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Impro for Computer Human Interaction and experience prototyping.
Podcasting. I’m still underwhelmed.
I’ve tried, I really have, to try to understand what all the fuss is about, giving the odd A-lister the benefit of the doubt. The radio killer, the next big thing, the future of the media. Sorry, still not ringing any of my bells.
A few months back I added enclosures to one of the Sacrament Radio RSS feeds, and after the hour of coding it took to write and test, I sat back waiting for the metaphoric penny to drop. Not even the podcasted recording of a penny dropping, metaphoric or otherwise, I think would change the situation much either. Here we are podcasting, big deal.
Podcasting? Hmm… All I did was drop a URL to an mp3 file into an RSS feed via an enclosure. Enclosure? That’s a bit of a misnomer. It’s not like the file is actually stored within the feed, just the URL is. The file still needs to be stored on a server somewhere, and pulled down by software that knows it is there. I think “external media reference” is a more accurate term to be honest.
I’m an Apple nut, and have been since that fateful day in 1979, so I’d be the last to suggest dropping the pod from podcast, but sitting here seeing an RSS feed containing a reference URL to an mp3 file, I’m thinking perhaps feedcast is a more accurate and appropriate term. Podcast? Pah! Cute iTunes scripts to download files to the iPod, but buddy, it’s still just a URL to a file.
So while I’m taking pot shots at the technology, why don’t I finish up by firing a few broadsides at podcasters themselves. Of course to call yourself a podcaster, would imply that your listeners are downloading to iPods, which is a bit presumptuous if you ask me. You’re a feedcaster, so just deal with it, ok?
So that brings us to the content itself. Most of course are mp3 files, now a substantially old technology, that only still exists because bandwidth hasn’t increased as fast as we’d hoped it would. Where is the interesting experimentation with other kinds of media?
And listening to some of these podcasts is a enlightening experience I must say. Most tend to be amateur umm and ahh merchants who think they’re either experts in their domain or professional stand up comedians, presenting content which would be way quicker to consume by reading it instead of having to hear it, all interspersed with various musical tracks, which if I was interested in listening to, I’d probably have running in the background via iTunes or the radio anyway.
I’ve said it before, in Podcasting: The little brother of RSS, or the future of community radio? and Podcasting — a speed limiter for information flow, podcasting is an interesting hack for delivery of audio content, but it is not like traditional radio isn’t progressing either. XM and Sirius are expanding their satellite options, and terrestrial broadcasters are also raising their game. To then say that podcasting will take over from traditional media, is the same blinkered thinking that took us into the bubble in the first place.
Radio and Internet audio (in some form or another) will converge at some point on personal devices such as phones and PDAs, which are effectively just portable radios anyway. The podcasters’ challenge is to wake up and realise that all they’ve re-invented is community radio, and then take it to the next level.
I’m sorry, but a URL inside an RSS feed, which points to an mp3 file of some guy reading a news story I can read elsewhere, with illegally recorded music spliced in that I have no interest in listening to, isn’t going to impress me. Show me the delivery of high quality time shifted content which feeds me knowledge faster than I can read it, and then I’ll get excited!
I had an interesting visit to my site the other day by someone at Vodafone. I don’t know exactly why, it just popped up in my logs, but I’m guessing because they stumbled across my Dear Vodafone and your mp3 ringtone DRM, welcome to the blogosphere post.
That evening, I stumbled across a post in an online forum by someone who had been a customer support person at Vodafone, and was saying that to get the best results, you need to act nice and cordial, detail your exact problem clearly, and not to get frustrated. Here’s a partial quote:
People really need to learn that getting angry at customer service
representatives can only hurt you, not help you. 99.99% of the time, some
poor person who has nothing to do with your issue will be taking your shit
and will not WANT to help you.
Of course this is stating the obvious, but the problem here is that if this tends to have more success, then it is more indicative of a failing customer support system. A poor person who will not WANT to help you, shouldn’t be working in customer support, end of story.
When someone calls up support, they are usually frustrated with themselves that they can’t work out the problem, frustrated with the company that what they’re trying to do can be so difficult, and are likely to do more damage through word of mouth if they are not satisfied with the outcome. Frustration leads to extreme emotional states, and the more frustrated, the more unstable and angry we become. That’s human nature. Subsequently, the more angry the customer, probably the more serious their problem, and therefore the more important it is to solve their problem and make them happy.
Customer support personnel are supposed to be professionals, solving problems in emotionally charged situations, with knowledge and experience of psychology and how to deal with people as key requisite skills. Most companies however, treat customer support as a low income limited skill call centre process, usually staffed by out of work actors or HTML coders, who couldn’t give a shit about the person on the end of the phone.
Think about the last time you had to call a company for support, think about how frustrated and angry you may have been, and think about how they dealt with your call. I bet your current impression of said company matches your last experience with them on the phone.
Vodafone. Between their arrogance of removing most of the useful functionality from my phone, and their really crap customer support, I guess at least they’re consistent.
I had my hair done today (a wonderful vibrant blue if you’re
interested), and at one point during the 5 odd hours it took to do, a
mother and her 18 year old daughter had their hair done. The daughter
had beautiful long natural almost white thin straight hair that was just dying (sic) to be coloured a bright glitter blue, but I resisted.
I’d describe the mother as one of those upper middle class virtual upper
classers. You know the ones, they try to come across all
sophisticated, but their middle class attitude, and lack of dress sense,
regardless of which labels they happen to be wearing flaunting, clearly give them away.
On the way out of the salon, customers are offered a chocolate from a big glass fish
bowl, which at this point was probably three layers deep with
individually wrapped chocolates. So the mother grabs the only Lindt on
the top layer, it being the most expensive of all the chocolates in the
bowl. She then motions towards her daughter and says “would you like a
chocolate?”, and before hearing a reply, had already dug down two layers
and retrieved what was probably the only other Lindt in the bowl.
So does she think she’s more deserving than anyone who comes to get
their hair done after her? Or is it that she just happens to like Lindt
and thinks that most other people don’t? I’ll go out on a limb here, and
suggest perhaps that it’s just plain greed, and completely typical of the Christmas season.
To be fair, she’s probably married to some middle class businessman,
who’s had greed drilled into him from the day after completing his arts
degree, and their daily grind consists of greeding their way onto
Sydney’s north shore, greeding their way up the class hierarchy, and
promoting good greed culture in their 1.4 children.
Most likely however, it is just the greed that is built into us all from
the day we’re born. We talk about the prisoner’s
dilemna, and the iterated prisoner’s dilemna, where greedy
strategies do poorly against altruistic strategies, but what about the
last Lindt in the bowl dilemna?
At first I thought this was like the last slice of cake on the plate
dilemna, but it’s not, because there’s a social aspect to slices on
plates. Countless pairs of eyes, pretending to be engrossed in conversation, are secretly watching the plate to see who takes the last piece. With Lindts in bowls, there’s no chance or strategy involved, you can just take the last good chocolate and nobody will know, and the only thing you have to consider are your own principles.
But then again, maybe I’m just jealous?