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Podcast boosts NPR show’s audience
And I can still hear the echos of the usual A-list suspects as they continue to rant on and on about “its not radio, its not radio”.
The exciting thing about vogging, is that there still aren’t any defacto
standards for how video should be presented on blog or even a web page.
Many have a static frame on the page, then a mouse click takes you to a
popped window and the video. Others pop a window to another page
containing the video and text, which you then have to click on yet again
to view. Yet others, like myself, embed the video directly in the page,
using the QuickTime plugin, and you click the static image to start the
video.
And what about the preview movie? QuickTime can present a shorter movie,
or more often a static graphic, over where the movie will play when you
click on it, or as in some of the examples above, in a hyperlinked
graphic to a pop window. Should this be a credit, title, scene from the
movie or just a placeholder icon? I’m just using the QuickTime logo at the moment.
And what about feeds? My RSS feed contains the enclosure, but the
description text (my full text blog post) doesn’t include a hyperlink to
the enclosure. Whereas if you go to my blog page, the video is clearly
embedded in the description text. The assumption being that if you’re
pulling the feed, then you won’t want the enclosures duplicated in the
description text, and if your reader doesn’t support enclosures, you can
always click back to the permalink which does. Is the first real example
of when a web page blog post differs from the copy in the feed?
And not much work has been done in the whole area of cross linking and
combining video, audio, images and text. Unsurprisingly it sounds like
yet another microcontent and reuse problem.
Who knows when the space will start to settle. Maybe six months? For
now, it’s exciting, and an opportunity to ride the wave before the flotsam
and jetsam of the already going stale podcasting community, starts to wash in.
The company I work for, Synop,
does a lot of R&D, particularly in the CMS and microcontent space. We
developed one of the leading RSS readers for .NET, Sauce Reader, which isn’t our end
game, but at least gets our fingers into the blogging space. We’ve
always been a microcontent company, so although we feel like we belong
in the space more than most, Sauce Reader is actually designed with
additional purposes in mind.
Anyway, I did a quick review of CNet’s new Newsburst aggregator the
other day, and posted it on my Synop blog. While not a
direct competitor with our core R&D, they are heading in our direction,
and of course they do compete directly with Sauce Reader.
So then someone on the Newsburst team comes to my blog and thanks me
for my comments, and then asks for any additional feedback I may have,
and areas in which they could improve. This is great, it opens a dialog
up with a possible customer, and whether he realises it, a partial
competitor. Very Scoblesque of both of us, if I may coin a phrase, to
positively review a competitor in public.
But here’s the rub. How much feedback do I give? If any? And how much
of that should be on company time? We have a lot of IP in this space,
and it would be very easy for me to throw a few nice ideas their way,
just to keep the discussion alive, but traditionally you’d just shut the
fuck up really.
Scoble talks about almost anything being open for discussion, except
for confidential company IP like new products etc. Others would say
everything should be open. However this isn’t always as black and white
as people suggest. A grey area exists between embracing the chasm, the
long tail, the blogosphere, and keeping quiet about what we’re working
on. There’s no real guide, and I guess we have to make our own decisions
as to what we do and say.
As for Newsburst, I do wish them luck. Who knows, one day we could be
big competitors, or even partners. More likely, one of us won’t sync up
with whatever direction the industry takes.
There’s a saying in show business: The people you meet on the way up,
are the same ones you meet on the way back down. It’s another one of my
life mantras.