Ding-ding-ding-ding! Your podcast is ready
It's not the first novel that's the problem, writers say. It's the second. This item of lit folk wisdom was confirmed a few years ago when Alex Garland, author of the massively popular The Beach, produced The Tesseract, a truly wretched follow up that led to him having some kind of nervous breakdown. Those unfortunates, including myself, who bought it, are still trying to figure out what he was trying to say. Anyway, does the same "second rule" hold for entrepreneurshp? Well, let's see how Even Williams does with his latest project. Williams, 32, is the guy who helped found Pyra Labs, which allowed a zillion blogs to bloom, which he sold to Google two years ago for an undisclosed amount of stock. Talk about timing! Talk about a happy end!
With his new venture, Williams is betting that podcasting — the process of creating, organizing and listening to digital audio files — is going to be the next Blogger.com. How fired up is he about the idea? Here's an excerpt from his posting last Friday:
"Podcasting is going to be freakin' huge. I don't have time in this post, because it's 2am and I gotta be on stage at 8am, to give my pitch for why. But it's the same story as blogging (with several unique characteristics of its own), but in a whole new medium that is much bigger than people think. And it'll happen much, much faster. It's about personal media, time-shifting, and the long, long tail. And I love that shit. Amazing things are going to be created."
When Evens talks about a "whole new medium" there, he's referring, in part, to the ownership of MP3 players, and the numbers do tell a remarkable tale. Here's the introduction to the Pew Internet Project on iPods and MP3 players:
"We just got the results of the survey we took between January 13 and February 9 and for the first time asked a question to find out how many American adults have iPods or MP3 players. The answer is 11% —or more than 22 million of those who are age 18 and older. It's safe to say that there are several million more MP3 players owned in the teen world, but we did not survey teens in this poll."
It would be nice to know how many of these players are distributed a across the planet, wouldn't it? With Jupiter Research predicting US ownership to hit 45 million devices in 2005, we can assume a global spread of 100 million by 2010, and that's a conservative forecast. Wow! Seeing that music radio has degenerated into playlists of 100 songs, the time is right to take broadcasting out of the studios of the radio programmers and put it in the hands of the commuters. And that's just the beginning of what podcasting could do. Meanwhile, check out Odeo to get an idea of what Even Williams is up to.
