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Positively 10th Street RIP
May 14 2005 - August 12 2006
It was a good run. But it ended in apathy and rebellion (from the kids).
We had a lot of fun doing it and I hope those of you who checked in now and then enjoyed listening.
Here's where I come out on podcasting:
It's a fun thing to do for a while. But it's really hard to sustain. It requires setting things up, getting a show together, and then editing the audio, making sure the sound is right, and then uploading the file to a hosting service, and then publicizing it.
In the end it was too much work.
And as a listener, I'd much rather read than listen to people talk. Music works for me, but I'd rather have the individual files than one long mp3 that I can't do much with.
Podcasting is cool, but my feeling is that there are better ways to connect with an audience on the web. Blogs, videoblogs, feeds, and mashups are all way more compelling to me than podcasts.
But don't delete the Positively 10th Street feed. I've turned my blog into a podcast. I post music to this blog all the time now. And you can subscribe to the music I post on my blog with the Positively 10th Street feed, courtesy of Streampad (there's now an RSS icon on the Streampad player on this blog which also links to my blog music feed).
If you have the Positively 10th Street feed in iTunes or some other service, you'll be getting a stream of music from me instead of the occasional podcast. That will be my new way of podcasting.
I'm sorry about the lack of talk, but you can always read The Gotham Gal's blog and this blog to keep up with us.
We've figured out how to sustain our blogs. We couldn't figure out how to sustain the podcast. May it rest in peace.
September 20, 2006 My Music , Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (18)
Comments
wow. too bad Fred. I enjoyed the podcast as a supplement to your blog and the gotham gal's blog. hearing your voices make you much more human than just reading a blog or blogs from someone you've never met before. it was also fun to hear your kids. Everyone in your family has very good taste in music, so the music made it even more special.
My absolute favorite Positively 10th Street is the one where you mention it's your anniversary and then you start to introduce Wilco's "Always in Love" I'm thinking to myself - Fred's scoring major points today. Then Joanne says "oohhhh that's nice + fitting" and then Fred says "Huh? what's fitting?" totally oblivious to the fact that you're playing a romantic song just after talking about your anniversary.
I'll miss your voices, but I'll still keep up with your words...
Posted by: Paul | Sep 20, 2006 9:26:04 AM
I have to agree with you on the podcasting - it doesn't work (for me, anyway) on two important levels:
1. Creation: It is not as easy as simply talking a blog entry, and posting it. It is an incredible amount of work to conceive, record, and edit.
2. Consumption: The internet has allowed people to consumer a greater amount of media more efficiently than they could have in the past. Podcasts don't really fit into this model. Like videos, you can only view one at a time, but, like any oral presentation, people can ramble on. There is something about the visual nature of video that gives a sense of instant gratification and engagement. With Podcasts, I often find myself trying to get to the point quicker than the speaker.
Posted by: Dan Blank | Sep 20, 2006 9:47:08 AM
The solo venture is easier, but not your style I guess.
Posted by: jackson | Sep 20, 2006 9:59:36 AM
Hi Fred,
At the end of the post, you said "We've figured out how to sustain our blogs. We couldn't figure out how to sustain the podcast"
Can you give some insights into what you've figured out on sustaining your blogs. I really enjoy reading your blog and am baffled on how you manage to do quality posts on such a consistent basis.
Posted by: Steven Krein | Sep 20, 2006 10:01:06 AM
Ashes to Ashes.
Podcasting is a total pain in the ass and it seems for every minute of the podcast there is an exponential amount of mins added to the editing, encoding, publishing, frustration with software, making sure all is right with iTunes, etc. Ease of Creation will hit it right someday.
Thanks for the ones that you guys did do, I really enjoyed them.
Posted by: Cyanbane | Sep 20, 2006 10:29:46 AM
I like the idea of feeding music straight to my iTunes.
Please just add your entire collection to the podcast, thanks.
Posted by: Rick | Sep 20, 2006 1:34:26 PM
I'll respectfully disagree, sir. With services like Hipcast - which you can literally phone in your show, or pieces of your show - Garageband, etc., podcasting CAN be as easy as blogging, with one exception: if you are looking to do a studio-quality podcast (pro audio, etc.) then yes, expect to do a fair amount of time in postproduction.
Let me recommend attending one of the free PodCamp events happening near you, like PodCamp NYC.
http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/PodCampNYC
My daily show takes about 45 minutes in the morning to record, produce, and distribute, which isn't too bad for a daily show. More time than a blog post? Absolutely. But less time once you map out a workflow.
All the best,
Chris
--
Christopher S. Penn, The Financial Aid Podcast
A Publication of the Student Loan Network
On-demand financial aid internet radio, no iPod required
http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
Posted by: Christopher Penn, Financial Aid Podcast | Sep 20, 2006 1:54:57 PM
I gotta disagree as well. Podcasting isn't for everyone, just for folks who love communicating through audio. Some journalists prefer writing for the NYT, and some prefer producing for NPR. Now anyone can blog or podcast, and so the metaphor extends.
As a professional producer, I'm thrilled with the advent of podcasting. It allows for a much wider variety of audio content than is currently available on the air. Not all of it will be compelling - but some of it will be, and hopefully in a way that busts past some of the boundaries currently set by big broadcasters.
It's definitely more work than blogging, but with a streamlined production process, an engaging format, a few templates and a small amount of advanced planning -- the entire process can go smoothly and be creatively fulfilling. The result is a great show.
Anyway, I'll keep reading, and we can just agree to disagree...
I'm a sound person, you're a print person. :)
Stacy Bond
Executive Director, AudioLuxe
San Francisco, CA
http://www.audioluxe.org
Posted by: Stacy Bond | Sep 20, 2006 2:12:40 PM
I can't believe this is a meme on TechMeme.
You're overexposed. :)
Posted by: Charlie | Sep 20, 2006 4:28:31 PM
I was thinking we should put together a podcast service that is really just a transcript reading of a few major blog posts of the day, with a separate podcast that includes user comments. good idea? bad? is this being done already?
I think people would pay for it. I might even pay for it.
Part of the revenue goes to the sites/posts we select. There are a few major blogs we follow, of course, like avc/tc/om, and others would have an opt-in/permission-based thing. Split revs. New revenue streams. New customers. More convenience. Everybody wins.
The service is basically just someone reading all the posts of the day - either chronologically, or by blog, or maybe we end up chopping it up and offering mashes/rss feeds to all subscribers. And, of course, they can come back and review whenever they want. Got a long slag somewhere and haven't been keeping up? No worries - just subscribe to our transcription podcast and download a month's worth of tech/biz happenings in one shot to your ipod.
oui?
Posted by: Peter | Sep 20, 2006 5:36:11 PM
Most podcasts are way, way, too long. I can read the average blog post in 30 seconds, most podcasts are north of 20 minutes.
It's hard to fill 20 minutes of airtime. I think podcasters (and their listeners) would be well served by aiming to do content chunks in the 1-2 minute range. Tagging those chunks well and distributing them as discrete pieces of content.
The podcasting platform is inherently flawed (which is why we've built a better platform for short form mobile audio)
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | Sep 20, 2006 7:44:49 PM
Charlie - It is a meme because it is news - although he is overexposed :)
Fred came to the absolute correct decision. Podcasting is lamo and not nearly as satisfying to the author as writing a great post. The words just seem to live and link for a longer life.
Posted by: howard lindzon | Sep 20, 2006 11:42:54 PM
There are so many promises of easy to create podcast services, and to be honest I haven't tried them all, but I run a podcast in which I am on podcast #30 directed toward a VERY niche audience that doesn't really make any money [the podcast, not the audience] and is done for fun. Over time I have come to understand 3 things by doing the podcast:
Post Process Ends up taking much much more than the actual show recording.
Purchasing some decent software will make it a little easier, it can increase the sound quality greatly as a trade off for time invested in the software. I use Propaganda (PC, I don't own a mac, yet..)
iTunes has too much power in regards to format and traffic (in relation to my podcast they amount for over 90% of traffic) so you have to cater to their xml tags. It is like SEO and Google, they are 600 lb and sitting in a corner.
i wouldn't call my self an audio perfectionist (I won't sit here and argue about quality of codec vs time for encoding for each filetype) but I do appreciate and can fairly discern good sound. Over the 30 episodes of my podcast I have done, I have gotten exceedingly lazy over the quality of the recording, but the time involved in post production is halved, which honestly I can live with. We don't play music so it doesn't have to be amazingly great quality (we post at 96mhz), but regardless I usually estimate 2.5x the length of the podcast for post production. I don't mind doing it a every 2-3 weeks, but it would be a major time sink every week.
I REALLY like Erik's idea of short blurbs continuously updated throughout the day (I guess kinda like where Fred has moved on his podcast except without the analysis, and only the songs (some of us really liked the talking also though Fred). I think Fred and the family should try "Guerilla-casting" where they just give a little blurb about a song and then play the song every now and then. The podcast I host we use "Guerilla-casting" some when we don't have time to do a full show we just do a 20 - 25 min one and call it a "Guerillacast". Hit em hard, hit em quick, then run. It has given us a little variety and allows us not to spend too much time in the mire of post production. Our usualy shows are 1-1.5 hours long done once every 2-3 weeks.
For background, the podcast I am part of usually has around 3k downloads per show and we use Feedburner as our feed host for stats. This may already be out there, but It would be nice if there was some way to discern # of downloads for a particular podcast vs some type of standard equation for an estimate of unique users via ips that have downloaded the mp3. It is easy for me to say that we have 3000 downloads but that may only be 30 people downloading it 100 times. I am not sure there is an easy way to discern the actual figures, but it is something to think about, and I would love to know if anyone has an good ideas on it.
Yeah I kinda went off on a tangent...
Posted by: cyanbane | Sep 21, 2006 1:09:52 AM
Fair enough. There are ways to make it easier on yourself though...
For FreshBooks' Build Your Business Teleseminar/Podcast series we use our conference call service (http://conferencecallsunlimited.com) to record our calls...they send us an MP3 of the call afterwards, which we use as a podcast. Easy.
Posted by: Mike McDerment | Sep 21, 2006 8:34:09 AM
I agree with the comments here about podcast length. Of those I've listened to, many are so enamored with the tech they seem tempted to subsitute quantity for quality. From my listener pov, long podcasts, while not requiring total concentration, do prevent me from writing, reading or doing anything else needing focus. I mean, I can paint a room or shave the dog while listening to a podcast, just as I can with radio, but I can't handle actual ideas while listening to a podcast. But I can see podcasts being useful in quick bites. Audio and theater of the mind can be powerful.
Posted by: everysandwich | Sep 21, 2006 8:59:59 AM
I like the new Streampad setup a lot more than the old podcast. I wasn't really interested in the 10th St talk, but I like to hear the new music you've discovered.
One request: Can you get the artist name and album to appear in the podcast in addition to the track title? I listened to I Gotta Move on my ipod this morning, but had to come back to your site to figure out that Ben Kweller was the one singing.
Posted by: Rick Burnes | Sep 21, 2006 2:03:34 PM
There is a basic truth of media consumption that often gets ignored/forgotten by audio plays. We process information with our eyes in a very different way to with our ears. With our eyes we can scan past the boring stuff v. quickly and easily double check data points like tables once we know they're important. Rewinding and forwarding on an audio file is always a pain.
And then there are graphs and pictures.
These are the reasons none of the many attempts to put newspapers or email on audio have gotten very big.
Posted by: Nic Brisbourne | Sep 22, 2006 10:45:33 AM
New technologies are blurring the lines between audio/visual and textual content on the web, though. Services such as http://innertoob.com allow bloggers to comment along the timeline of a podcast or video, and then share those comments on their blogs by allowing people to jump right to the point in the podcast that is being described.
I do agree that not everyone will enjoy the work of podcasting. The fact that you don't find it as engaging as other content speaks to the fact that very few people who podcast understand how to make compelling content.
Posted by: Carter Harkins | Sep 25, 2006 1:45:24 PM
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