When Doug Kaye was working on his book Loosely Coupled, the missing pieces of Web Services, he had the same revelation that struck us shortly after we started Naked Conversations: The people he was interviewing knew a great deal more about his subject than he did. He could write a better book if he could stay out of the way of what his interview subjects had to say to his audience. That’s hard to do in text, but easier in audio.
Kaye started podcasting his Loosely Coupled interviews. His experiment gave birth to IT Conversations, a highly regarded network of tech-related podcasts or an “”audio magazine.”
We caught up with Kaye by phone when he was standing in the middle of an empty Oregon Convention Center setting up for O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference (OPSCON 2005) which would be attended by 400 people then podcast to as many as 80,000 worldwide. We talked mostly about how businesses can and should use podcasts, the most exciting part was when he shared his vision of a future version of IT Conversations. We'll get to it in a moment.
Kaye discussed two models for businesses podcasting. There’s the traditional webcast model, a carry-over of the “heavy-handed message-controlled” streaming media broadcasts, where a company plans to get X number of leads by spending Y number of dollars. Then there's Kaye's prefernce, an open source model providing unidentified users free content via RSS syndication. In the latter version, you make up in volume--many times over--what you lose in mine-able data.
In webcasts, a best-case audience reach 10,000 registered listeners. A proficient direct marketer with some good timing and luck might produce 200 sales from that registration list (The rest would make up the 98 percent of annoyed people we discuss in our introduction, we assume).
However, Kaye maintains that companies that provide quality content without requiring registration through RSS syndication will fare better. What the company loses in data profiling it makes up in goodwill with an audience that according to Kaye may swell by tenfold or more. The sponsoring or hosting company gets the goodwill for providing quality and people can instigate a relationship with the company when and if they wish to through RSS syndication.
Kaye believes that despite its current boom. podcasting is still an awkward early stage with much refinement needed before business or mainstream end users embrace it. Most companies continue to use the registration/streaming audio model, but there are some who are changing. Kaye recently helped BMC Software to start BMCTalk, a hosted podcast that covers subjects ranging from the finer strokes of golfing to the human integration problems that follow a corporate acquisition. Salesforce.com, after meeting with Kaye, is in a formative stage.
Will podcasting emerge at the same blinding speed as blogging and will businesses embrace it? Kaye says it has a long way to go before it is so universally popular. While Technorati estimated there were nearly 15 million bloggers by August 2005, CNN recently estimated there were a mere 7000 podcasts. It takes much more time to listen to a podcast than it does to scan RSS blog folders. Navigating to hear a specific part of a podcast is still challenging. Until recently, discovering podcasts that interested you required cumbersome podcast directory services such as Podcast Alley and podcast.com.
However, Kaye observed, the new iPod 4.9 is a significant step in the right direction to making podcasts both easier to produce and discover. The iTunes lists Top 100 podcasts and allows end users to sort by categories for free. It also exposes podcasts to the huge iTunes installed base. All of this means that a good podcast can be more easily discovered by more people and that should mean adoption will accelerate. Kaye guesses that two years from today, there will be 50,000-100,000 podcasters. People looking for content will find what they want faster and easier, partially through RSS tags. Other services and devices will extend iPod functionalities. New podcast search engines, have begun to emerge. For example, Podscope has been released into beta. It’s great, Kaye told us for finding podcasts on large topics like China, but not yet minor topics like Naked Conversations.
But all of this is just the inevitable technology innovation. From Kaye’s point of view the superior podcasts will be discovered in the blogosphere’s old-fashioned way. Bloggers will point to the good ones and they will link. By so doing, the word of mouth engine will crank the most valuable and the most interesting the top. And this system is foretells why the old webcast registration model will succumb to the open source of model of the blogosphere. Free content is essential to getting noticed. Of all IT Conversation podcasts published so far, a talk by Malcolm Gladwell at last year’s PopTech remains the most popular, with 67,000 downloads. Recorded live in October 2004, it was still receiving hundreds of downloads per week in August 2005. It was free, but what has the value been to Gladwell as an author, who released his “Blink” book since he spoke? What is the value to the producers of PopTech, a conference attended by less than 500 each autumn, getting exposure to 67,000 people?
Kaye used another example—Robert Scoble. He asked what would the value of Scoble’s blogging to Microsoft, if he could only post his blog behind the company firewall. What would his influence be on Microsoft if he did not have enormous exposure from publishing out in the open? “Blogging has made Scoble, and for that matter, me more important than we really have a right to be,” he quipped. Maybe so, but we could not help wonder how much Scobleizer’s market value to Naked Conversations would diminish, if he had been tucked behind a firewall or required registration before reading. We got his point and extending it we also saw the diminished value of Scobleizer if you had to register before reading Scoble’s blog, knowing full well you had just given your personal information to Microsoft to use as they saw fit. RSS protects you from that, as Kaye pointed out, because you remain invisible to the corporation. You build a relationship with that corporation under your own terms or not at all.
This brought us to Kaye’s really big idea, what he calls IT Conversations 2.0. It ties into the citizen-journalism being discussed by people like JD Lasica, Mark Cantor and Dan Gillmor. His vision is to podcast as many speakers in as many places on as many subject as possible, giving all of them the same exposure opportunities as IT Conversations 1.0 has awarded Gladwell. The new model would transform IT Conversations into a non-profit organization. No great change since the current operation has never been profitable, often operating from out of Kaye’s pocket. He see an eventual compilation of an archive of hundreds, eventually thousands of audio records accessible by topic, geography, or speaker. IT Conversations would be editor and producer and the quality would vary greatly depending on what and who was involved in the actual recording. Kaye is talking with multiple other organizations including NPR and WGBH Boston, public television. In some ways it reminds us of the ancient Egyptian Library of Alexandria, where all things known were supposed to be aggregated. That one never got completed, and when we consider its amazing scope, we dout that Kaye’s Digital Age version will either.
But it is remarkable and exciting that such an endeavor might soon be started.
