Podcast Archive

So we learned today via Marshall that Yahoo Podcasts will be closing on the spookiest day of the year, October 31. Now, I like Marshall and he is a master blogger, but I slightly disagree on why Yahoo Podcasts is closing. He notes, "Some would argue that podcasting hasn’t caught on like it was expected to, that it’s been dominated by existing media giants and beaten as a medium by the rise of video. I still love me a good episode from ITConversations, Briefings Direct or our own new show Read/WriteTalk when I’m walking the dog – but Yahoo! users looking for podcasts will soon have to look elsewhere."

If we ignore his shameless plug for RWWTalk :) then we can see that he believes that podcasting hasn’t taken off like it was expected to and that video has been on the express track and audio the local. I agree with both arguments he makes in that video has moved faster overall and now that most multimedia players can handle video, it’s become preferred over audio. But here’s the real reason it’s closing:

THE DAMN THING NEVER WORKED. I spent hours trying to get CN podcasts to upload and never could get it to work. Emails to support went unanswered and I left. I wonder how many others were in the same boat.

ON24 Inc., a media marketing provider, published a report last week about webcasts and specifically the B2B industry. The report looks at webcasts under 60 minutes in length.

Mediapost has a good report summary which includes:

The report shows that registration and attendance is cyclical depending on the time of year or week:

• Forty-seven percent of all registrations occur in the 10 days before a scheduled webcast, with 10.41% registering on the day of the webcast
• The months of December, June and August registered the highest registrant-to-attendee conversion percentages of 64.71%, 58.43% and 57.14% respectively
• Most registrations occurred earlier in the week – Monday (23%), Tuesday (21%), Wednesday (19%) – with the fewest percentage over the weekend

In my 12+ years running online promotions and email campaigns, I have found that Tuesday works best for sweepstakes and Thursday works best for coupon offers. On CN, I try to think about which stories work best on which days. Outside of news, every story can be scheduled based on what I believe the reader response will be.  

The conclusions of the report include:

• There is a cyclical trend of when publishers schedule and deliver webcasts, with registration and attendee levels seeming to rise when there are a lower number of webcasts scheduled
• Archiving a live webcast contributes 15.34% of all registrations, indicating that archiving extends the ROI of the live webcast
• Forty-seven percent of all registrations occurred in the 10 days before a webcast  while most of these registrations occurred earlier in the week (Monday-Wednesday) versus later in the week and weekend

While the findings are based on B2B but I think sites (and webcasters, livecasters and podcasters) such as Justin.tv and Ustream might benefit from this information. I am sure Ustream will provide archives at some point for some of their shows.

Jason Calacanis asked me to participate in his CalacanisCast with Andy Beard, Michael Gray and Brian Provost to discuss Mahalo. The three "SEOs" really did an excellent job of asking the right questions and getting more information about the service from Jason. The call goes for about 60 minutes and is a pretty interesting discussion overall. Thumbs-up to Jason for having some of the most critical opinions on Mahalo discuss it in an open format. It also looks like there was very little (if any) editing done to the podcast. Mahalo currently has 40 full-time employees and Jason is looking to have 100 onboard by year-end.

What I find is interesting is about the 11 minute mark, Michael notes that when you search for "DisneyWorld" you get redirected to "DisneyWorld Vacations" and Michael notes that this is a much more monetizable term. Jason did not want to answer to that and moved the call forward. And just like I wrote in the original review, Mahalo is created for two reasons: To help us get a better search experience and, more importantly, to cash in on the top keywords which pay the most.

Yesterday I replied to Jason's post about his iPhone page. Engadget is listed on that page 5! times, no other site is on there even twice. This is just one example of the bias which I stand by my belief that bias may hurt Mahalo overall. Jason also noted at 19 minute mark that he created the most popular blogger pages first. My belief is that he did this to get bigger amounts of buzz (which is actually excellent and intelligent marketing). At the 44 minute mark, Jason makes my point about bias very clearly… he notes that he will pull headlines from the same batch of sites.

Graywolf asked a good question about "domains by proxy". Jason looks at this as a big red flag as most spammers are using this. I think that's a bad decision as well, especially since his sponsor, GoDaddy, pushes those domains by proxy subscriptions like nothing else.

Anyway, you can watch the podcast below (embedded) or download the audio.

Last week I had a chance to speak with Renn Vara from the "More than Talk" podcast series. The podcast is ten minutes in length and covers mainly using social media within a large organization.

• Download the mp3
• Check out the other More than Talk episodes (the latest one features a VP from Netflix!)

SplashCast is launching a new feature, MyPodcastNetwork, as part of their player that (in simple terms) will allow you to take any media RSS feed and show it on your site. You set the feed in the player and then the player will always show the latest plus the other media that is part of the feed. I haven't seen anything like this before (if you have please post it in a comment and I will update).

SplashCast defines the new feature as, "SplashCast is releasing the first version of a new feature that will allow the video or audio enclosures in any RSS feed to be displayed in a SplashCast player on your web page. This will take podcasts beyond iTunes and make every page on the web an avenue for live distribution."

In their upcoming section they speak about stats and since I am a stats freak, I think this is a piece that is really missing. How many people have viewed my video/audio files inside the rss, where are they, who are they, what page did they view it from (using this new player option), etc. As videocasts become more popular, the dreaded ROI discussion will begin. Whomever can own the video stats market might do pretty well for themselves.

I asked Marshall Kirkpatrick, Content Director, for some comments on the new service:

This new functionality really speaks to a big part of the original vision for SplashCast. When the My Podcast Network featured gets combined with the forthcoming quick editing capabilities, then we'll see all kinds of remixed, multimedia channels of commentary on media from around the web. I'm way stoked about that. I saw something on the O'Reilly factor yesterday that really needs to be sliced up and interspersed with some PowerPoint documents I've got and video responses I've recorded – if you know what I mean. Creating a whole channel of that kind of interaction with media will be awesome.

Podcasts – they're not just for iTunes anymore!

It's great that so many media outlets are releasing content via RSS. RSS is a very versatile technology that can be mixed, spliced and filtered in so many different ways.

I think SplashCast seems to be thinking first about where the gaps are currently but, just as importantly, also considering where we need to be moving. The latter is what makes a company sustainable and succeed over the long-term.

Here is a screenshot of the RSS directory within the SplashCast web app:

Jake reviewed ConceptShare back in December. ConceptShare is an online design sharing, mark-up and review tool. I wish this tool would have been available 10 years ago. I know that I could have used it on practically any web site I created. The days of scratching on a printout, drawing in photoshop or sending impossible to understand emails back and forth are over. To find out more about ConceptShare, I spoke with Bernie Aho and Scott Brooks, two of the three ConceptShare co-founders.

Highlights of our discussion include:

• Can you provide a brief background about yourself?
• Where did the idea for ConceptShare come from?
• How do you use ConceptShare to innovate ConceptShare?
• Can you share some information about your users?
• How do you monetize ConceptShare?
• Funded or self-funded?
• What’s next for ConceptShare?
• What has been the biggest mistake you have made since starting ConceptShare?
• Which Web apps besides ConceptShare do you believe is a star?

Grab the RSS Feed and always know the instant we post other interviews.

Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (19 minutes) (or download the mp3):

Thank you for listening to our interviews, we appreciate it!

I have been using Viddler for a couple of weeks now for our video reviews. I tried YouTube but left quickly because of the size of the video. It is hard to review a program in a 320 box. I then tried Revver and the service is very good except they also limt the video size and a human has to review the video before it is approved. And so I gave Viddler a try. What I like about Viddler is the size of the video in both dimension and file size and they have a very cool tagging function which allows you to tag portions of the video. Robert calls Viddler the “video version of Flickr”.

Highlights of our discussion include:

• Can you provide a brief background about yourself?
• Where did the idea for Viddler come from? What about the name?
• Can you share some information about your users?
• How do you monetize Viddler?
• Funded or self-funded?
• What technology is used for Viddler? How do you make the cool “notes” on certain timings of the movie clip?
• Who are your competitors?
• How does Viddler compare to YouTube?
• How does Viddler compare to Revver?
• What’s next for Viddler?
• What has been the biggest mistake you have made since starting Viddler?
• What are the top 1-2 things you have learned since starting Viddler?
• What are the most important things that a startup must have to be successful?
• Which Web apps besides Viddler do ou believe is a star?
• Where do you see the Video moving in the next year?

Grab the RSS Feed and always know the instant we post other interviews.

Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (26 minutes) (or download the mp3):

Thank you for listening to our interviews, we appreciate it!