Over at Black Belt Dojo, guest poster Jeffery McMillan posts some musings about podcasts and their place in his new assignment in Russia. He makes some interesting points about how the different medium elicits different responses from interviewees and how it can build a more intimate connection with the audience.
However, what got me thinking was this:
Let's return to the paradox with which I began this blog post. It seems the better I get at producing podcasts the lower the number of listeners tuning in.
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It could be a cultural thing. Perhaps podcasting is as of yet a western phenomenon. PwC Russia is a solid 93% Russian in its staff composition and, let's face it, maybe you can't blame my Russian colleagues for having an instinctive skepticism toward the media—corporate media included. I wonder what the experiences of my colleagues around the world have been. Do podcasts resonate further in some necks of the woods than in others?
Now I'm no techno-slouch, per se. I have 2 iPods (car and general use) and I'm rarely without my laptop. And yet... I barely listen to podcasts. It's true that I don't work for an organisation that puts out vital information in this format, but plenty of high quality blogs in the IC space and others produce a podcast. But the only podcast I generally make an effort to listen to each year is the Guardian's Tour de France daily report. And I usually end up listening to that in the evening on my laptop.
Now there are a variety of reasons for this, from the fact that I don't drive on a regular basis, to the miserable quality of bandwidth on the train and in various hotels for streaming.
I must also admit that once I get the new iPhone, I might be more likely to find it easy to organise such that podcasts are with me all the time.
I think that these sort of infrastructure issues are a big part of Jeffrey's situation. It's often not that convenient/appropriate to sit in an open plan office listening to a podcast. But elsewhere, bandwidth can be a bit scanty. And (guessing) perhaps the Russia office has a lower iPod ownership.
And this is a problem which a lot of new media channels face. The main reason every "social networking" conversation eventually turns to Facebook (and occasionally LinkedIn) is that they are the main ones with any kind of serious user density.
For myself, I can see lots of interesting possibilities for mixing my virtual life with my physical one. Examples include things as diverse as Facebook's status update, Twitter and Dopplr. The problem is, candidly, very few of the people in my physical world are on any of these services.
Interestingly, email was easy, because everyone got it with internet access. I wonder which other channels will turn out to be "basic" in the same way.
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