Syndicate - Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting

My second panel on Wednesday at Syndicate is Beyond Words: Media RSS and Podcasting with David Berlind of ZDNet (blogs here, here, and here), David Payne of CNN.com, Mike Dunn from Hearst Interactive (blog here, vlog here, and more here), and Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! Search. (Mike already blogged a bit about our pre-panel call last week -- thanks, Mike). I'm particularly excited about this one, since I launched my own CTO Connection podcast last week and personally immersed myself in many of the issues we will be discussing in this panel. (Important note: this session isn't going to be just about podcasting because the concepts behind RSS distribution of podcasts apply more broadly to other forms of multimedia.)

First, if you are new to podcasting, I'll pass along a couple of recommendations from Mike Dunn that were useful to me: Bloggercon III - Podcasting Session by Adam Curry and the SXSW Podcasting Session, both from IT Conversations.

Some of the areas we will likely touch on:

What is a podcast? Why this is different from radio and vanilla mp3 files -- touch briefly on the relationship of RSS, enclosures, podcatcher, and player (would like to emphasize that we're not just talking about iPods here). I don't want this session to get too deep into technical minutiae, but also want to demystify the technical concept a bit so we can move on from it.

Why is podcasting a threat to traditional media? Time-shifted media versus streaming, control issues, audience measurement, etc. As David Berlind said recently, "Time is a zero-sum game."

Who is the audience for podcasts? As serious consumers of podcasts, I'm sure Mike Dunn and David Berlind will have plenty to say about this topic.

Blogs vs. podcasts. Right now, we have the first generation of tools (Technorati, PubSub, et. al.) that help bloggers determine who is linking to their sites, what is being said about their blogs, etc. How (and when) do we get there with audio and video content?

Quality. Podcasting is "easy" and the barriers to entry are lower than ever. Does quality and editing still matter? Can quality be a differentiator? What kind of money does it take to produce high-quality audio? (Just today, I listened to David Berlind being interviewed about the challenges of podcasting -- we might reprise some of what David said in that podcast).

BitTorrent. What does it mean that Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire was reportedly seen by more people via iFilm and BitTorrent than on CNN, the actual broadcast network?

Subscription models for rich media. Just today, CNN.com announced that it will make its formerly for-pay video clips free, so I hope David will talk a bit about the thinking behind that decision in terms of what it suggests for the business models of video providers like CNN.

Video search and standards: Barely two weeks ago, Video Search graduated from beta to its 1.0 release. Yahoo! is developing the Media RSS spec to make indexing and retrieval of video content easier (Media RSS FAQ here and post on the subject to Yahoo! Search Blog from Jeremy Zawodny here). Expect Bradley Horowitz to talk a bit about how Yahoo is leveraging Media RSS and their search crawler technologies to index multimedia content from traditional media companies all the way down to the thinnest end of the long tail -- and what that means.

Who is going to make money with podcasts, and how? Or will people make money because of their podcasts (as Doc Searls suggests with blogs?)

I'm looking forward to it -- should be a lot of fun.

Posted by Chad Dickerson at May 17, 2005 12:22 AM