Podcast.com - the new podcast directory with big ambitions to dominate the medium - has opened its doors just a little. You can begin to get an idea of what this cleanly designed, cutting-edge interface is all about.

There are many podcast directories, but not one that is easy to navigate and use. Podcast.com aims to be the first. It has a nice feature that certainly helps in that direction. You can keep listening to a podcast while browsing away from its page in the directory.

The heart of Podcast.com is its approach to directories. You can subscribe at any level - say to all “business podcasts”, or sub-categories within “business podcasts”. Later, users will themselves be able to organise podcasts in directory trees and folders, and share their sorting and sifting of their favourite podcasts with other users if they want to. You will be able to manage one feed with all your favourite podcasts in one place, and subscribe to it in iTunes or whatever podcatcher you use. You could even publish a podcast compilation - a new take on “Top of the Pods”. This might be a controversial feature with some podcasters, who could possibly think that their syndicated content is being “stolen”.

As a podcast publisher of (Storynory - audio stories for kids) we are going to be very interested to see where users place our podcast in their directories. It should give us clues for marketing ourselves.

There’s clearly going to be a huge amount of user-flexibility and functionality within Podcast.com. A lot of it is quite new to people like me, and we are going to have to stretch our little brains to understand what we can do with it.

The task facing Podcast.com, is to explain all it can do to the public. The expensive URL (which cost the owners a tidy sum I believe) implies that this directory is going for the mass market. For that it’s going to have to be simple and easy to understand. I suggest moving away from jargon. It’s based on OPML - which is great - but we the users shouldn’t have to know that. It’s an old analogy, but most of us drive our cars without knowing what goes on under the bonnet. If we want, we can open it up and take a look, but it shouldn’t be compulsory. The web should be the same.

There is a a tricky balance to strike between great functionality and down-to-earth easeb of use. I hope Podcast.com gets it right, because if it does, it’s going to be hugely beneficial for promoting podcasts.

iTunes is a capricious friend, so I hesitate to boast, but I was pleased to log on this morning and find that our Children’s Story Podcast, Storynory is at 21 in the UK Arts and Entertainment Category, just ahead of the Capital Breakfast show with Johnny Vaughn.

But despite having set “Family” and “Education” as iTunes subcategories, we don’t warrant a ranking in those charts. We do, however, appear under Education as a “featured” podcast, rather than in the separate chart. It’s annoying that big Brand Podcasts, such as BMW and Penguin are often plugged on the front page of iTunes under “New and Notable” despite being behind us in the charts.

If you set the “popularity” ranking in the fourth column of an iTunes podcast search (in the latest versions of iTunes, changing from the default “relevance”,) Storynory comes out top for a search on “children”, ahead of the BBC’s “Big Toenail Clippings” programme. But if you search for “kids” we come nowhere at all, despite having it as a key word and mentioning it in our description. We do, however, come out as number one in popularity for books, ahead of Penguin.

iTunes works in mysterious ways - but as 80% of subscribers use it, it’s THE most important promotion for any podcast - and Podcast Alley etc are far, far behind.

This graph shows the trend history for searches on “Gordon Brown” (red) and David Cameron (blue) using Google’s new trends tool.

The Tory leader will taking on Chancellor at the next general election. Currently, it looks like David Cameron is getting more buzz on searches than Brown, while Brown is getting more mentions in the news put out by the media. I think this trend tool is going to be useful.

Here’s a couple more Business Podcasts in English accents. McKinsey on Finance and PriceWaterhouseCoopers Recruitment Media. I found them in the iTunes business category, but I can’t link to them because I can’t find a dedicated podcast site. Perhaps this is why they have gone unnoticed.

Neville Hobson is asking why there are so few British business podcasts? I think the answer is that it’s early days. The word “Podcast” might have got into the dictionary last year, but it’s round about now that it’s filtering into the British consciousness. As Neil Dixon and Dean Whitbread said in last week’s interview with me for ID3, now the big media have got in on the game, (Guardian, Sun, Telegraph, BBC, etc), podcasting is getting some new buzz about it, and that benefits all podcasters and would-be podcasters.

See Nev’s comments section for British businesses (well a British branch of German business in one case), BMW, Thompson Holidays, Jamie Oliver/Sainsburys, who have got into the medium. Elswhere, GM, Mercedez, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Whirlpool are at it. It’s not too bad a list for an emerging medium. And let’s not forget Nev’s own excellent, Anglo/American For Immediate Release.

My prediction for the rest of 2006 - there are going to be quite a few more British Business Podcasts.

“Podcast tips” are one of the top in-coming searches on Blog Relations. I haven’t written that many so far, perhaps for fear of looking like a know-all, high-lighting my own weak-points, or boring the general audience. But as more people try out podcasting, there must be punters looking for a few tips.

One of the first questions a would-be podcaster must ask himself or herself is, “Which microphone should I buy?”

For a safe bet, why not stick with a tried and trusted old work-horse? The Shure SM58 has been around since the 1960s, and features on numerous pop classics. It’s made for vocalists, and it’s just as good for those of us who merely babble into the mic, and don’t burst into song unless we are pissed.
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

Id3 Magazine have published my audio interview with Neil Dixon of Britcaster and Dean Whitbread of The UK Podcasters Association.

Download the Audio

I caught up with them on Wednesday night at the We Media fringe event at the Zero One media centre in Soho.

The topic was the STATE OF UK PODCASTING but we ended up talking about who does eccentricity best - the Brits or the Yanks. I think in the process I managed to insult a good chunk of the British Podcasting scene, and Neil said one or two things that might get him into trouble with his American Wife. Dean told me that I was lucky to be still be vertical. But it’s actually a good natured chat after a very long day of conferencing.

I’ve included it in the Blog Relations feed, and I must get round to asking Neil to add Blog Relations to Britcaster.

ID3 Magazine - for podcaters - has announced that it’s ditching plans to launch as a paper magazine in the shops. Instead it’s saving trees by refunding subscribers and will become a “mere” website. They “underestimated” the complexity of the project.

Well I’m not too disappointed. I prefer a multi-media website to a PDF format, the way PodcaterIUser Magazine has gone. PDFs are too much bother for me, and have no interaction.

The self-interested good news is that they will share advertising revenue with contributors - of whom I am one.

My credentials at the We Media conference were for ID3. I’ve sent ID3 an audio interview with two leading British podcasters at the “We Media” fringe. Adam Curry didn’t show as billed for the main event.

Download this audio podcast

I restored my sanity after yesterday’s We Media conference with a few whiskies at the lively fringe event. Suw Charman was in full flood, laying into the conference - which made me feel a bit better about all the nasty things I said about We Media here on this blog.

There’s a lot of talk about how the Big Media and the Social Media can live together. Well I hope I’m not being indiscreet when I mention that Suw - who is a social media consultant - lives and blogs together with Kevin Anderson who works for the Big BAD Media in the form of the BBC World Service. So who better to tackle the subject of media “cohabitation” than Suw and Kevin?

The We Media conference now has a Fringe Wiki that is asking whether the conference is worth it…. Feedback is pretty instant these days, and putting anything on is a risky business. Also see Technorati under the wemedia tag, which despite my earlier remarks, is working all too well today.

The We Media Conference is quite mind-numbing. At first I thought that what it needed was a break-out zone, where you could get away from the boring speakers and meet interesting people. Now, after hours and hours of this, I think it needs a darkened room where you can lie down with an ice-pack on your forehead, with an intravenous drip of some good whisky.

The main subject is how “We Media” - ie the BBC, Reuters, The Times, The Guardian, can “embrace” citizen journalism and use it to their own ends.

Far from being “We Media” it is “They Media” sitting up on the stage and talking without much knowledge about citizen journalism. For a moment it came alive when they had a blogger on the stage - Rachel North who was inspired to blog by being caught up in the London bombing. The rest has been open-ended and vague. The most cringe-worthy moment came when a “young” 31 year old BBC smarmy presenter introduced some “digital assassins” ie bloggers (some of whom work from the BBC), who sat down at the tables with the old fuddy-duddies so that they could talk to real bloggers. Oh God! That was the most embarrassing moment of any conference I have ever been to. Rightfully, it was heckled by an old Private Citizen in the Dad’s Army mode who somehow got into the conference.

Richard Dreyfuss did the Hollywood, “I’m not a typical star because I care” turn, with his tie loosely pulled to one side, telling us that the young can’t be trusted with “this technology” because they haven’t been properly educated in the meaning of Democracy. Then actors are always repulsive as themselves, even if they are wonderful being somebody else. (The Tin Men will always be one of my favourite films).

Even the survey which kicked off the conference was bogus. It was presented as saying that people don’t trust bloggers to tell the truth - but in fact it turns out that the question was whether people trust bloggers to have the good of society at heart. This is an entirely different question, and it’s a black mark against the BBC that they twisted this.

Helen Boaden, the BBC Head of news who decided to keep reporting that the London Bombs were a power surge on the tube got off lightly. Nobody asked her about it, even though an authentic victim/blogger was on the stage. Helen was asked what blogs she reads,and she named one by her boss and another by a BBC journalist.

There’s no sense here of the variety and liveliness, human warmth/spite, and sheer entertainment of grass roots media. All I can say is thank goodness I didn’t pay to get in. Actually, they could charge people to get out. I don’t think I’m going to be posting any nice thoughts about the BBC until I’ve got over this.