Ever wondered who reads all those millions of weblogs, or blogs, that are supposedly revolutionizing the media world? Well, here's another question to get you thinking: Who will listen to the audioblogs known as podcasts that will supposedly revolutionize the world of radio?
If you've never heard of a podcast, here's a brief description. The concept was developed last summer when Adam Curry, 41, a former VJ for MTV and an inveterate tech tinkerer, became intrigued with the idea of freeing Internet radio and audio blogs from his computer and putting them on the capacious drive of his Apple iPod.
He called the result podcasting, named after the Apple iPod that is often at the center of the system.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
The basic idea is instead of listening to radio over the airwaves, you download the radio shows you want from the Internet onto your iPod and listen to them when you want.
That may not seem such a revolutionary idea, except for the fact that the wonders of digital technology make it easy for anyone who wants to record his own radio show to upload them to various sites that then use syndication feeds to deliver the radio segments directly to listeners' MP3 players.
Listeners interested in hearing the ramblings and eclectic music choices of such shows as "Soccertunes" or "Geekspeak" can click a few buttons and presto the show will automatically be downloaded to their iPod whenever they connect their device to their computer.
Thousands of amateur "blaggards" (or should that be bloggards?) have launched podcasts since Curry and his pals unveiled the technology last autumn. But now even big business is getting in on the game. Companies like Heineken and Playboy have launched their own podcasts while Virgin Radio recently became the first major radio station to offer content for podcasting.
Not surprisingly the new medium is earning plaudits from the usual digerati.
"Podcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it," noted Linux guru Doc Searls when he discovered podcasting way back in September.
Searls believes that podcasting is at the same embryonic stage where blogging was in 1999, when he was just one of a few dozen people writing an online journal. Five years later there are 4 million.
By some measures podcasting may be growing even faster. There were just 17 Google results for Podcasting when Searls did a search in September last year. At the end of last month there were 2.7 million results. There are numerous sites like podcastbunker.com, ipodder.org, podcastcentral.com and podcastalley.com that offer comprehensive directories of thousands of the DIY broadcasts.
Curry is working on ways to take podcasting mainstream and recently met with leading media and advertising executives in the US to discuss the prospects.
"It is totally going to kill the business model of radio," Curry said. He believes that mainstream media and advertising companies are rapidly losing the ability to reach their audiences as the decline of network television, the rise of the Internet and the fragmentation of the media make the models that have existed for the last 50 years rapidly obsolete.
"They are scared to death of the next generation -- like my daughter who is 14 -- who don't listen to radio," Curry said. "They are on MSN, they've got their iPod, their MP3 player, they've got their Xbox -- they are not listening to radio. So how are they going to reach these audiences?"
"It is the distribution that is changing and the barriers are being brought down so everyone can be part of it," he said.
The phenomenal success of the iPod, of peer-to-peer systems like Napster and its descendants, and of social networking sites like Friendster that let users communicate with each other and with small like-minded communities offers hope that such a model could prove popular, experts say.
Moreover, the advent of advertising models like Google's Adsense that automatically direct adverts to relevant Web sites, even if these attract only a small audience, provides a further boost to the chances of podcasting.
But Dave Winer, who teamed with Curry to launch the first podcasts and is also the writer of the longest-running blog on the net, Scripting News, is more sanguine and warns against expecting an overnight revolution.
"We're the sources, the people doing stuff, and podcasting is a way to tell people who care what we're doing," Winer told the BBC last week.
"No matter how you look at it, commercializing this medium isn't going to make very much money," he said.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
Within Taiwan’s education system exists a long-standing and deep-rooted culture of falsification. In the past month, a large number of “ghost signatures” — signatures using the names of deceased people — appeared on recall petitions submitted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) against Democratic Progressive Party legislators Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) and Wu Pei-yi (吳沛憶). An investigation revealed a high degree of overlap between the deceased signatories and the KMT’s membership roster. It also showed that documents had been forged. However, that culture of cheating and fabrication did not just appear out of thin air — it is linked to the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS