Interesting things have been happening over on the blog I help write for a Seattle startup, Exbiblio. The management have announced a sudden cutback of the staff. I’ve been writing up both sides of the story.

I’m not sure that the Exbiblio blog has always been everything it promised - but this is the real stuff, I believe. It is a genuine experiment in openness when you are writing about cutbacks as they happen.

The Press Gazette is to close after 41 years reporting on journalism, mostly in the UK. No reasons were given. In a way, its surprising it’s lasted so long. Classified Ads for British journalism jobs go straight to Monday’s Media Guardian. I suppose there are so many media pundits blogging away for free these days, that the competition was almost limitless. Still, I think if you wanted to really know what was going on behind the scenes in British journalism, you had to read the Gazette. It will be missed.

Is it just me, or am I right in thinking that UK iTunes has buried Podcasts out of view? There used to be a link on the main Music Store page near the top. Now you have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the top five podcasts only.

I switch the store to the US view and find that it’s as before. But if the UK is setting the trend, this could be a very serious for the development of podcasts. iTunes has been the big driver of their popularity.

You can still click on podcasts in the left side bar, and then on Podcast directory at the bottom right of the page - but that’s hardly likely to bring in new listeners.

Thanks Apple….

We are still not quite sure if our Alternative Energy Blog is worth the effort, but we seem to have launched just as the phrase is leaping out from every news stand, with the Washington Post and The Economist both leading with the topic. I’ve no doubt that this is a really booming area.

I’m finding the subject interesting - and learning loads as I go along. It feels good to be writing about a topical news subject, with a mass of material. I don’t have to hunt for stories. But the economics of a blog are a bit airy-fairy. If it does well in Google, it could become a valuable property that somebody might want to buy - but that is going to take a while. In the meantime, it’s hard to earn enough ad revenues to pay somebody else to write it. You need to get several thousand visitors a day to make anything like real money. Still, with clicks at about 20 cents + a pop in alternative energy, it’s easier than some subjects to make some pennies. If it does well, there may be some value in credibility. We’ll see. For the minute, it’s a bit of a whim.

Saturday’s Podcaston was a success, but you could feel the tension between those who would do podcasting seriously, and the radio-ham type pioneers. Brad Gibson of Macformat made the ‘controversial’ suggestion that a good podcast should aim to have listeners. He went on to say that it shouldn’t be over half-an-hour, and it should have some sort of formal structure. When he was contradicted from the floor, at least half the audience cheered loudly. After that, the discussion on creativity got no-where, descending instead into how to please sponsors.

Nobody really defined the attractions of podcasting. Almost everybody said it’s not a radio show - but what’s the difference? I hate to state the obvious, but the first difference is that the listener can choose when to hear it, and choose out of a big catalogue of different shows, broken down by categories. This tends to make podcasting very niche - if you are interested in knitting, one evening you will seek out and find Caston. If you are interested in Dr. Who, you will find one of sereral who-casts.

If you are generally interested in the world, there’s always BBC 5 Live or Radio 4. If you want the latest news - again you go to the broadcasters. Podcasting is all about focus. Sorry - but that’s the way it is. It’s not about getting as many listeners as the BBC, but it is about reaching as many people as possible who are interested in your subject.

I was also bored with the ‘anyone can do it refrain”. Few thought that they could easily do my job when I was at the BBC, but now that I’m effectively producer, sound engineer, co-writer, co-publicist, blogger, webmaster, designer, and a few other things all at the same time, everyone thinks they can do my job.

No. Not everyone has the time or the inclination or the skills to podcast. That’s why there were about 160 people at Podcastcon - not quite enough to fill Earls Court yet. But if you really really want to podcast, you can learn. That’s pretty much true of lots of things in life.

The best session by far was on business. Guillaume du Gardier of Edelman gave a sobering account of how big business can’t see the business case for podcasting. They want to measure only the size of the reach, and have no interest in the quality of the relationship with the listener. The reason that business should be interested in podcasting is that it delivers such a targetted audience who feel involved in the programme - rather than a mass of people who are only half listening.

A great example of what a small business can do came from the Wiggly Wiggler/ Podcast. Heather Gorringe and her husband are farmers, and online suppliers of plants for ‘wildlife’ gardens. They talk about life on the farm and conversations with customers. “How do you measure the value of a conversaton?” asks Heather.

Her podcast has gained her coverage in national and international media, and she’s received orders from as far away as California. Her business continues to grow, even though she relies far less on traditional advertising. But Heather is clearly a natural communicator. She has found a community of interest in natural things, and she supplies it with what it wants. This is good podcasting

Matthew and I have been cooking a few plans for new ventures, and we’ve quietly launched the first of these today. It’s an Alternative Energy blog called altnrg. We think it’s a good niche to play in, but it’s a bit of an experiment. There is good news-flow, and good click-through rates, but you still need an awful lot of those clicks to make it worth while. We’ll just see how it goes.

Installing a new Wordpress blog is no more than a few clicks away our Bluehost webhosting account. From then on, I always think it’s going to take half-an-hour to get everything ready, and in fact I end up tinkering until the wee hours.

You’ll notice that the design is a development of the blog relations theme. In keeping with most ad-driven blogs, it has a double sidebar on the right. We noticed at Storynory that people click far more on this side.

I wanted to get latest posts, search, and subscribe button clearly above the fold. The comments link is at the top of the post to encourage people to take part.

It relies on tags and a tag cloud rather than categories, as I think these are better for technorati searches, and you can have more of them. The cloud gives a quick overview of what the blog is about.

I’ve installed the latest Ajax stuff, including the great Extended Live Archive and Ajax Comments. Tags are by Ultimate Tag Warrior. For SEO I consider the sitemaps plugin essential (together with Webmaster tools) and I track stats with Analytics. Of course we need a Feedburner account, and have to make sure that the header template directs people to the feedburner feed.

All in all, it’s never a five minute job to optimise a new WordPress blog.

Being a blog consultant is not without the occasional unexpected perk. Last night one came along in the form of a fabulous Indian home-cooked dinner. I’m ashamed to say I drank rather a lot of wine while Mallika Basu was cooking, and got quite plastered while holding forth on all subjects under the sun to her photographer husband, Andy. Mallika’s blog goes from strength to strength, and she’s making all sorts of interesting contacts - in fact everything is happening just as it’s supposed to.

Our Storynory podcast is almost a year old, and so it is a nice surprise to find that it has received a nod from the British Media Establishment in the form of the stately Radio Times. The RT’s Good Podcast Guide has a witty write-up of our “ever lasting supply of bedtime stories, updated every week…read by a soft-voiced actress”.

When our icon “Prince Bertie the Frog” can appear along with the international culinary pin-up and school meals activist Jamie Oliver - you know that podcasting is still a more or less level playing field.

By the way, emails suggest that Storynory has quite a few adults among its listeners. If you want to sample our wares, I suggest our latest offering, Shock-Headed Peter.

I’ve been taking a little tour of iTunes around the world to see how our Storynory podcast ranks in the Kids and Family section against the likes of Disney, Cartoon Network, Nickleodeon, The Fun(Sun)day Times, etc. In the UK and Austalia we are in the number one position. Pleased to see that we are among the few English language podcasts doing well in Japan af number 9. We don’t do so well in the Germanic countries. They are really into their Disney.

1 UK, Australia
2 Canada, Greece
3 USA,Ireland,Spain
5 Italy, Norway
9 Japan
11 Belgium, France
10 Sweden
12 Portugal
16 Switzerland
18 Germany
21 Netherlands
27 Austria

P.S. Recently received an offer to outsourse our storytelling recordings to India for $8 per hour of recording and editing time. I think our prenter’s job is still safe though…

It seems like an eon ago - in fact it was at 2000 - when I met YES TV that had the technology to offer TV on demand down the DSL copper cable. Its stockmarket flotation was cancelled because of the dotcom crash. They seem to have done okay in Asia where they have 20 million viewers, but are not the force that their ahead-of-the-game vision might have suggested. I seem to remember that they were trying out video on demand over DSL with BT. Now it seems that BT is about to launch that without them.

It just goes to show that with a good idea, timing is everything.

Interesting to see that Podshow’s slick new site is putting a big emphasis on video, and is calling itself a “media network”. Deeper in, you’ll find that a lot of the content comes from “across the net” i.e. from YouTube. In the UK Podshow has teamed up with BT and is looking for video-on-demand talent.

We still believe that there’s a lot of demand for audio - it’s a very special medium - but there just isn’t enough top-quality speech talent in podcating.

At the minute video is hot even when it’s crap, but soon quality will rise to the top. It’s the same with audio. People will try out cheap and easy podcasts and then stop subscribing. You have to aim to be up with the best of them - and that means the BBC and NPR. It means a lot of time, thought, and effort and little up-front reward. This is essentially the story of why the indies are losing out in the podcasting wars and moaning about it over on Britcaster.