The great thing about the Internet is that it keeps people occupied for hours or whole days with their personal Web sites, blogs and now, podcasts. Even former VP nominee John Edwards is wowing Democratic foot soldiers with a podcast of him and wife Elizabeth talking about March Madness, breast cancer, blogging... and, sigh, why President Bush's Social Security reform plan is such a stinker.
"[Edwards] is now one of the few politicians to venture into the world of podcasting," reporter Brian Faler wrote in an article that ran in today's Washington Post. "It is populated, mostly, by otherwise anonymous individuals who have posted recordings of themselves discussing everything from God to wine. Their audio files can be heard online or downloaded onto portable digital audio players." Faler said Republicans also are podcasting from the party's national committee Web site.
| ___About Random Access___ Random Access is a daily column by Robert MacMillan that explores the latest trends in technology and how they are changing daily life. Random Access won't tell you why a new gizmo will revolutionize your ad server. It will tell you about episodes from daily life -- exasperated waiters who use blogs to vent about their customers, whole runs of salmon injected with nanoparticles for individual tracking in Norwegian fjords and the growing number of DJs who are sick of being sidelined in favor of iPods. (Only one of these stories is fake.) Most of what you see will be culled from news sources and blogs from around the world, though we will supplement Random Access with original files on the novel, unusual, bizarre and reactionary happenings in the world of technology and society. E-mail: Send links and comments. | | |
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The Edwards-on-Edwards act already has one admiring reader, Bill Riski (whose Internet domain charms the pants off all of us here: riski.biz), who chimed in on Podcastingnews.com: "Amazing, just amazing. So refreshing to hear a politician in this candid fashion. Let's hope it does start a conversation with John Edwards, his wife, and an interested American community -- and that the result is more podcasts from them. Mark my words, in about one week this podcast will be all the buzz around Washington and the MSM (main stream media). March 2005 will be remembered as an inflection point in podcasting." Bill, tell us the truth, your real e-mail address begins "howard.dean@..."
Anyway, this podcasting phenomenon illustrates a law that I am sure exists, and probably has someone's name attached to it, like "Moore's Law" or "Murphy's Law." In this case I'm calling it "Robert's Law" until someone sets me straight. Here it is: The faster the rate of innovation, the more quickly the innovation grows stale. It sounded profound a moment ago, but now that I look at it, I bet that this is a well-known principle in any macro econ 101 lecture hall. At marketing agencies that try to enslave children through cookies and toys, I bet they call it "conventional wisdom."
Call it what you will, it's happening with podcasting now. People started delivering their opinions through online audio files, others started listening. And like other ideas that seem cool at first glance, it morphed into a fad and now it seems like everybody's doing it.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer even ran a how-to guide in an article today. It also provided the inspiring story of Brian Ibbott, whose www.coverville.com podcast reaches 10,000 to 14,000 listeners per show. That's nothing to Clear Channel or Viacom, but it's amazing for a total amateur. The P-I also asks the important question: "What kind of stuff is out there and what can you create? An oral blog -- it's your life, in sound files, baby. You can put together a radio program -- ever wished they played more Mark Sandman on the radio, less Nelly Furtado? On RadioYou, they do."
But when everybody's doing it, we stop listening. At least with blogs we can stop reading whenever we want and find another blog we want to read. Well-written, insightful blogs will survive and thrive, along with the demagogues who know how to talk to their audience without making them think too much.
Podcasting, on the other hand, sounds like pure hell for someone who considers "This American Life" or "Prairie Home Companion" to be ingenious torture methods. I don't mean that to sound like podcasting is a tool devised solely by liberals with suede elbow patches on their corduroy blazers. People allergic to being stuck in a traffic jam with Rush Limbaugh's voice on the only radio station with good reception probably won't suffer podcasting gladly either.
Now I don't mean to sound like I'm "against" technology. The Web and all those "on-demand" technologies it fostered allow anyone to be a publisher, as the flabby, pasty-faced malcontent student informs the stuffy, scowling professor in that Xerox TV ad. Technology really is a great democratizing force all over the world. It will change our ways of communicating, hopefully for the better.
But that's a lot of high-level thinking. On the daily level, let's face two facts: Most of us have too much to do to concentrate on what our closest friends and relatives are saying, let alone thousands of people allowed to chatter away for as long as they want. And most of us, with unedited access to public communications channels, say boring things. You don't believe it? Watch cable access on any given day and get back to me.
