Minutes of the 11-8-05 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group (RMIUG):
"Podcasting: The Future of Broadcasting"

About 50 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin facilitated and Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

MEETING SPONSORS

MicroStaff (http://www.microstaff.com) provides pizza and beverages. Microstaff also provides creative and technical talent for Web, Interactive Media, Marketing Communications, and Software Development projects.

ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com) pays for these meeting minutes. ONEWARE is a Colorado-based software company that provides semi-custom, web-based applications.

NCAR provides free use of their facility for our meetings.

Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com) provides the audio/visual equipment.

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MEETING MINUTES

Announcements:

The RMIUG meetings for next year (2006) will continue to be on the second Tuesday every other month starting January 10. The meeting dates are as follows:
1/10/06, 3/14/06, 5/9/06, 7/11/06, 9/12/06, 11/14/06

Boulder Digital Arts will be offering a Podcasting 101 class on December 12th. For more information go to: http://boulderdigitalarts.com/training/details.asp?offering=101

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About the Speakers

Joe Pezzillo (jpezzillo@qwest.net) has worked at the vanguard of media convergence for nearly twenty years. In 1987 he started doing radio at KGNU in Boulder, worked in broadcast television and digital publishing for several years, and then served as creative director at Apple Computer's Electronic Media Lab in the mid 1990s. Joe founded one of the first internet-only radio stations (GoGaGa.com) in 1996, grew the station's audience to national prominence, patented the company's pioneering streaming management and personalization technology, and then passed the reins to leading radio and internet investors three years later. Joe discusses his most recent work producing a biweekly segment on citizen journalism, remix culture for KGNU, and being a podcast personality.

Neal McBurnett (mcburnett.org/neal) chairs the Information Technology team at KGNU, an independent noncommercial community radio station in Boulder. Neal has been involved with virtual communities since he got hooked on Usenet at Berkeley in 1979. He was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs until 2001, and currently consults with Internet2. He cofounded the Boulder Community Network in 1993. Neal talks about KGNU's effort to expand its podcasting in light of podcasting standards and support in free Content Management Systems. He also discusses collaborative markup of audio content.

Gil Asakawa (GKAsakawa@DenverPost.com) is Executive Producer for DenverPost.com, the website of one of Colorado's largest newspapers. Gil is a writer, editor, and online content consultant with more than 20 years of experience working for new media companies such as Digital City Denver (a new media subsidiary of America Online), Trip.com, and ServiceMagic. In 2003 came to DenverPost.com, which has been providing daily podcasts since May 2005. Gil discusses his experience launching the Denver Post's podcasts, the reception by its audience, and its effect on a traditional print company.

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Links

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INTRODUCTION (Josh Zapin)

Podcasting is exploding. Podcasting involves audio and video feeds via internet. People estimate that there will be 12 million podcast subscribers by 2010. All the major media companies are into podcasting, and venture capitalists are starting to get in to it too. And so are we: a podcast of this meeting will be available.

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Joe Pezzillo

Part of the reason for the proliferation of podcasting is the gadgets that make it possible. Now we've got iPods, iSight, etc. Lately I've been involved with KGNU, doing a program called On the Internets. Podcasting really stems from the blog. With blogs, it's about the relationships and interconnections among blog authors and how we remix information and share it. Podcasting is essentially just blogs in audio and video format. Newer browsers like Apple's Safari have built in RSS capability to get at this stuff. The underlying technology for podcasting is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is based on XML. If you want to do a podcast, you still have to know some programming and a few tags, but that will go away as tools get developed. I think we'll have Dreamweaver-like apps for podcasting pretty soon.

There are some good local podcasting sites:

Coverville.com: They put out cover songs.

www.hoshimotors.net/podcast.html: A Boulder Honda repair shop wanted to make their website more interesting, so they podcast car-related topics called Fifteen Minutes at Hoshi Motors. This brings more traffic to their site and raises their Google rankings.

w3w3.com: This is an internet talk radio site. Mostly they post interesting interviews for listening.

Future of Podcasting

Ease of Use
Podcasting is getting easier thanks to sites that cater to podcasters. ClickCaster.com helps people to create and distribute podcasts through their site. PodShow.com and Odeo.com help people create, find, and enjoy podcasting.

Mobility (not tied to your iPod)
Smartfeed.org makes a podcatching application that runs on your cell phone or other device. Multiplatform compatibility helps break barriers, like the iPod which is (at least for the moment) essentially a tethered device.

Video
The new video iPod sold a million videos at $2 each in the first 20 days. Clearly, we're ready for video. Ourmedia.org and YouTube.com can help you out with video. This is all part of a trend to completely bypass traditional media channels in creating and distributing media.

Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism is when people have a direct channel to their audience through the Internet. Increased bandwidth makes this more possible today. I think now you have a different type of choice on who gives you information. With citizen journalism you can get information directly from experts rather than from online newspapers. I think this will be the ultimate expression of what the Internet is all about. Check out I, Reporter (ireporter.org).

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Neal McBurnett

Collaborative Podcasting

KGNU is independent, noncommercial, and worldwide (streaming and podcasting since 1995). It's one of the top radio stations for citizen journalism, and a great place to learn.

How did people share information ten years ago? You had to do a phone call during business hours. Then a bunch of geeks got together and said "interoperability" and "open standards". Other stuff pushed by the big guys (ITU, OSI) died of its own weight. Companies that try to own the business just get in the way. So you can stick with lightweight standards-based stuff for broad compatibility, like RSS. With this philosophy we're able to glue the world together. iPod and mp3 stuff is still patent-based, which slows us down--but encoders and decoders are in use. We're stuck with dealing with some allegedly-patent-encumbered stuff for now, but better, open formats are gaining ground.

On standards, I think meta data is key. It's important to always tag your data with authors, keywords, title, etc, is what enables it to index well for users, makes it searchable. This of course is a challenge for audio-video content. If you want to podcast, the hardest part is getting your process up set up to produce content, get it tagged, and find labor (like volunteers) to get it all done.

A Creative Commons "share and share alike" copyright strategy helps the network effect work for you, helps you collaborate with the collective. Be careful what you put on your podcast--music is often copyrighted.

Consider using Linux. It has an infinitely configurable audio subsystem that provides some very interesting features.

You may want a content management system to replace manual tasks and even simple tools. You need a CMS that that understands your content and does what you need. Plone is good: it holds together in some exciting ways and there are good plugins to assemble and produce podcasts. That's where we want to get to, where (like with blogs) people just plug their stuff in and you don't have to do any work to publish.

Wikipedia - the encyclopedia anyone can edit - gives me faith in the human race. It demonstrates that people can collaborate with volunteer management and create some of the most compelling content on the planet. Is it accurate? It pretty accurately reflects what people think - both the experts and the minority viewpoints: back to citizen journalism. We always we have to critically judge all our sources of information. But it ensures that you get people's opinions about stuff and you have the chance to fix it.

What some people are calling Web 2.0 is where the wiki philosophy meets the rest of the web. We're just beginning to see the standards needed to do wiki-like links between bits of multimedia content like audio and video, like tagging mp3s with URLs, and linking to specific clips inside movies. SMIL, XSPF, Annodex, CMML are good standards. Once everyone starts following some standards, it will make things better for everyone.

I envision a call-in show with PBX asterix that knows what time a call came in and helps tag the content as it comes in, so you can search for sound bites. Imagine if we posted meetings of the Colorado Legislature and let people comment on it.

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Gil Asakawa

I will not use the word "markup" even once.

I'm recording this presentation on my little $200 digital camera.

Newspaper companies are not the most "agile". It is are very slow moving creature, a wonder it has not gone extinct. Newspaper websites appeared in mid 90's. They really didn't know what to with their websites, and so they used them as marketing wings and based them in marketing departments: they were not newsroom operations. But in last few years, websites have become legitimate avenues for newspaper companies to disseminate the news. Journalists don't work for newspapers any more, they work for "news media companies" that publish in a variety of ways including web.

My personal opinion is that newspapers are boring and out of touch which is why readership is down. But web lets you do stuff that just text can't -- add video, sound, slideshows, etc. Helps you get the whole story. It's all evolving now how this is done. Even a year and half ago, podcast wasn't even buzzword. Today we have blogs at the Denver Post.

If you have audio files on your website, then you have the ability to podcast. So it's nothing new. But the RSS distribution platform IS new. A year ago we were talking about finally getting RSS feeds. And once you have that, it's easy to do podcasting. Over half the market has broadband now, so video and audio content is easy for our users to accept.

We looked at some different approaches: Streaming radio programs. Little talkshows with reporters. Present our headline news in a way that is portable. But we had no budget. So...I got some savvy journalism students to set up podcasting of our major stories. They would have to get up at 4 am to do this. Pulled stories off the website, rewrote them as a broadcast script appropriate for audio. Then posted for people to listen to in 10 minutes. Some ads were mixed in.

We are refining what it is to be podcasting. We use some of the podcast audio for slide shows. You could just download and listen to them on your iPod, or listen to them with the photos. We have a regular-guy-movie-reviewer who comes on on Fridays.

The beauty of podcasting is that a lot of people don't like to write--talking comes easier, lets people roll with their thoughts, conveys voice, inflection, etc.

Many are volunteering to do this stuff--they are passionate about it, see it as fun and interesting. I really appreciate the level of commitment that young people just out of school have, and they realize there are no limits on what is possible with podcasting. Feature stories like NPR could be done by newspapers. Audio is fresh, conveys the excitement of being somewhere. Newspapers are on extremely tight budgets, so it's a real test for us as we move into this stuff.

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Panel Discussion

Q: How do the students get the stuff uploaded?

A: Gil: mp3 files get FTP'd up and assembled. I use feedforall.com software to generate XML for podcasting. Takes me five minutes to upload all the RSS feeds.

Q: Can't you send this out by subscription email so you can make money?

A: Gil: It takes too long to send big files by email. Tools like iTunes are remarkably fast at taking files off an RSS feed. We have a Newshound RSS reader that gets stuff for you from hundreds of sources so you get just the news you care about.

Joe: itunes and others can schedule downloads so you don't really see that you're on the web. iTunes will act just like email.

Neal: Email also converts everything to awful ASCII formats. That's the difference between a podcast and a website. Website is manually getting stuff. Podcasting enables your software agent to automatically get what you want without having to visit any websites.

Q: Instead of searching on Google for podcast feeds on a topic, how do I get all what I want added to my RSS? Is it all streaming?

A: Joe: Google and Yahoo offer specific blog-searching capability. A search engine called Blinks does speech-to-text of audio so you can search for audio content only. iTunes can synchronize the latest content on your iPod, but most people listen to podcasts on their computer. Streaming content will be more important for cell phones. Maybe a wireless iPod will do streaming.

Q: Can you recommend a good mobile wave or mp3 recorder?

A: Joe: iRiver device records to flash memory, it's tiny, with extensive time recording capabilities. DV video cameras are very good, but expensive. You can even record a podcast by calling a phone number.

Gil: A mike plugged into an iPod works quite well. I also got a good $400 recorder that's about the size of a cell phone. And yes, you can post a podcast by phoning it in (if you don't care about fidelity).

Neal: I can't wait to see the answering machine-slash-podcaster!

Audience Comment: Marantz makes a good one.

Q: What's your opinion on the advertising business model in podcasting, and will the Denver Post advertise their podcast on TV?

A: Gil: We only advertised it in the newspaper.

Joe: The ads are coming, and I think they will be public-radio-style announcements. Podcasters are pitching to advertisers. Long tail model: how do we advertise with deep vertical content? So context-sensitive advertising is popular. It's only a matter of time before we see context-sensitive advertising on podcasts. Podcasts are very targeted to audiences, with niche content. Google AdWords proves that this model works.

Q: Where are we on licensing of music?

A: Joe: Copyrights are very complicated. It comes back to the streaming question. Radio stations that broadcast get public performance licenses. But making mechanical digital copies are a different animal. Perhaps licenses will be created for use of incidental music in podcasts.

Neal: You can either pay the lawyers and middlemen, or work directly with the artists who want to get their stuff out there. Artists are doing their own thing now more and more. But every technological advance has changed the copyright laws, so things will change to allow what we want to happen to happen.

Q: What about Myspace.com?

A: Neal: Yes - lots more bands get a piece of the action with some free content and social networking. And there are places that will serve your liberally-licensed audio and video for free like ourmedia.org.

Joe: Even a great band that has signed up with BMI and ASCAP may find that at some point it becomes effective to sign up for all the licensing to get access to everyone.

Q: How are newspapers going to stay in business?

A: Gil: We're all losing money. Print ad revenue has been flat, but online ad revenue has increased significantly. I think in a few years, the web will be more primary. Banner ads and online classifieds are big.

Q: Can you track podcasting traffic?

A: Gil: Yes. You can track a little TOO accurately...it's certainly better than just seeing how many newspapers you sell because who knows what part of them people are reading? With podcasting you can track how many people listened to a particular story.

Q: A lot of companies aren't selling online subscriptions.

A: Joe: But now the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are putting some of their stuff behind a paywall. On the other hand, people don't like it.

Q: Are you threatened by Citizen Journalism?

A: Gil: I love newspapers! (joke). We have a hundred years of brand building, so people trust the Denver Post. News photos are also hard to come by. I think online divisions at news organizations will find ways to bring citizen journalism to the plate, have interaction with our readership. Invite user videos, photos, citizen podcasts at the Denver Post. These are just my opinions. We can get fresh perspectives and still be true to the values of the Denver post.

Neal: Wikipedia is more popular than Britannica, but wikinews is not catching on as quickly.

Joe: On the other hand, a lot of breaking news appears on blogs first. "You want the news, write it yourself" is the message we get from some news organizations that don't want to cover certain stuff like high tech issues.

Gil: The Denver Post does not have a technology section in print. I can say with certainty that we are not afraid of bloggers--we maintain a list of local blogs on our blog house. We're very happy to support the local blog community.

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RMIUG (http://www.rmiug.org/) appreciates the sponsorship of
MicroStaff (www.microstaff.com), ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com), and Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com).