Recipe for a Killer Podcast Application

While doing last night’s RanchoCast, I thought of an application that would not only bring podcasting to the masses, but would also be very useful for current podcast listeners. I’m going to tell some smart guy or gal somewhere how to put themselves on the Web 2.0 map.

I have said before and I’ll say again, that as long as podcasting is technologically or psychologically tied to iPods and other portable music players, it will never reach the mainstream. Nobody I know, either socially or professionally, uses an iPod or other portable music player. Not one person. A couple of people I know have iPods, but they tell me that after the initial thrill of having one wore off, the iPods got relegated to a drawer somewhere, rarely to see the light of day.

Granted, I’m sure lots of kids and college students have iPods, and if you don’t mind ignoring millions and millions of grownups with lots of disposable cash, then so be it.

But if you want to bring podcasting to the masses, some things are going to have to change.

First, you have to understand that grownups who listen to podcasts generally do not listen on an iPod. We have made some progress integrating computer-listening features into podcasts. The Delicious playtagger supports this (as an aside, am I the only one who noticed that all of the Delicious buzz went stone silent as soon as Yahoo bought it?), as does the new play button in Feedburner feeds.

But there is another place where grownups listen to even more of their music, talk shows and audio books- in the car. Which leads me to my recipe for a killer podcast application.

Want to be famous and actually make some money too? Then create this-

An application, online or local, that allows a user to subscribe to podcasts and organize their subscription lists.

Allow them to listen to the podcasts online or to download them into an iPod.

Here comes the new and important part…

Create an easy to implement way to have selected podcasts automatically burned to a CD-R every week or so, with each podcast to be a separate track. After it is set up, the application would simply prompt the user to insert a CD-R every so often, at which time it would burn that week’s podcasts onto a CD-R that could be listened to in the car.

The application would also create a text document with the track numbers, names, dates and descriptions of the podcasts. That document could be printed and used as a listening reference. Label maker developers could write plug-ins that would allow the automatic printing of jewel case labels or, even better, templates for applications, like my Primera printer, that print on the CD-R itself.

Have the podcast name and date burned on the CD-R as CD Text.

Most car stereos can play MP3’s now, so that would be the default setting- for more capacity. But there would also be an option to burn the CD-R in CDA format so older car stereos could also play it. CD-R’s are almost free these days, so cost is not a factor.

Plus, the CD-R’s would allow the user to create an archive of podcasts and to share good ones with friends.

People would happily pay for this product. And if you wanted to be true to the Web 2.0 mantra and get some of the allegedly infinite ad revenue, you could place ads on the application pages, if it’s an online application, or on the CD-R between the podcasts themselves. Perhaps there would be a cheaper version of the application that has brief ads between the podcasts and a full-priced version that doesn’t.

I realize that you can burn podcasts to CD-R’s now, but it’s simply more trouble than most people are willing to go to for a concept they don’t fully understand or embrace. To get to where the population and the dollars are, you have to make it easy for people to say yes.

Let me say it again, the customers we are trying to sell to are not geeks like us. They want something that is (a) easy, and (b) cool and useful, but in that order. Too many Web 2.0 developers get it backwards. You have to make it easy to say yes, because it will always be easy to say no.

Take podcasting into the cars and trucks of the masses and you’ll see podcasting really take off.

Otherwise it’s just too easy to say no.

Blog Improvements and the Backup

I tell my friends all the time how important it is to always back up their data. That to choose not to back up is to choose to lose data, and all that.

But yesterday, when I was making some changes to the left and right columns of my blog, I didn’t take the time to back up my current template before I made those changes. I am pretty good changing the html and scripts used to pull and display information, so I figured I’d be in and out in less than a half hour.

What I didn’t count on was the second half of my template page getting accidentally selected and deleted by mistake, along with those few lines I intended to delete. I still don’t know how it happened, and only realized it had happened when I went back to my blog later and there was nothing but random code on the page.

Big honking problem.

I have many old backups of my template, but none from the last few months. So I had to spend about 3 hours figuring out what was missing and rewriting the template. That is not a recipe for a relaxing Saturday afternoon. At least it was raining cats and dogs, so I wasn’t missing anything fun.

At the end of the day, my improvements were added. Here’s a summary of what I did and how I did it:

1) I added an automatically updating “recent links” list using Dave‘s advice given in a Comment to my WordPress Blues post. I tried that approach a year or so ago, and only got 3-4 links in the list. Technorati must have fixed it in the meantime, because now it seems to work reasonably well. One beauty of the blogosphere is that it allows you to have smart friends from all over the world who can help you out. Thanks Dave!

2) I added a tag cloud using ZoomClouds. It is easy to set up and configure (I had to make mine very narrow to fit in the column). The links lead to a page on the ZoomCloud site where the relevant portion of your RSS feed is displayed. I wish it linked to the actual blog post, but ZoomCloud has to pay the bills, so I can live with it the way it is.

3) I fixed my Last.fm plug-in to J. River’s Media Center (the best media player on the market, yet one that is ignored by many writers), so my playlist will appear on my Last.fm page. I also designed a weekly top artists chart, which I am not going to display all the time, but which I will post from time to time. Here’s how it looks:

4) I deleted all of the old feed buttons in favor of the standard one, and put it, my email subscription form and a new mobile feed via Plusmo at a better location, to encourage more visitors to subscribe. If you aren’t subscribed to Newsome.Org, how’s about clicking that little orange button over there?

5) After considering removing it altogether, I moved my Skype button to a less obvious place- below the fold. Anyone who ought to be Skyping me will know it’s there, and it will hopefully keep me from getting too many young, drunk and clueless calls.

6) I added an automatically updating list of people who recently Commented on my posts. Note that it isn’t the last 10 to Comment anywhere- it’s the last 10 to Comment on a post that is still on the front page. Not my preference, but that’s the way the system I found works.

The idea of a lot of the new features is to give people who link to me and Comment on my posts some instant and automatic return traffic. I am good about responding to people who link and Comment, but when I get busy or distracted, I don’t want links and Comments to go unrecognized. After all, blogging is about community and about back and forth.

Lastly, I updated my music and book lists. Many thanks to Donncha Caoimh, who recommended Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure in a Comment. That is the most helpful photography book I have ever read. Bryan knows how to teach exposure. I just wish there were a few more photos of his extremely fine wife in that book. If you’re a guy and you’ve read it, you know what I mean.

Donncha is a fantastic photographer. Visit In Photos to see his amazing photography.

Back to backups. While I was finally able to get things back up and running with the new content in place, my failure to backup my data made a 30 minute job a 3 and a half hour job.

Do as I say, not as I (sometimes) do- go back up your data.

If I Can't Have a Revenue Model, Then Neither Can You!

Here’s what I don’t understand.

People try so hard to couch the Web 2.0, blogosphere, etc. thing as a real business, but when a real business, with an actual revenue model, makes a smart and logical business decision to protect that revenue, a lot of those same people cry foul.

How in the world have we gotten to a place where eBay saying no to Google’s checkout service is lame, yet AOL giving away its services to broadband users is a good idea?

If you want to know why many real businesses don’t take the blogosphere seriously, this is Exhibit No. 1.

No right thinking business with the dominant market share eBay has would allow a competitor like Google, who is also rumored to be about to enter the auction market, to walk into its store and sell services to its customers.

The entire Web 2.0 movement and many desperate older web companies have climbed on the back of the ad dollar. Ad revenue simply cannot bear that burden for the long haul.

Sometimes I feel like the Web 2.0 groupthink is “if I can’t have a sustainable revenue model, then you can’t either!”

Oh, That Money Thing Again

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, my cousin Janet was visiting me in Houston. During her stay, we spent a lot of time with a friend of mine (who, incidentally, is one of the characters in my long forgotten and half written novel that became the Mr. Happy stories). Anyway, one night my friend was trying to convince Janet to go home with him. He was getting nowhere and finally she blurted out “Look, I just met you,” to which my friend responded without missing a beat, “Oh, that time thing again.”

That’s sort of the way a lot of these Web 2.0 companies seem to approach their business plans and the obvious, at least to some of us, need to actually turn their nifty science projects into some cash. I have talked until I’m blue in the face about the faulty logic inherent in the ad dollars as a sole revenue source approach. Yet every day we read about another social bookmarking service and another social networking service who plan to take over the world, one ad click at a time.

The lawyers are about the do some damage to those who believe they can toss up a system, let the inmates run wild and sit back and get rich and famous.

Joe over at Techdirt posts today about a new MySpace angle designed to disguise the fact that it’s just more advertising and a new Facebook angle designed to disguise more ad sales as some sort of a joint venture by giving the advertiser some equity.

If I were a VC, I would ask only one question to every startup that I came across:

What is your revenue model, exclusive of selling ads and getting bought by Yahoo.

If I got an unsatisfactory answer, I would thank them and tell them I’m not interested.

It’s that money thing again. In the business world, you simply have to make it. Otherwise, you’re not a business, you’re a hobby.

On a related note, I still want to know, exactly, who clicks on online ads. I have never once (never, not even one time) clicked on an ad on a web site I didn’t own. If you regularly click on online ads, please leave a comment and tell me about it. I’ll devote an entire post or two to this if I get enough takers.

Goal Tracking Made Easy

It’s the simple things that solve real problems that have the most potential to make a difference. When I saw those little power strip savers a year or two ago, I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t thought of that years ago.

jg-746270

I feel the same way about Joe’s Goals, which I read about today at Lifehacker.

Joe’s Goals is a straight forward, simple to use and seriously useful online goal tracking application. You sign up, set goals (both things to accomplish and to avoid) and track your progress. A neat feature is that you get one point for every goal you meet each day and lose a point for every one you miss. If you think in math like I do, you could average your weekly scores and create a trend line (integrated charts and trend lines would be a really cool feature for a future release).

I set up a few goals in about 2 minutes and now have a little tangible incentive to eat healthy, work hard, etc.

Check out Joe’s Goals- you’ll be glad you did.

Technorati’s Spam Problem

Blogspotting has an interesting post today about Technorati and its spam problem.

nospam One of my 5 Things That Would Make the Blogosphere a Better Place the other day was if Technorati would work the way it’s supposed to. I mentioned the fact that I come across links to Newsome.Org all the time that never show up in Technorati. Stephen Baker of Blogspotting was talking with Dave Sifry about this issue. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that it’s spam-related.

Everyone who’s been on the net for more that a day knows that spam is a gigantic problem. I continue to be a little amazed at the ridiculous spam I get, both via email, Comments and trackbacks. I am even more amazed, however, at the fact that some idiots somewhere must be responding to spam or else it wouldn’t still be happening. It’s like the rest of us are subsidizing the idiot tax for those who think random strangers are doing them great favors by sending them get rich quick schemes and online degree offers.

I don’t feel a bit sorry for people who lose money by responding to spam. But I do feel sorry for the rest of us who have to weed spam out of our email and blogs.

These problems present a great challenge to Technorati, as they try to filter out the massive amounts of spam blogs that litter the blogosphere. Occasionally, legitimate blog posts get flagged as spam and quarantined- i.e., not indexed. Dave says that Technorati has people who manually try to resolve these issues, but that they are “a little backlogged.” I can’t imagine how much effort it would take to separate the spam blogs from the real ones, so it’s understandable that they are backed up.

Here’s the thing- more of this filtering should be done on the front end, by the blog platform provider and ISP provider. Granted, some spam blogs probably have blogging platforms installed on private servers, but the majority of the spam blogs I have come across seem to be half-assed attempts by some idiot to make some easy change by tossing up a blog on blogspot or some other online services. If these spam blogs were filtered more effectively at the platform level, Technorati’s job would be a lot more manageable.

Even the blogs that don’t reside on the major platform providers seem to be hosted on other, likely spam friendly, services. These domains should be blocked at the domain level and their ISP providers notified and blocked if action is not taken.

AdSense and other ad servers should also be more proactive in identifying this sort of thing and closing those accounts sooner rather than later. A nudge from their customers wouldn’t hurt either.

Like cockroaches, you’ll never kill all the spam blogs, but you can kill enough to make the infestation manageable.

The war on email spam has been raging for years, and we can learn from the successes and failure there. Unlike email spam, however, blog spam can’t be filtered on the end user level, like Outlook now does fairly effectively. Blog-related spam has to be addressed more adequately on the front end (domain and platform) level, before it multiplies and spreads.

It’s a big problem, and I don’t think Technorati can win the war by itself.

Bubble 2.0 Watch: He Said Thought Leaders

web20 Om Malik says that the thought leaders (a new “pre-owned car” word for my dictionary of needlessly fancy terms), along with investors and pundits, have lately begun to wonder about the whole Web 2.0 business.

Proving that thought leaders have been reading blogs for months, a “well known angel investor,” which I believe is a nice word for a rich guy who swoops down like an angel from heaven and tosses some cash at whatever science project turned business grabs his fancy in exchange for the possibility to get even richer by later selling said project to either Yahoo or some poor smuck in an IPO, wrote, according to Om, “that many of the Web 2.0 companies that were cropping up were targeting a niche audience. He found that many were me-too or forgettable permutations of some of the more established players such as Flickr, You Tube or Digg.”

Ya think? I and a bunch of other average Joes must be thought leaders too, since we have been saying that for months.

Om, who is generally on the money about things technological, goes on to talk about scalability and Web 2.0, arguing that eventually some of the advances that are being made in the Web 2.0 arena will find their way into the enterprise applications that run big business, sort of the way NASA’s velcro found its way onto my 4 year old’s tennis shoes.

Maybe. Eventually. But most big business is running enterprise applications that are 2 or 3 versions old, so Om and I will be retired before the benefitted versions find their way onto most corporate desktops. By then my grandkids will be hoping to get links from Om’s grandkids.

I continue to think that too many people are trying to stuff business, hobbies, old media and blogs into the same bag. I don’t know if it’s a mass scam in the making or if people who are used to writing about business and old media are just writing about what they know.

What I do know is that to judge success you have to start with perspective.

As Dave Winer points out, TechCrunch’s 53,000 or so subscribers is huge in blogosphere terms. 53,000 viewers would be a gigantic bomb if it were a TV show, which is measured in old media terms. Similarly, a Web 2.0 application that has a million users at $0 a month makes a lot less profit than my blog, which makes very little, but costs almost nothing to operate.

You can’t measure success in raw numbers. And you can’t judge a blog by old media standards.

Blogs are not businesses, no matter how many people try to pretend they are. A part of a business, yes. The business, no.

Similarly, most of these Web 2.0 applications are not businesses. A part of a business, yes (thus the sell to Yahoo business plan). But still not the business.

I think there are a lot of people trying to stuff a lot of square pegs in the old and familiar round holes.

As soon as they realize that won’t work, we’ll step back, get some perspective and see where we are.

C|Net and the Return of the Bad Old Days

How deep is the online-ad well?

That’s the question and title of an article by Elinor Mills at C|Net today.

The article begins by recalling Bubble 1.0, during which a lot of people, including me, launched web sites and services that were to be supported by online ad sales. Next, of course, it reminds us that for many of those people, it didn’t work out.

A few “industry experts” are claiming that since Ford and P&G are mad buyers of online ads and because more companies buy into the online ad medium, things are just as rosy as rosy can be. Certainly there are more buyers now, which is why all of Web 2.0, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Stowe Boyd, a baby and even Microsoft are making plays to get the advertising dollar while the getting is good.

And I absolutely agree that the decline of some traditional advertising allotments (because no one watches them and they don’t work) has resulted in a renewed, and somewhat desperate, focus on online advertising.

But here’s the thing. We have a confluence of several industries with a vested interest in placing and receiving ad dollars. That’s why everyone is singing the happy song about the long term prospects for online advertising. The reality, however, is that while this song and dance will prolong Bubble 2.0, it will not prevent an implosion once the entire internet hops onto the shoulders of the advertising dollar. Sure, a few people will get rich in the meantime, as more and more of the overall ad dollars chase the mythical internet ad clicker.

But the basic game is the same as last time. And the result will be substantially the same.

In the meantime, we can watch things play out and battle to protect our privacy as more and more targeting (read tracking) technology is tossed out as reason number one why ad buyers should look online.

The ad agencies who look past the low hanging fruit of the internet and develop the next big thing in advertising (whatever that may be) are the ones who should and will get rich. Advertising is at a pivotal point in its evolution. I can’t tell where it’s going yet. I suspect Steve Rubel has a pretty good feel for it. But I know where it’s not going- online. The smart agencies are the ones who see the internet as a rest stop on the way to a more stable destination.

In sum, I don’t agree with everything that’s in the C|Net article, but I am glad to see someone else asking the dreaded question.

Top 10, Web 2.0 Style

Here’s the Web 2.0 Developer’s version of Guy Kawasaki’s Top 10.

top10 1. We can get Mike Arrington to favorably review our product.

2. If we can finish the under construction page on our website, we’ll get listed in Catagioriz.

3. We can hire Stowe Boyd to be our walking billboard.

4. We’re confident that our product will make lots of money somehow, even though it’s free.

5. Assuming that each user only tells three additional people, we will have an installed base of five million non-paying users by the end of the first year.

6. Google is really excited about placing Adsense ads with us.

7. Conservatively, the total available online advertising available for our website is $50 billion.

8. Even if it’s not $50 billion, we will have sold ourselves to Google or Yahoo by the time the advertising dries up.

9. Robert Scoble really loves what we’re doing and as soon as he gets back from this week’s blogging haitus, he’ll give us many links.

10. Our product is better than the other hundred or so free products that do substantially the same thing.

and, last, but not least

11. Our product is not dependent on online advertising revenue for most of its revenue, it just looks that way.

Save Some Trees – No More Yellow Pages

Craig Newmark points to a petition where you can request that your name be removed from the mailing list for the hard copy of the Yellow Pages. 540 million hard copies takes a lot of trees.

I signed up, for both the Yellow Pages and the White Pages. I haven’t used a hard copy of either in years. I don’t need one copy and I certainly don’t need multiple copies, which I seem to get every year.