We here at Kwote.Me have been working.  As pretty and informative as this blog is, it’s not the reason Kwote.Me was brought into existence.  No, we’ve been sneaky.

As we’ve mentioned before, Kwote.Me is interested not only in exploring the bleeding edge of podcasting technology, but also in creating the bleeding edge.  What fun would it be if we just wrote about stuff we should do?  Well this time, we did it.

Before I go spilling the beans, allow me to set up the suspense.

Houston, we have a problem.

Podcasting has been around in it’s current form for years, but it’s popularity has plateaued over the past couple.  We explored one of the reasons for this in our Transcription post, and it’s significant:

Unless looking for a podcast in particular, a typical Googler will not download a 20mb – 60mb file to find the information they were looking for.  Likewise, they’re not going to listen to 20 – 60 minutes of content to find the information.

We’ve been limiting our audience only to those who were willing to download large files and invest the length of the podcast looking for their answer.  Imagine if Google required up to a 60 minute wait time before your results came back.  That’s what we’re doing with our podcasts.  In today’s information age, quickly finding information is key, and it’s been a major disadvantage to podcasting.

What We’re Up To

Advantage, Podcasters.

Imagine if Google required up to a 60 minute wait time before your results came back.  That’s what we’re doing with our podcasts.

Now, imagine if we had a way to dynamically extract as little as 10 seconds, and as much as 5 minutes out of a podcast.  Imagine finding a bit in a podcast you thought should be shared, and you could share only that bit.  Imagine immediate access to specific parts of your podcast without the listener having to download the entire podcast, and most importantly, without them having to wait.

This is what we’re up to.

We’ve created a tool that will allow anyone to extract up to 5 minutes from a podcast and create a new file from it.  Sounds simple, yes, but consider the possibilities.  Any of your listeners can create a small bit (or Kwote) of a podcast they found interesting.  Kwote.Me would extract the Kwote from the full podcast, generate the new file, and provide a tinyURL-esque url for it to be shared.  For instance, if you pulled a 30-second Kwote out of a podcast, it would be found at a small url such as http://kwote.me/H4s2.  It could be tweeted, emailed, shared any way you want, and the users would have instantaneous access to just the part of your podcast that contains the juicy information they’re looking for.  No more listening for half an hour to find what everybody’s talking about.

“But what about Copyrights?”

No more listening for half an hour to find what everybody’s talking about.

Techically, when you create a Kwote, it alter’s the file.  Of course that breaks most (if not all) copyright laws, which means we can only offer the Kwote.Me tool to those podcast owners who allow us to alter their podcasts.  Is this a problem?  No, in fact it’s a solution.  Podcasters will benefit most from these tools, and if they choose not to participate, they won’t benefit.  The tool works just as well with one podcast as it does with thousands (we already have 2).  If your podcast is included in the Kwote.Me tool, your listeners will be able to share the best parts of your podcast.  If you don’t, they don’t.  No skin off our backs.

“I have to spend the time extracting the Kwotes to get this to work?”

You have listeners, don’t you?  This is the beauty of the tool.  Anyone who wants to share a Kwote from your podcast can.  This isn’t a tool for you.  This is a tool for everybody.  If somebody likes a bit from your podcast, they can create a Kwote with zero interaction from you.  Zero interaction means zero work.

“But they can listen to my podcast without the download being recorded”

No, they can listen to part of the podcast without the download being recorded.  Besides, we’ll be tracking how many times your Kwote has been listened to, and anyone listening to a Kwote from your podcast will have the opportunity to download your podcast while listening to the Kwote.  We’ll have a link to both the podcast page, as well as the file itself right above the Kwote player.

“Does this work with .ogg files?”

No.

“Will this work with .ogg files?”

No.  Get over it.

So there you have it.  What we’ve been spending our time on the last few weeks.  The Kwote.Me tool isn’t public yet, but I can assure you it works.  Stay tuned to this blog as we slowly release functionality and keep up with bugs.  Soon, we’ll have the full version Kwote.Me tool available for your podcast.

You can’t play with it just yet, but we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of possibilities with this.  How do you think this could be used to benefit podcasting?

When first starting a podcast, I found a slew of information in the blogosphere regarding where to host your site, but as I looked for a specific storage solution for the mp3 files themselves, I ran into some problems.  Hosting dynamic web pages through Wordpress, or whatever your blog of choice, has very different requirements than the static hosting of your mp3.

As I was looking at my podcasts over the month, I found I was producing two weekly hour-long podcasts.  At about 1 mb per minute, this was adding up to ~480 mb of storage per month.  Not too overwhelming, until you consider the bandwidth.  Those two podcasts were pulling in about 1,200 downloads a week.  That’s 144 gb per week, or 576 gb per month! Looking at a sample GoDaddy hosting account (which I don’t recommend for podcast hosing), I would pay $16 per month and still be short bandwidth.  Considering the cheapest I’ve found extra bandwidth was $0.50/gb, and there are some hosts that charge up to $4/gb extra, this is a chunk of change in the $38 – $304 range.

Let’s face it.  We don’t podcast for the money, and $16 a month for a podcast usually means a loss of $16 a month.  The goal then, is to keep the number with the $ symbol in front of it small, and the number of downloads large.  So now what?

Let’s face it. We don’t podcast for the money, and $16 a month for a podcast usually means a loss of $16 a month.

Amazon S3

I probably shouldn’t even have listed this one, but it’s a professional service that can’t be ignored if you’re looking for that level of quality.  Amazon offers static storage through their S3 service at a rate calculated on space requirements and bandwidth.  The problem?  The more downloads you have, the more you pay.  In this case, about $98 a month.  Like I said, not really a solution for our pocketbooks, but if you just have to have the security and redundancy that S3 offers, this is worth looking at.  Not for me.  http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Unlimited Space/Bandwidth Shared Plans

Buyer beware!  There’s been a lot of talk about these so-called “unlimited” plans, and the talk isn’t good.  The promise is whatever space or bandwidth you need, you get.  Some of these plans are for as little as $3 per month, which sounds too good to be true;  Often they are.  Looking into the TOS of one of these services, I found this:

…Customers may not use excess server processing power that will create a negative impact on the performance of the server and other customers on that space. In these circumstances, access or downloads to your site may be limited.

The real catch here is that you have no control what-so-ever over what impacts the performance of the server.  How many other people are using this server?  If it’s $3 a month, you can guess there are quite a few.  How robust is the server?  Again, if it’s $3 a month, not much.  While this type of plan will probably work if you only have a couple dozen listeners, there’s plenty of better alternatives that will not leave you up a creek when your show goes platinum.

Archive.org

Speaking of “sounds too good to be true,” there’s Archive.org.  Before I scare you away I should confess that this is the method I use.  Here’s how it works according to Archive.org:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

From a podcaster who was recently bitten by the Podango shutdown, I can tell you this is still a concern of mine.

Simply put, they’re archiving the internet one file at a time.  There is no cost, but there are some, shall we say issues.  The first is that you’re donating your file to the archive.  You can choose several different Creative Commons Licenses, which offers what I would consider great copyright protection, or you can simply donate it to the public domain.  The other issue I have is ethical.  It’s tough to determine whether or not you’re taking advantage of the service.  They are a non-profit organization and I sometimes question whether my material is actually benefiting their cause.  It mostly is, but we all have those lame podcasts where we don’t really say much.  Add in that Archive.org reserves the right to remove any file at any time and it may cause some consternation for those of us who have years of podcasting files available.  From a podcaster who was recently bitten by the Podango shutdown, I can tell you this is still a concern of mine.  http://www.archive.org

Libsyn

As I researched for this post, it quickly became obvious who the leading podcast hosting provider was.  Libsyn (Liberated Syndication) provides a podcast-specific hosting plan that allows you to pay for your monthly storage, and receive unlimited bandwidth.  Here, “unlimited” isn’t as scary as we saw before, and here’s why.  While Libsyn offers blog hosting plans on their site, they are set up specifically for static file hosting.  Libsyn was built around storing and allowing access to large audio files, and have specialized their servers for just such files.  Not without it’s own teething problems, Libsyn has been known to have some uptime problems, but nothing more than a typical shared server, and certainly a reasonable amount for the price.  Having been acquired by Wizard Software in 2007, the backing seems to be in place for a long-term solution for podcasters.  Pricing?  Very reasonable.  Remembering that they charge for monthly additional storage and not bandwidth, my example of two podcasts at 480 mb of monthly storage and 576 gb of bandwidth would cost $20 a month.  Not a bad price considering there are no extra fees if your podcast suddenly get’s popular.  http://www.libsyn.com

All in all, you have to decide what your podcast’s needs are.  Are you willing to pay for almost 100% up-time?  Are you willing to donate your work to an internet archive?  Or do you prefer the middle of the road solution?  Whatever your needs, the answer is most likely out there.  Now stop reading blogs, and start podcasting!

Podcasting is a funny animal.  As much as we’ve heard about how audio (and video for that matter) will dominate content on the net, it isn’t happening.  Text is still king, even though talk podcasts consist of that same text just in speech format.  So why aren’t we seeing podcasting making it to mainstream?  There’s one commanding reason:  searchability.

Finding information inside a podcast is, for the most part, impossible.  We do have ways of compensating, typically by adding a human element with show notes or tags.  For some this is sufficient in that, if done perfectly, the show notes should hit every key word in the podcast.  The tags would then be picked up by Google and the other search engines leading listeners to that podcast.

But there are two major flaws with this ideology.

• You cannot tag every possible key word. If you did, you wouldn’t be tagging, you’d be transcribing.  As a result it is inevitible that somebody will search for a key word in your podcast that they will not find.
• The information is too difficult to get to. Unless looking for a podcast in particular, a typical Googler will not download a 20mb – 60mb file to find the information they were looking for.  Likewise, they’re not going to listen to 20 – 60 minutes of content to find the information.  They may have tagged the podcast appropriately, but the searcher would still have to download the entire podcast and find the part where they talked about the subject they were looking for.

Audio information simply requires too large of a time investment to reach the masses.

Audio information simply requires too large of a time investment to reach the masses.  The answer that’s been floated around for quite some time is transcription.  But is it really an answer?  Some say no, and their arguments are valid.  Consider the benefits:

• Transcription takes time.  If you have a 60 minute podcast, it will take you at least 60 minutes to transcribe it, and that’s considering you can type at the speed of speech.

and/or

• Transcription costs money. There are transciption services out there such as Casting Words that will charge anywhere between $0.75 and $2.50 per minute, depending on how quickly you need it.  Consider that 75 cents per minute still costs $45 for a 60 minute episode and could still take over two weeks for it to be completed!  If you’re willing to manage the transcription directly, you can find plenty of willing transcriptors at Amazon’s mturk which could save you considerable amounts of money.

How do you provide the user exactly what they’re looking for without forcing them to download the entire podcast?

However, this argument makes one large assumption.  It assumes that the transcription will only be completed if you initiate the action.  With the progress that’s been made in online collaboration and crowdsourcing, podcasters have at their disposal an army of volunteers eager to help in any way they can, often short of giving money.  Several podcasts have toyed with the idea of setting up a wiki to have their listeners transcribe the podcast for them.  While promising and likely the preferred method of podcast transcription in the future, it still doesn’t solve the entire problem.  How do you provide the user exactly what they’re looking for without forcing them to download the entire podcast?  How do you aggregate podcast transcripts into a coherent repository from which to search?  How do you protect the transcripts to keep them from being used in blogs across the internet?

And that’s where I’ll leave this post.  The question whether or not to transcribe a podcast is an open one.  I agree with most when they say they don’t see the benefit of transcription compared to the effort and cost it requires.  There are several new projects we’re working on to solve these problems, but until we can decide whether or not they are even viable, the problems remain.

Kwote.me, for now, is a blog dedicated to the art of podcasting.   There’s been so much excitement around podcasting that seems to have plateaued as we reach some of the perceived limits.  Here, we’ll be questioning those limits.  We’ll be exploring the bleading edge of podcasts as a technology, a business, a medium, and an art.  I say we, because this is meant to be a community of writers, not just me blabbing away about the audio on the net we call podcasts.

If you’re not comfortable with writing about the bleeding edge of podcasting, fear not, for I bear good news.  We’ll be doing plenty of other types of podcast writing including:

• How-to Videos, Podcasts, and Articles
• News
• Podcast Reviews

If you’re not comfortable with writing about the bleeding edge of podcasting, fear not, for I bear good news.

Authoring is easy.  Just send me an email at authors@kwote.me and I’ll get your account set up.  You’ll be able to write whatever you please, but be aware that the article will need to be approved before being published.  As long as it’s podcast related and in the correct category, that won’t be a problem.

As an author, your writings won’t be relegated to a charitable contribution either.  We’ll be running some Google Ads and you’ll receive 100% of any ad revenues your article generates.  Why 100%?  Because I couldn’t afford 150%.  Remember, however, that this blog is dedicated to the advancement of podcasting, and not to the advancement of our pockets so don’t expect to get rich off of this.

Ready to get started?  The easiest way is to write a review of a podcast (not your own, please).  So shoot me an email and get writing!