Why did I ever drift away from audio! I could be quite skilled up by now if I had remained focused and engaged.
Just saying...
Aside from my own in-house tech issues and angst, the New York Times captures a more general trend when it wrote recently:
And then, sometime around 2009 or 2010, the podcast scene seemed to wither. The stalwarts ("This American Life," "Radiolab") stayed around at the top of the iTunes charts, but there wasn't much else happening. Download numbers fell. Interest waned. People moved on to online video and streaming music services as a way to pass the time.
I think that's very true -- video killed the podcast stars. Well, maybe not 'killed them' so much as winged them. So I wasn't alone.
But the NYT also captures the new trend -- a renaissance -- and that's the exciting part because the gadgetry is better and cheaper for those who seek to move away from their desktop, like me.
But let's not get too juiced up because despite the growth in podcasting it is not comparable to main station radio in way of listener numbers. As Ashley Milne-Tyte points out,"Most of us are laboring away in a vast, overpopulated digital landscape, trying to be heard above the din."
She's doing alright with 10,000 listeners, a respected podcast (The Broad Experience), highly recommended in review. But that's the drill: podcasting by niche: in Milne-Tute's case, woman in the workplace.
Indeed to go looking for podcasts to listen to is all about trawling for specific niche and subject matter. No one podcast fits all.
Nor is it easy to determine where radio stops and podcasting begins as there is so much cross over -- albeit skewed by music copyright law. Nonetheless, while radio has veered to becoming something of a generic swamp, podcasting is dynamic audio ecology,with an open ended agenda still unknown.The irony being that through the medium of podcasting you access the best of what radio has to offer.
That said, this time around I'm more aware of my niche.I have a cunning plan....at least in my head. The size of the audience isn't the issue -- it's the journey and my own satisfaction with the audio I produce. It amazes me that i can go back to podcasts I produced five and six years ago and be taken with their verve, advocacy and accomplishment. You can't do that with video it seems to date much more easily I guess because its content is less 'dense'.
Take this episode, for instance -- Choosing with Work Choices. The two channel stereo interplay is a bit annoying but what I've done is captured a historical moment during the trade union response to John Howard's industrial legislation by mixing in actual protests with satirical takes.
It can standalone.
Today I'm not so keen to produce 'shows' with segments. Today I'm interested in generating standalone segments that stand or fall on their own merits. No fluff. No packaging. Short and, hopefully, sweet.
I may suck as a text editor but I do cut a mean audio track.
It's all about montage -- audio montage -- laid out on a RSS feed. Like a comic with its panels.
She's doing alright with 10,000 listeners, a respected podcast (The Broad Experience), highly recommended in review. But that's the drill: podcasting by niche: in Milne-Tute's case, woman in the workplace.
Indeed to go looking for podcasts to listen to is all about trawling for specific niche and subject matter. No one podcast fits all.
Nor is it easy to determine where radio stops and podcasting begins as there is so much cross over -- albeit skewed by music copyright law. Nonetheless, while radio has veered to becoming something of a generic swamp, podcasting is dynamic audio ecology,with an open ended agenda still unknown.The irony being that through the medium of podcasting you access the best of what radio has to offer.
That said, this time around I'm more aware of my niche.I have a cunning plan....at least in my head. The size of the audience isn't the issue -- it's the journey and my own satisfaction with the audio I produce. It amazes me that i can go back to podcasts I produced five and six years ago and be taken with their verve, advocacy and accomplishment. You can't do that with video it seems to date much more easily I guess because its content is less 'dense'.
Take this episode, for instance -- Choosing with Work Choices. The two channel stereo interplay is a bit annoying but what I've done is captured a historical moment during the trade union response to John Howard's industrial legislation by mixing in actual protests with satirical takes.
It can standalone.
Today I'm not so keen to produce 'shows' with segments. Today I'm interested in generating standalone segments that stand or fall on their own merits. No fluff. No packaging. Short and, hopefully, sweet.
I may suck as a text editor but I do cut a mean audio track.
It's all about montage -- audio montage -- laid out on a RSS feed. Like a comic with its panels.
