Blog de Puree

A former colleague, David Churbuck, recently asked the question whether people are still listening to podcasts, on his blog.

As usual, his timing for predicting or questioning Internet trends was dead on. I don’t see as much written about them by computer and technology experts. And these days, I really don’t listen to them as much as I used to. Mostly because my commute time to work has been mercifully cut to less than half of what it used to be.

Back in 2005 and 2006, when we were working together at CXO Media, he, Art Jahnke and I, together with some others dedicated to utilizing this relatively new form of audio media, produced a steady flow of podcasts aimed at sharing industry and expert information to marketing, IT and security executives. While the energy and demand for podcasts on the whole was huge back then, corporate executives—many of whom were older and not so quick to adopt newer trends—were not as enthusiastic as we had hoped. We only seemed to retain a small, and sometimes dedicated, audience that was interested in them.

Podcasts at CXO never did capture the audience and achieve the popularity we had hoped for, but it was a great learning experience into how to quickly harness a new online technology to attract a more focused or a wider audience, as well as put ourselves ahead of other online publishers.

Teaching myself how to easily work with audio on the Internet was also a great way to stand out from the online editor pack. At least with those who are in my age category or older. However, with younger online journalists and professionals, it was at least a way for me to keep up, as many of them have been using multi-media tools for years and doing so comes more naturally to them. But that’s often the case for the newer generation.

There are still a few podcasts that I subscribe to faithfully, even though I don’t always listen to every episode:

• On Point with Tom Ashbrook on NPR
• Pottercast from the Leaky Cauldron
• Sierra Club Radio
• The Web 2.0 show (Unfortunately, the frequency of their podcasts has drastically slowed)
• AstronomyCast

If you have never listened to a podcast before, I would highly recommend them for their convenience, portability and extremely wide variety of topics. And the tools available today are really easy to use.