The difference between broadcasting and podcasting
“The difference between broadcasting and podcasting, and a request for ideas about the first podcasts that will be broadcast, on KYOU-AM in San Francisco.”
Dave tells us that the radio station KYOU AM in San Francisco is planning to broadcast podcasts, and has asked Winer to provide the first podcast to be broadcast. Dave is excited about this opportunity, but wants to get feedback from the podcasting community before proceeding. Winer is interested in exploring the artistic and creative potential of using a high-powered AM radio station to amplify podcast content, but also acknowledges that podcasting may not need to be broadcast and wants to hear the community’s perspective.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Good morning everybody. It’s
Dave Winer here. Morning
Coffee Notes from May 9th, 2005
.
And this is, I guess, unlike any other morning coffee notes that I’ve done.
Sometimes we have some news very rarely.
Usually morning coffee notes is just, you know, exactly that, you know.
A cup of coffee and it’s the morning. It’s the beginning of the day getting ready to, you know, just sort of thinking out loud.
I used to write them, you know, and sometimes I still do.
But the idea is, you know, nothing profound, nothing earth -shaking, nothing really news worthy.
Just sort of some ideas, kick them around, you know, save it out, upload it, you know, send it out for everybody to listen to.
Hold on a second. I’m getting a Skype here. Let’s see who this is.
What’s Koso? Koso, hey, Koso is my British, British friend, who can speak in, he can speak in the Netherlands accent.
Like he was hanging out at Ch ippewa Airport in Amsterdam where they say all the time, you know, that’s French, it would be, whatever that means.
We did a, I love, the three of us, me and Blogue and Dr. or K oso and Joe, depending on whether you’re calling them by their alien names or their terrestrial names.
We did one when I was in the airport in Nashville, heading back to Florida, and it was just great stuff, something magic.
Sometimes you get that between a couple of people, in this case three people, and it just has a really nice feel to it, listen to it on the beach on my daily walk today.
So while I was getting ready thinking about doing this podcast, and you know, I did it .
I did this, like, I did this podcast while sitting on the beach, a 40 minute, you know, the usual thing, and when I clicked on the button, I wasn’t watching my Ar cos, and when I finished the podcast and sort of got ready to close it all up and get on my way, it only had saved two seconds of audio.
I don’t know what happened there, but next time I’m going to be watching it a lot more closely.
Anyway, so we’ve already got two minutes and 47 seconds, 48, 49, 50, et cetera, et cetera, as we go on and deeper into more and more morning coffee notes for you.
Anyway, so what’s the deal? Well, the deal is the difference between broadcast and podcast, okay? Well, we kind of know what podcast is, but just as a little refresher, let’s go over it one more time.
Basically, I’m sitting here recording this on my laptop, and when I’m done, I’ll save it out as an MP3, then I’m going to go edit the ID3 information, put in, you know, the title, the author, a little description, set the genre to podcast the year of 2005, then I upload it to my server, and then I include it in my RSS 2. 0 feed with enclosures, and then press the button and it’s all published.
In the meantime, your aggreg ator or reader or iPod or whatever you call it is watching my RSS feed, looking for a new enclosure, and when it finds one, it downloads it.
And depending on what kind of MP3 player device you have, it may copy the file right onto the player, or it may notify you that it’s there, so you can copy it onto the player yourself.
That’s podcasting, and then you listen to it, you know, whenever you want, wherever you want.
So it’s got the choice in terms of geography and in terms of time.
You may listen to this podcast.
Immediately, you may listen to it tomorrow.
You may be listening to it in 2027, for all I know.
In fact, I kind of hope you are .
And so that’s podcasting. Broad casting is very different, of course.
Broadcasting would be somebody sitting in a studio and maybe talking into a microphone, taking some phone calls, playing some music from the RI AA.
And then that signal gets relay ed to a transmitter, usually somewhere on a mountain top, or top of the skyscraper, or in the middle of San Francisco Bay , which is where they keep the transmitters in the Bay Area.
And it’s broadcast. Broadcast means one signal listened to by very many people, all at the same time, that’s very important.
In other words, you all listen to it at exactly the same moment, and there are a lot of you, a lot more people than there are listening to most podcasts.
And that means there are fewer broadcasts than there are podcasts.
That means that broadcasts are more heavily regulated and they ’re licensed, and it’s just a different sort of thing, broadcasting versus podcasting.
There’s another Skype. Let me just let him know that I’m doing a podcast.
Okay, hopefully he’ll get that.
Maybe he’ll say something in his James Mason voice, or whatever.
Anyway, he says righto. So, that’s the difference between broadcast and podcast.
So, as you know, I’m doing a podcast right now, but however, check this out.
You could take a podcast and broadcast it. You could also take a broadcast and you could podcast it.
The two are sort of, you can bridge them. In other words, how would you take a podcast and broadcast it? Well, you’d go take the, download the MP3 and play it at the radio station.
Just put it right over the transmitter so that everybody that can listen to the radio station then can listen to the podcast.
And that is exactly what Adam Curry is doing at Sirius, and that is exactly what they’re doing at KYOU AM in San Francisco, California.
So, anyway, I got a call today from Jim Griffin, and Jim is a famous guy.
He’s a radio music industry type creative guy, but he also comes from the computer industry too.
He’s on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He runs a mail list called The Foal List. That’s P-H-O, and that’s been around for a long time.
And it’s for people in the music industry who, you know, know how to use a mail list.
And so it tends to be people who are, you know, both interested in music and in computer technology.
And the reason it’s called The Foal List is that they have regular meetups, and all the meetups are at Vietnamese noodle places or foe.
And, you know, as a sidebar, I love foe, and I would, you know , I’m not on the mail list anymore. I used to be on it, but it’s a very high traffic mail list.
It was an interesting place to be during the heyday of Napster . There was a lot of sort of, you know, flailing and venting and wishing and begging even.
That the music industry would let Napster happen. And when it was very clear that Napster wasn’t going to be allowed to happen, that was kind of when I lost interest in being on The Foal List.
And I still wish for the day when, you know, music is when we have what Clay Scherke called the Celestial Jukebox, which really accurately describes how beautiful Napster was for a user.
I mean, you can understand the concerns that the commercial, you know, music people have.
I do wish we had been able to work something out there, maybe , and maybe someday we will.
So Jim, you know, apparently had been talking with the people at Viacom, and as the podcasting stuff was taking off , and he said to them, you know, let’s do something with podcast ing.
And they said, OK, Jim, we’ve got this radio station in San Francisco. Why don’t you find us some people to run it and let’s turn it into a vehicle for broadcasting podcasts.
And so, and we’ve all heard about it. It was a big announcement a few weeks ago, and they put up a website, you know, that sort of explained what they were doing.
And then that was kind of it.
Until today, when I got the call from Jim, and he said that he would like me to do, that they would like me to do the first podcast that they broadcast.
And that, you know, they felt that I had played a big role in developing the idea of podcast ing, and that sort of the honor or job of defining what it means for podcasting to move into broadcast would be something that they would like me to help them with.
So, and of course, so he asked me how I felt about it, and I said, I feel very excited. I think that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.
The only concern I had about it before is that there would be confusion, that people would think, well, that somehow that broadcasting, a podcast was itself podcasting, and of course it’s very different.
It’s not. There is the fundamental difference. You know, it’s like saying that, you know, using a telephone, and let’s not do that one.
Let’s say riding a Segway and driving a semi-truck are the same thing.
Well, they have some things in common. I mean, driving a semi- truck is about transportation.
It’s about moving things from one place to another place.
And riding a Segway is the same thing, right? I mean, it’s about moving some things from some place to another.
But the quantity of things that you can move, and the distances that you can move, and the speed with which you can move, make them, are so different between the two as to make them fundamentally different.
And just because one’s transportation and about motion , they’re both about transportation and motion, really is not a whole lot to have in common.
And in the case of podcasting, you can take content from podcasting and broadcast it.
There’s no technical trick to doing that whatsoever.
It’s not a hard thing to do, and it will be done. It will be done by this time next week. It will no longer have been, it will be a new thing, but it won ’t be an undone thing.
It will have been done. And now , to make it clear, there’s the other direction, which also works, okay? So we’ve just talked about taking a podcast and broadcasting it, right? So I have an idea what that’s like.
You can also take a broadcast and podcast it.
So that’s the kind of stuff that you see that the NPR stations are doing.
So you can get some very small number of NPR programs. You can receive RS as 2. 0 feeds with enclosures, and you can put them through exactly the same process that you put the Morning Coffee Notes, or the Daily Source Code, or Evil Genius Chronicles, or the Nashville Nobody Knows, which is one of my new favorites.
But, you know, just the same way you put any podcast through it, just because it came off a broadcast, is once it’s been adapted to RSS and MP3, there’s no problem.
You can go ahead and treat it just like it was a podcast. The BBC, for example, is doing podcasts like that.
And there’s a ton of value in it. If you’re a regular listener to the programs, well, you get all the benefits of a podcast. You get the time shifting and the geography shifting.
You don’t have to be there when the show is being broadcast, and you can listen to it at any time you want. So you don’t have to schedule your day around listening to a being at the radio during when the show is on, and so your life is richer.
And, of course, that’s a really good thing. But that’s not what we’re doing here. What we’re doing is the other direction.
We’re taking podcasts, and we ’re going to broadcast them.
So, we’re still about a week away from doing this, and the reason why I wanted to talk about this in a podcast before, as a motorcycle, isn’t that lovely? Let’s let me look at my meter here. Yeah, I’m sure you can hear it.
He’s going to go away now, hopefully. Go away! I’m too love it.
That’s like Rush Limbaugh, you know, that kind of person. They have to have the attention on them.
Anyway, well, that’s over.
Where was I? Right, so we’re still about a week away from doing this. The initial podcast to broadcast will take place on Monday morning at midnight, Pacific Time, which will be 3am Eastern Time, which is where I am, and it will be at 8am in London, so you can figure it out from there.
And then they will rebroadcast at noon Pacific Time, 3pm Eastern, etc. , etc.
And I asked how long can the podcast be? They say, you know, whatever you want to do.
And what should I put on it? That’s entirely up to you.
And I was thinking, well, should we go try to get some artists or some historic person of historic significance in previous media? Should we get Walter Cronkite, who was a leading pioneer of television? Should we get somebody from the early days of FM radio, maybe Jonathan Schwartz or maybe Prince? They said, that’s entirely up to you.
Basically every question I asked, they said, you know, you make the decision.
And those are the hardest people to deal with.
But on the other hand, that’s exactly what I want to hear. I want to hear, okay, we get to be creative here.
And that’s wonderful, because that’s what I love.
So I asked, well, you know, when can I start talking about this publicly? And I think you can kind of guess what they said. They said , whenever you’d like.
So I said, all right, let’s start talking about it earlier rather than later.
Because, because what I want to do is I want to ask, and I’m, and I’m going to do this tonight in a podcast, and I’m not going to write about it.
Okay, I’m not going to write about it.
Yeah, I’m not going to write about it. What I’m going to do, though, is I’m going to put up a post on www. podcatch. com and a place where you can post comments.
And I’m only going to put this out as a podcast for the first whatever hours overnight, basically.
And maybe we’ll see what happens after that.
Probably we’ll start talking about it in non-podcast format then.
But the idea is to give the podcasting community, the people who are listening, who are really close to this stuff, a chance to think about this and to, to give it a chance, give you a chance to do some thinking before you have to shoot from the hip.
In other words, what would you like to see? How would you like to see this? I mean, and, you know, for all we know, this could be a complete non-event.
It might not matter that podcasts are broadcast. It might not make the slightest bit of difference.
There is part of it that’s a little disturbing is the assumption that the old media somehow gets to pass judgment on the new media.
It’s one of the things that I ’ve sort of not liked about how the print newspaper news industry has gotten, at least to some extent, a chance to define what blogs are when it’s sort of a conflict of interest for them to do that.
Same thing may be true with radio, although in this case with this radio station, they don’t have any on-air personalities.
So they don’t have anybody. It ’s not like the New York Times writing an article about blogs, because they have a whole editorial staff that’s involved in the process of working on that article, every one of which, you know, has to deal with their own, you know, concerns about their own personal future should blogs take off.
At this radio station, that won ’t be a concern. The entire function of this station, the entire staff is being developed , being designed entirely to serve this function.
So there’s nobody there that has a conflict of interest.
They’re excited about the idea.
And there’s nobody to sort of like, you know, say, “Well, you know, you can’t do that because , you know, that’s like what we do. " No, that won’t be there.
On the other hand, podcasting may not need to be broadcasted.
It may not be that influencing people in drive time in San Francisco may not be a big deal .
On the other hand, the San Francisco Bay Area is an interesting place, and there are a lot of people who are very active in the tech community.
And if something interesting is developing here, I think they ’ll listen.
And I think that it may be a way to get some ideas out there and to, you know, to shine the light on some work that deserves the attention, or to inspire somehow, or to produce some art that could not otherwise have been produced.
So it’s exciting. That’s, you know, from an artistic standpoint, it’s a very interesting question to ask.
And the question is, if you have the resources of a high- powered AM radio station, and, you know, people, I’ve asked some people about this, and they say, “Well, you know, the quality isn’t going to be that good. " Well, you know, quality isn’t going to be any worse than what I do, you know, when I play music, the rare occasions when I play music in my podcast, which I don’t really go for very high quality. I kind of don’t even want very high quality.
I kind of like it being pretty rough and scratchy. So, you know, AM radio is just fine. No problem there.
And so anyway, I’m interested in knowing what you think.
So, you know, if you want to, you could send me an email, but I would really prefer, if you post your thoughts publicly, it’s quite okay to post them on your weblog, or, and then send in and post a pointer, or do a track back to the post on www.
podcatch. com, or post your comment there, or take a day or so and just think about it.
Just see where your brain goes.
Go for a walk or call someone up and, you know, ask them what they think, or let’s discuss it on the pod casters’ mail list. That’s a good place to go.
So, let’s kick the idea around and see where it goes.
So, anyway, this is Dave Winer . That’s about all I have for right now.
I mean, I obviously would like to talk about this some more, so, but that’s about it for now , I think.
I can’t think of anything right now that I, you know, haven’t talked about that I need to talk about right now.
So, anyway, the, remember, the place to go to comment is www.
podcatch. com.
And this has been Morning Coffee Notes for May 9th, 2005, and look forward to seeing you all real soon and hearing what you think. So, cool. I’ll talk to you later.
Bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And this is, I guess, unlike any other morning coffee notes that I’ve done.
Sometimes we have some news very rarely.
Usually morning coffee notes is just, you know, exactly that, you know.
A cup of coffee and it’s the morning. It’s the beginning of the day getting ready to, you know, just sort of thinking out loud.
I used to write them, you know, and sometimes I still do.
But the idea is, you know, nothing profound, nothing earth -shaking, nothing really news worthy.
Just sort of some ideas, kick them around, you know, save it out, upload it, you know, send it out for everybody to listen to.
Hold on a second. I’m getting a Skype here. Let’s see who this is.
What’s Koso? Koso, hey, Koso is my British, British friend, who can speak in, he can speak in the Netherlands accent.
Like he was hanging out at Ch ippewa Airport in Amsterdam where they say all the time, you know, that’s French, it would be, whatever that means.
We did a, I love, the three of us, me and Blogue and Dr. or K oso and Joe, depending on whether you’re calling them by their alien names or their terrestrial names.
We did one when I was in the airport in Nashville, heading back to Florida, and it was just great stuff, something magic.
Sometimes you get that between a couple of people, in this case three people, and it just has a really nice feel to it, listen to it on the beach on my daily walk today.
So while I was getting ready thinking about doing this podcast, and you know, I did it .
I did this, like, I did this podcast while sitting on the beach, a 40 minute, you know, the usual thing, and when I clicked on the button, I wasn’t watching my Ar cos, and when I finished the podcast and sort of got ready to close it all up and get on my way, it only had saved two seconds of audio.
I don’t know what happened there, but next time I’m going to be watching it a lot more closely.
Anyway, so we’ve already got two minutes and 47 seconds, 48, 49, 50, et cetera, et cetera, as we go on and deeper into more and more morning coffee notes for you.
Anyway, so what’s the deal? Well, the deal is the difference between broadcast and podcast, okay? Well, we kind of know what podcast is, but just as a little refresher, let’s go over it one more time.
Basically, I’m sitting here recording this on my laptop, and when I’m done, I’ll save it out as an MP3, then I’m going to go edit the ID3 information, put in, you know, the title, the author, a little description, set the genre to podcast the year of 2005, then I upload it to my server, and then I include it in my RSS 2. 0 feed with enclosures, and then press the button and it’s all published.
In the meantime, your aggreg ator or reader or iPod or whatever you call it is watching my RSS feed, looking for a new enclosure, and when it finds one, it downloads it.
And depending on what kind of MP3 player device you have, it may copy the file right onto the player, or it may notify you that it’s there, so you can copy it onto the player yourself.
That’s podcasting, and then you listen to it, you know, whenever you want, wherever you want.
So it’s got the choice in terms of geography and in terms of time.
You may listen to this podcast.
Immediately, you may listen to it tomorrow.
You may be listening to it in 2027, for all I know.
In fact, I kind of hope you are .
And so that’s podcasting. Broad casting is very different, of course.
Broadcasting would be somebody sitting in a studio and maybe talking into a microphone, taking some phone calls, playing some music from the RI AA.
And then that signal gets relay ed to a transmitter, usually somewhere on a mountain top, or top of the skyscraper, or in the middle of San Francisco Bay , which is where they keep the transmitters in the Bay Area.
And it’s broadcast. Broadcast means one signal listened to by very many people, all at the same time, that’s very important.
In other words, you all listen to it at exactly the same moment, and there are a lot of you, a lot more people than there are listening to most podcasts.
And that means there are fewer broadcasts than there are podcasts.
That means that broadcasts are more heavily regulated and they ’re licensed, and it’s just a different sort of thing, broadcasting versus podcasting.
There’s another Skype. Let me just let him know that I’m doing a podcast.
Okay, hopefully he’ll get that.
Maybe he’ll say something in his James Mason voice, or whatever.
Anyway, he says righto. So, that’s the difference between broadcast and podcast.
So, as you know, I’m doing a podcast right now, but however, check this out.
You could take a podcast and broadcast it. You could also take a broadcast and you could podcast it.
The two are sort of, you can bridge them. In other words, how would you take a podcast and broadcast it? Well, you’d go take the, download the MP3 and play it at the radio station.
Just put it right over the transmitter so that everybody that can listen to the radio station then can listen to the podcast.
And that is exactly what Adam Curry is doing at Sirius, and that is exactly what they’re doing at KYOU AM in San Francisco, California.
So, anyway, I got a call today from Jim Griffin, and Jim is a famous guy.
He’s a radio music industry type creative guy, but he also comes from the computer industry too.
He’s on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He runs a mail list called The Foal List. That’s P-H-O, and that’s been around for a long time.
And it’s for people in the music industry who, you know, know how to use a mail list.
And so it tends to be people who are, you know, both interested in music and in computer technology.
And the reason it’s called The Foal List is that they have regular meetups, and all the meetups are at Vietnamese noodle places or foe.
And, you know, as a sidebar, I love foe, and I would, you know , I’m not on the mail list anymore. I used to be on it, but it’s a very high traffic mail list.
It was an interesting place to be during the heyday of Napster . There was a lot of sort of, you know, flailing and venting and wishing and begging even.
That the music industry would let Napster happen. And when it was very clear that Napster wasn’t going to be allowed to happen, that was kind of when I lost interest in being on The Foal List.
And I still wish for the day when, you know, music is when we have what Clay Scherke called the Celestial Jukebox, which really accurately describes how beautiful Napster was for a user.
I mean, you can understand the concerns that the commercial, you know, music people have.
I do wish we had been able to work something out there, maybe , and maybe someday we will.
So Jim, you know, apparently had been talking with the people at Viacom, and as the podcasting stuff was taking off , and he said to them, you know, let’s do something with podcast ing.
And they said, OK, Jim, we’ve got this radio station in San Francisco. Why don’t you find us some people to run it and let’s turn it into a vehicle for broadcasting podcasts.
And so, and we’ve all heard about it. It was a big announcement a few weeks ago, and they put up a website, you know, that sort of explained what they were doing.
And then that was kind of it.
Until today, when I got the call from Jim, and he said that he would like me to do, that they would like me to do the first podcast that they broadcast.
And that, you know, they felt that I had played a big role in developing the idea of podcast ing, and that sort of the honor or job of defining what it means for podcasting to move into broadcast would be something that they would like me to help them with.
So, and of course, so he asked me how I felt about it, and I said, I feel very excited. I think that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.
The only concern I had about it before is that there would be confusion, that people would think, well, that somehow that broadcasting, a podcast was itself podcasting, and of course it’s very different.
It’s not. There is the fundamental difference. You know, it’s like saying that, you know, using a telephone, and let’s not do that one.
Let’s say riding a Segway and driving a semi-truck are the same thing.
Well, they have some things in common. I mean, driving a semi- truck is about transportation.
It’s about moving things from one place to another place.
And riding a Segway is the same thing, right? I mean, it’s about moving some things from some place to another.
But the quantity of things that you can move, and the distances that you can move, and the speed with which you can move, make them, are so different between the two as to make them fundamentally different.
And just because one’s transportation and about motion , they’re both about transportation and motion, really is not a whole lot to have in common.
And in the case of podcasting, you can take content from podcasting and broadcast it.
There’s no technical trick to doing that whatsoever.
It’s not a hard thing to do, and it will be done. It will be done by this time next week. It will no longer have been, it will be a new thing, but it won ’t be an undone thing.
It will have been done. And now , to make it clear, there’s the other direction, which also works, okay? So we’ve just talked about taking a podcast and broadcasting it, right? So I have an idea what that’s like.
You can also take a broadcast and podcast it.
So that’s the kind of stuff that you see that the NPR stations are doing.
So you can get some very small number of NPR programs. You can receive RS as 2. 0 feeds with enclosures, and you can put them through exactly the same process that you put the Morning Coffee Notes, or the Daily Source Code, or Evil Genius Chronicles, or the Nashville Nobody Knows, which is one of my new favorites.
But, you know, just the same way you put any podcast through it, just because it came off a broadcast, is once it’s been adapted to RSS and MP3, there’s no problem.
You can go ahead and treat it just like it was a podcast. The BBC, for example, is doing podcasts like that.
And there’s a ton of value in it. If you’re a regular listener to the programs, well, you get all the benefits of a podcast. You get the time shifting and the geography shifting.
You don’t have to be there when the show is being broadcast, and you can listen to it at any time you want. So you don’t have to schedule your day around listening to a being at the radio during when the show is on, and so your life is richer.
And, of course, that’s a really good thing. But that’s not what we’re doing here. What we’re doing is the other direction.
We’re taking podcasts, and we ’re going to broadcast them.
So, we’re still about a week away from doing this, and the reason why I wanted to talk about this in a podcast before, as a motorcycle, isn’t that lovely? Let’s let me look at my meter here. Yeah, I’m sure you can hear it.
He’s going to go away now, hopefully. Go away! I’m too love it.
That’s like Rush Limbaugh, you know, that kind of person. They have to have the attention on them.
Anyway, well, that’s over.
Where was I? Right, so we’re still about a week away from doing this. The initial podcast to broadcast will take place on Monday morning at midnight, Pacific Time, which will be 3am Eastern Time, which is where I am, and it will be at 8am in London, so you can figure it out from there.
And then they will rebroadcast at noon Pacific Time, 3pm Eastern, etc. , etc.
And I asked how long can the podcast be? They say, you know, whatever you want to do.
And what should I put on it? That’s entirely up to you.
And I was thinking, well, should we go try to get some artists or some historic person of historic significance in previous media? Should we get Walter Cronkite, who was a leading pioneer of television? Should we get somebody from the early days of FM radio, maybe Jonathan Schwartz or maybe Prince? They said, that’s entirely up to you.
Basically every question I asked, they said, you know, you make the decision.
And those are the hardest people to deal with.
But on the other hand, that’s exactly what I want to hear. I want to hear, okay, we get to be creative here.
And that’s wonderful, because that’s what I love.
So I asked, well, you know, when can I start talking about this publicly? And I think you can kind of guess what they said. They said , whenever you’d like.
So I said, all right, let’s start talking about it earlier rather than later.
Because, because what I want to do is I want to ask, and I’m, and I’m going to do this tonight in a podcast, and I’m not going to write about it.
Okay, I’m not going to write about it.
Yeah, I’m not going to write about it. What I’m going to do, though, is I’m going to put up a post on www. podcatch. com and a place where you can post comments.
And I’m only going to put this out as a podcast for the first whatever hours overnight, basically.
And maybe we’ll see what happens after that.
Probably we’ll start talking about it in non-podcast format then.
But the idea is to give the podcasting community, the people who are listening, who are really close to this stuff, a chance to think about this and to, to give it a chance, give you a chance to do some thinking before you have to shoot from the hip.
In other words, what would you like to see? How would you like to see this? I mean, and, you know, for all we know, this could be a complete non-event.
It might not matter that podcasts are broadcast. It might not make the slightest bit of difference.
There is part of it that’s a little disturbing is the assumption that the old media somehow gets to pass judgment on the new media.
It’s one of the things that I ’ve sort of not liked about how the print newspaper news industry has gotten, at least to some extent, a chance to define what blogs are when it’s sort of a conflict of interest for them to do that.
Same thing may be true with radio, although in this case with this radio station, they don’t have any on-air personalities.
So they don’t have anybody. It ’s not like the New York Times writing an article about blogs, because they have a whole editorial staff that’s involved in the process of working on that article, every one of which, you know, has to deal with their own, you know, concerns about their own personal future should blogs take off.
At this radio station, that won ’t be a concern. The entire function of this station, the entire staff is being developed , being designed entirely to serve this function.
So there’s nobody there that has a conflict of interest.
They’re excited about the idea.
And there’s nobody to sort of like, you know, say, “Well, you know, you can’t do that because , you know, that’s like what we do. " No, that won’t be there.
On the other hand, podcasting may not need to be broadcasted.
It may not be that influencing people in drive time in San Francisco may not be a big deal .
On the other hand, the San Francisco Bay Area is an interesting place, and there are a lot of people who are very active in the tech community.
And if something interesting is developing here, I think they ’ll listen.
And I think that it may be a way to get some ideas out there and to, you know, to shine the light on some work that deserves the attention, or to inspire somehow, or to produce some art that could not otherwise have been produced.
So it’s exciting. That’s, you know, from an artistic standpoint, it’s a very interesting question to ask.
And the question is, if you have the resources of a high- powered AM radio station, and, you know, people, I’ve asked some people about this, and they say, “Well, you know, the quality isn’t going to be that good. " Well, you know, quality isn’t going to be any worse than what I do, you know, when I play music, the rare occasions when I play music in my podcast, which I don’t really go for very high quality. I kind of don’t even want very high quality.
I kind of like it being pretty rough and scratchy. So, you know, AM radio is just fine. No problem there.
And so anyway, I’m interested in knowing what you think.
So, you know, if you want to, you could send me an email, but I would really prefer, if you post your thoughts publicly, it’s quite okay to post them on your weblog, or, and then send in and post a pointer, or do a track back to the post on www.
podcatch. com, or post your comment there, or take a day or so and just think about it.
Just see where your brain goes.
Go for a walk or call someone up and, you know, ask them what they think, or let’s discuss it on the pod casters’ mail list. That’s a good place to go.
So, let’s kick the idea around and see where it goes.
So, anyway, this is Dave Winer . That’s about all I have for right now.
I mean, I obviously would like to talk about this some more, so, but that’s about it for now , I think.
I can’t think of anything right now that I, you know, haven’t talked about that I need to talk about right now.
So, anyway, the, remember, the place to go to comment is www.
podcatch. com.
And this has been Morning Coffee Notes for May 9th, 2005, and look forward to seeing you all real soon and hearing what you think. So, cool. I’ll talk to you later.
Bye.
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