We’ve slowly added new podcasts for you to Kwote.  Make sure you check them out and add your favorite kwotes.

• Airplane Geeks Podcast

Podcasting Aviation Greatness Since 2008. The Airplane Geeks talk about the latest in the airline industry, general aviation, and military aviation. If it flies, we\’re talking about it.

• The Guys’ Podcast
• 
  
• Reviewing movies, video games, Science Fiction, Technology… Whatever, Whenever.

• Pilots Journey Podcast

The Pilot’s Journey Podcast discusses aviation training and maintaining proficiency.

• Uncontrolled Airspace

News and conversation about the world of General Aviation flying.

• IAGBlog Podcasts

Nanocasting for the aviation and travel industry

• How I Got My Job
  

Real people. Real job-hunting success stories.

• Pilot’s Flight PodLog

Pilots and aviation enthusiasts like to fly, naturally. When they aren’t flying, they like to talk about flying. Come join us in the virtual hangar for a little hangar-flying!

• Plane Crazy Down Under

An aviation based podcast with a focus on the Asia/Pacific area

Yeah.  You heard me right.  Podcasting sucks.  I’m not talking about the act of podcasting, or the podcasts themselves, I’m talking about the industry.

If you’re reading this post, you obviously think podcasting clearly doesn’t suck, and I agree with you.  But this isn’t in the context of the podcasters.  This is from the perspective of the general public, or more specifically, the non-listeners who vastly outnumber listeners.

We all know podcasting finds it’s advantage in community building and loyal followers.  We can all say we podcast to podcast and not to make a profit or to gain as many listeners as we can, but we’re all lieing.  Seriously.  We can all claim the high horse, but we’re all podcasters here, and we all know that listeners are the core of our industry.  If you still don’t agree with me, spend your next couple of podcasts talking into the corner of your room not recording a thing.  Podcasting is about listeners.

Ok, now that we’re past that…

Podcasting sucks.

Have you looked at the “Podcast” keyword on Google Trends lately?  Stagnant.  The internet public doesn’t care about podcasts as a source for information any more.  What happened to the huge promise that was the future of podasting?  Why have we failed to continue the promise?  Most importantly, what are we doing to fix this?  Want to learn more?

Then come to Podcamp Ohio!

<shamelessplug>I’m happy to announce that I’ll be presenting a session at Podcamp Ohio in Columbus this year on this very subject.  If you’re in the Ohio area June 20th, make sure you stop by.  It’s free, and all the cool people are doing it!  And the best part, you’ll get to hear me talk about how podcasting sucks.</samelessplug>

Podcasting Sucks!

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.