Thoughts On Podcasting From Mossberg, Cuban, May

Walt Mossberg tries podcasting. “The good news is that, with its iTunes move, Apple has made receiving podcasts as simple as downloading music. The bad news is that neither Apple nor anyone else has made it nearly as simple to create a podcast and get it online as it is to create and post a text and photo blog. Until that happens, podcasting won’t be truly mainstream.”

Mark Cuban compares streaming a decade ago to podcasting now. “For those who are tying to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and create a ‘hit’ podcast that you plan on selling advertising in, it’s cheap and easy to do, but even with Google Adsense for RSS it’s going to be really tough to do it as a fulltime job and make minimum wage back. Podcasting is right where streaming was about 10 years ago. Before you dive into podcasting as ‘the next big thing’, you would be wise to do some homework on how the streaming industry evolved. Try to find any of the many that created original content for PSEUDO.com, TSN, EYADA.com, Broadcast.com and others that i have long forgotten.
There is a good chance that their history is your future.”
Be sure to read the comments.

– Over at Corante, Matt May takes a critical look at Apple’s foray into podcasting. He notes mostly positive reviews since the 4.9 iTunes launch but chides Apple for failing to communicate with podcasters, for causing bandwidth problems and for lagging behind on its podcast directory. (Mossberg singled out several issues with the directory, including long lag times and inconsistancy about which podcasts get listed.) May also highlights Apple’s creation of a new RSS 2.0 element without working with the RSS community. “Apple has time to fix all of these problems and regain the goodwill of podcasters. But they will need to deal with us directly…”

Comments have been disabled for this post