the way of the fax machine because it’s not a technology. It is a black hole of technology, sucking in all that is truly interesting and innovative. It’s the 8-track of the Internet.

First off, I hereby resolve never to use the word podcast again. It doesn’t have anything to do with Apple’s iPod, and there’s no “casting” or broadcasting involved. More on this later.

Remember when you got your first cassette recorder with a microphone and you and your friends sat around recording each other talking? That’s (almost) exactly what a podcast is, except it’s cheaper to make copies of your mindless babble. The “pod” came from the fact that Apple is dominating the portable audio player market, so most people were listening to their audio downloads on their iPods. If we were any more sheep-like, we’d be calling operating systems “Windows Systems.”

Then, the fact that you can download this recorded audio somehow became known as casting, although broadcasting is generally accepted to be the distribution of a signal, like through television or cable, that can be simultaneously received by the watchers or listeners. But podcasts are downloaded on-demand, whenever the listener wants, or as the tech types like to say, asynchronously. It is not sent until the user requests it, and then it is only sent to a single user. Nothing casty about it.

So what we’re talking about is really an audio download, or as I like to call them, loadios (LOW-dee-ohs). These are not to be confused with loadeos (low-DAY-ohs), of course, (video downloads.)

So why are loadios destined to join Betamax and the upcoming PlayStation 3 on the scrapheap? The technology to make loadios obsolete is already here. The whole point of a loadio is that you can download it and play it whenever you want on your portable audio device. But perhaps you’ve noticed that every cell phone and PDA released in the last couple years has a wireless Internet connection. As those connections get fast enough, there will be no reason to download and store loadios because you’ll be able to listen to them on-demand, whenever and wherever you like. No need to have an iPod involved or to save the loadio anywhere - just ask for it, and you’re listening to it. Naturally, you’ll be able to save them if you want to your phone or PDA or ‘net-enabled audio player, but would there be any reason to call a saved audio program a “podcast” at this point? It’s just another saved program, like on your Tivo. This streaming, on-demand paradigm is not far away. It may even make iPods obsolete, but you can be sure Stevie Jobs is adding ‘net capabilities to his Pods as we speak.

Incidentally, what’s so “I” about the iPod? Usually that “I” stands for Internet, but any connection an iPod has to the Internet is purely incidental in that the computer you plug your iPod into may have an Internet connection, although there’s really no need for that unless you want to download music files to your computer where you can THEN transfer it to your non-Internet enabled iPod. I love marketing folks.

Of course, downloadable audio files are useful still. It’s cool that people can record their own little radio show and distribute it to their friends and listeners. But we’ve been able to download audio files on the Internet for 10-15 years now, so it just doesn’t seem that important, new, or revolutionary. The fact that you can put these files on a portable audio player like an iPod is cool, but just not all that new or exciting. And how the word “podcast” came to represent this activity, I have no idea. Perhaps some underground marketing from Apple? I look forward to a time when I don’t have to download files to my portable audio player and when I can pick and choose which programs I want to listen to on-demand.

So yes, I give podcasts *ahem* loadios another 2 years of any sort of relevance, and then another 3 years until they’re completely forgotten. People will listen to streaming audio (streamios) and watch streaming video (streameos) on any device they like, whenever they like. Check back with me in 2011 and we’ll see.

For at least the past year now, you can’t read a story about Web 2.0 and the Internet without reading about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great site. It’s a great reference. It’s free.

But, it’s just not as Important (capital “I”) as people make it out to be. It’s touted as the Wisdom of Crowds or the knowledge of the masses, but after further analysis, it was found that the vast majority of the content on the site was generated by 1000 people. That’s right, just 1000. Now, who exactly are these people? Are they professors of history, biology, physics, and the other deeply technical topics they cover? Unlikely, because those people get paid to do what they do. They write books and research papers and do research, and reference primary sources. Perhaps they even write encyclopedias…

So who’s contributing to Wikipedia? Schmoes. I’m not saying these people are dumb or uneducated, but they’re…regular people. Maybe they have a few history books or other textbooks they consult (or, I hesitate to suggest, an encyclopedia). Maybe they’re some professor’s research assistants. Maybe they’re just passionate about the topic. I respect their work and their passion, but when it comes down to it, I can’t trust Wikipedia with information that absolutely has to be correct, particularly current events. It’s not a news site, and it shouldn’t try to be one. If I need to know what year Lincoln died, I’ll go to Wikipedia. But if I want to know about a topic that’s current, hotly debated or deeply technical, I will find other sources.

I do love the spirit of Wikipedia, the collective effort to document human history and science, but we’ve seen more and more incidents where it has been abused by unscrupulous users. You never know when something isn’t quite as impartial as it seems or is a deliberate effort to smear someone. Truthiness indeed.

What’s the solution for Wikipedia? It seems that to control quality, they will need to limit their contributors to a small, trusted group. When you rely on a small, trusted group, however, you often need to pay them, and what will you have then?

And lastly, I’ll point out another disturbing trend in journalism.

If you haven’t read BusinessWeek’s latest piece of Silicon Valley fluff, take a few seconds to skim it. Just make sure you don’t pay too close attention, because much of it is overblown, the facts are dodgy, and in general, they’re playing the Big Media game by selling their magazine with hype. Where have all the real journalists gone?

I discovered early in my life that I have a gift for criticizing things. No matter what you’re talking about, I can find a downside to it. If I won the Lotto, I’d complain that I have to pay 1/2 of it in taxes, and that Bush will probably spend that money paying Halliburton to build another prison in Iraq, next to the still broken-down water purification plant. When Christmas rolls around, I lament the commercialization of the holiday and how sick and tired I am of hearing the same carols year after year. When I travel, I criticize the ever-changing security procedures at LAX and how poorly documented they are, so you only know what’s going on if you actually ask a security guard.

Does all this mean I’m a pessimist? Perhaps. You can make up your own mind from this blog as I progress.

I’ve been working on this creature we call the Internet for 10 years, and only now am I getting around to starting my own blog. To tell you the truth, I don’t really like blogs. I don’t even read my friends’ blogs, and honestly I’m not expecting my friends to read this blog. There are far too many bloggers who go on and on about their family or what they had for lunch that day or what movies they want to see this weekend. I only care about such things if I’m already a close friend of yours, and if I am a close friend of yours, I’d rather talk to you to catch up with your life than read about it on the web.

Perhaps we can chalk that up to my ADD. We’ll discuss that later on. Personally, I think it’s because you don’t get the “color” by reading something on the web - if I want to learn about your life, I want to hear what you have to say, ask you questions, and have a real conversation. Reading a blog is primarily a one-way conversation, aside from the highly asynchronous “comments” that lend an iota of life to the whole institution.

But here I am anyway. And now that I think about it, why am I doing this? I believe that, despite any pessimistic leaning, I have some observations on the world that I’d like to share. Particularly, observations about Media, Marketing, and Technology, probably the three professional/industrial worlds that I’m closest to in my everyday life. This unholy trinity does have some great things to offer, but they are also abused, and I’d like to take this opportunity to examine how MM&T affect our lives. More often that not, I find that they have a bigger impact than I first recognized.

My next post: Why Wikipedia just doesn’t matter