Streaming media has won. The mouse now owns an equity stake in Hulu.com, and will start pushing their content through the portal. I take this as a pretty sure sign that the Hulu model is, at least for now, the clear winner in the race for new distribution models.
Welcome to the new century, Disney. Glad to see you finally made it. Now I can prop my kids up on their stools, tape open their eyelids, and pump HSM3 into their tender little minds 24 hours a day!
I watched most of both major parties’ conventions streaming on C-SPAN. I don’t have TV (a lack for which I am more and more grateful every day this political season drags on), so it was online or nothin’. All the major networks and many cable outlets offered their coverage online, but I have to tell ya: I can only take so much talking head. So it was C-SPAN for me.
In addition to what seemed to be contempt for community organizing, I was struck by the outrage expressed by many of the RNC speakers regarding the “media elite.” Now, charges of media bias are nothing new in politics; everybody’s heard of the librul media. And I readily recognize that the unique circumstances of Gov. Sarah Palin being picked as the GOP running mate torched off what can legitimately be called a (an over-?) zealous media frenzy. (To ask what I think is a fair question, wasn’t that kinda the point?) But what threw me off a bit was the implied assumption that the news media (I assume that’s who they mean when they say “media elite”) should be impartial.
Stop the presses! some of you are saying. Isn’t journalistic neutrality something that should be assumed?
Here’s the thing: I don’t know. I know there is a long tradition of “serious” journalists (and schools of journalism) preaching objectivity and “disinterestedness” (as they like to call it); I’m just not sure, in our age of reality TV and the 24-hour news cycle, that it’s even a possibility.
But I’m also not sure that’s a bad thing.
Am I the only one who finds it a bit reassuring to know where most everybody stands? Man, I love checking in on The National Review Online and The Weekly Standard to see what David Frum and crazy ol’ neocon Bill Kristol have to say about the underhanded plotting of The Evil Left. And I love peeking in on the ganga-fueled ravings of the Kossacks and the merlot-soaked bloviating of The Huffington Post to stay on top of the newest conspiracies hatched by The Evil Right. I love PajamasMedia and the whole roll over at The Atlantic. And I love watching Jon Stewart make hearty and delectable mincemeat pie of the whole shebang on The Daily Show. (I draw the line at watching FOX News, but there are 8 million+ people covering that base for me.)
Gone are the days when we could tune in as a nation to trustworthy Walter and know that we were getting the straight poop. And I think maybe it’s okay. (Furthermore, I’m pretty sure there’s no going back outside of some kind of apocalypse, so we may as well roll with the punches, given the alternative.) New media, for better or worse, has given everyone with wifi a soapbox from which to air his or her well- or ill-considered take on the world’s goings on. I, for one, am glad that the “media elite” are no longer the sole arbiters of information.
And when I get tired of all the opinions-couched-as-truth, I can always watch C-SPAN.
Yesterday was story time. Today is the technical study. I thought it might be cool to look at some of the things that helped propel The Bible Podcast forward, presented in no particular order, as a guide to anyone else who might think about launching a podcast.
This has got to be the single biggest factor in moving the site up through search engine rankings. The name of the site is the name of the podcast is the 3-word description of exactly what it’s all about. If you launch a podcast about how awesome bunny slippers are, and title it “The Mr. T Show”, and host it at http://www.crazy4u.net/mrtpodshow, people have no idea what it is you’re doing. There are packs of raving bunny slipper fans out there searching Google for a podcast that meets their needs, but all they can tell from your page hit is that you’re a confused, possible psychopathic teenage girl. This doesn’t work to your advantage.
Since the very beginning, The Bible Podcast committed to iTunes as its primary distribution channel. I started with the assumption that most of my listeners wouldn’t be podcast people – they would be people venturing out into the world looking for this specific sort of thing (in the same way that most Addison Road readers aren’t really blog people, they’re people who come to this one specific blog). I assumed that most of our listeners would find our blog either through a Google search, or by flipping open iTunes and using the podcast directory search function. The iTunes search results are weighted in favor of popularity (number of subscribers).
Armed with this knowledge, I push iTunes as the sole distribution channel for the podcast. If you look at the first page of the site, you’ll see what I mean. I stole this idea from Scribe Music Show (thanks, Trevor), and about 40% of the first-time visitors go directly to iTunes without ever having to visit the site itself. If they do click through to the website, they’ll see a link to iTunes prominently displayed, should they decide to subscribe. If they poke around the site a bit, they’ll find a “How do I listen?” page which, again, directs them to use iTunes to subscribe.
There are many, many good podcast aggregators out there, like Odeo.com, and the podcast is listen in most of these, but these sites are still, by and large, only used by the Nerd Herd. If you walk up to 100 people on the street and ask them about podcasting, they’ll beat you up and take your iPod away. This is LA, after all. But if you were to do it in someplace nice, like Boise, most people, if they knew anything at all about it, would say, “Oh yeah, that’s the button on my iTunes where I can listen to shows people do.”
By committing early to a distribution channel that would be most popular with my average listener, I made my popularity within iTunes artificially high. Instead of a few hundred subscribers scattered across dozens of distribution channels, I had a few hundred subscribers all listening through iTunes. Within the first 6 months, The Bible Podcast was in the top 4 results for the search term “Bible”, which in iTunes means getting banner placement on the search results page.
So, you’ve signed up for a fancy new hosting plan with Jim’s Big House of Web Hosting, and you’ve started to do the math. You realize pretty quickly that by the time you hit 100 daily subscribers, at 20 MB per podcast episode, you’re going to rip through your bandwidth in about 8 seconds. What do you do? Well, don’t host the files! OurMedia.org will host your audio and video files for free, and you can directly link them into your site. In other words, your listeners don’t have to click through to Our Media to listen, the files can be embedded directly into your site. There are two advantages to hosting your files off-site. The first is that you don’t have to pay for as much bandwidth. The second, you will pick up some drive-by traffic from people searching through the Our Media site looking for the things your podcast is about. I get about 20 hits a day from people who searched Our Media for the title of a specific book of the bible, and then following the links over to the podcast site.
I should mention that the Our Media servers have been pretty bloaty since the very beginning, and if an episode hasn’t been downloaded in a while, it seems to take forever for the server to actually find it. I eventually switched back over to hosting the audio files myself, instead of using Our Media. Still, I think they were an important part of getting up off the ground.
So, those are some of the early choices that I made with the podcast, that I think contributed to it getting up off the ground. I don’t think they were the biggest factor in the podcast’s success, though. The inescapable truth is that “Content is King”. People come because they want the content. They want to hear the bible read by someone with a clear speaking voice, recorded with good equipment. Everything else is just lipstick, pointing people in the right direction.
I’m curious – anybody else out there in The Roadhouse running a podcast, or thinking of starting one? I’d love to hear your experiences.
[pictures Michael podcasting whilst wearing lipstick, and wonders what color it would be]
Dig it, Terri.
Cerise
I think often of doing a podcast, or a blog. And then I realize that I lack engaging content. With the Bible, you have a substantial audience: people who want to hear the word in spoken word.
I have a feeling that my podcast would be a redundant extension of what I use Addison Road for- awkwardly sharing intimate details of my life and psychology under the ignorant assumption that only a half dozen people will read it and find me to be a deeper, more likeable individual.
See?
Hey! Me, too!
(Sharolyn does a spit take at the thought of herself starting a podcast.)
I don’t know about distribution channels, bandwidth, or bloaty servers… but if you want to feel more successful you could change “One Thousand Sets of Ears” to “Two Thousand Ears”.
ABC is now streaming full episodes of their most popular shows online, for free, with limited ads. Just what I need, one more way to waste time. here’s the link.
YAY! I don’t have to pay iTunes for every episode of LOST! What a wonderful world.
JC and 4 others are discussing. 
sharolyn 12:55 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
“But what threw me off a bit was the implied assumption that the news media (I assume that’s who they mean when they say “media elite”) should be impartial.”
Confession: I complained this morning that the media was not impartial. I can only stand the Jim Lehrer Newshour. They do the best at just saying what has happened. And if something is partial to one side, they will go on to say something in favor of the other side.
But now you’ve given me something to think about, darn it all….
michael lee 1:34 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
I’ve got no problem with media outlets that have an acknowledged and understood bias. When you watch Fox News, or read the Kos, everyone knows what you’re getting.
What about Time magazine? I think they trade on a public perception of neutrality, that they would say that about themselves, and the general public would agree. I think that perception, however, belies editorial choices that hold a distinct political perspective. In the past 12 months, they’ve put Obama on the cover 7 times (1 shared with McCain, 2 shared with Clinton). McCain has been on the cover 3 times (1 shared with Obama). The rest of the covers from McCain date back to 1999, 2000, when McCain was the darling of the media for a few years because of his movement away from conservative ideals. Once he became a serious, and conservative, candidate, the tenor of the coverage changed.
Those are editorial choice, but I don’t think they’re made intentionally. There’s no smoke-filled room where reporters meet to decide how to best advance liberal candidates. I do think, and there is data to back this up, that the culture of journalism fosters a liberal mindset. Based on a Pew research study, 7% of newsroom journalists in national media outlets identify themselves as conservative (I’m guessing almost 100% of those work at Fox). 34% identify themselves as liberal.
If that’s the political temperature in the newsroom, then the media’s presumption of what neutrality looks like deserves some scrutiny. I think Time magazine might very well be attempting to strike a neutral balance in their coverage of the election, but they don’t do it from an informed perspective, because they’ve failed to staff themselves with anyone informed from the opposing perspective.
Paul Reisser 2:49 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
I agree with Mike that many media voices — especially the major networks, CNN and newpapers such as the LA Times — would consider themselves neutral or unbiased in covering the political scene, but behave otherwise. This isn’t a nefarious plot but rather a culture in which certain perspectives are considered reasonable and reality-based and others are not, yielding reporting that (consciously or not) definitely uncercuts conservative positions. (Bernard Goldberg’s book “Bias” addressed this quite
engagingly, although he took a lot of heat for what he said.) Fox News of course leans the other direction, which is hardly “fair and balanced” either. On Labor Day I watched a CNN reporter who had flown to Anchorage in the wake of Sarah Palin’s nomination. Barak Obama had just made a strong statement that the daughter’s unplanned pregnancy was off the political table, but the reporter spun her coverage of this event in a most unflattering and politically charged way. (I should add that in a roundtable that immediately followed, Bill Bennett appropriately ripped Wolf Blitzer a new one over the tone of the Anchorage dispatch.)
In many ways I agree with Aly that it’s less annoying to listen to someone whose viewpoint is front and center. Every so often I enjoy listening to KPFK (90.7), which is as unabashedly left-wing (and proud of it) as Rush Limbaugh is right-wing. Hey, at least we have a choice.
harmonicminer 8:07 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
Hmm.. before too long, if Obama wins, and most especially if the Dems get a filibuster-proof majority, you won’t have that choice.
The “fairness” doctrine will be re-enacted. Since right leaning talk radio is so enormously more profitable than left leaning radio (due to ability to attract and keep an audience), broadcasters will have to decide whether to match every (profitable) right leaning hour with an unprofitable left leaning hour…. or just can the whole thing altogether, and go back to a neutral format of some sort.
It was the rescinding of the “fairness” doctrine that made modern talk radio possible, and the “fairness” doctrine’s renewal would probably end it.
Its OK, though, I love listening to recipes and discussions about pets and cars as I drive to work. And you have to love those weather reports.
harmonicminer 8:44 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
BTW… if you read the wiki article on Walter all the way to the bottom, you’ll learn he wasn’t the neutral voice he pretended to be, either. Which was obvious to anyone who noticed what he didn’t report….
Chad 9:19 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
Now now…
If anything, I think we’ve learned that oppressive circumstances amp up the fighting spirit. If Obama wins, right-leaning folk will have PLENTY to talk about, and they will not allow their voices to be silenced. I seem to remember plenty of right wing media success during the 1990′s…
As Jeff Goldblum so eloquently stated in Jurassic Park… “Life finds a way…”
michael lee 9:38 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
If history holds, whoever wins the white house gives away the majority in congress at the next midterm elections.
Chad 9:44 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
Besides… and I know this statement might come back to haunt me, and it’s also in no means meant to be an endorsement, but I think McCain is going to win.
harmonicminer 10:09 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
Nice to think that bad things won’t happen and free speech will out… And yes, there was plenty of right wing media success in the 1990s, because of FCC policy changes in the 1980s.
Until the FCC cancelled the fairness doctrine (which was never legislatively mandated, just a regulation under general authority of the FCC), in the massive Reagan deregulation policy, talk radio as we know it now could not exist. That’s why there was a Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s broadcasting nationally… it had JUST become possible for such a thing to exist.
Rush is often given credit for more or less singlehandedly ushering in the era of talk radio, and he deserves it… but it would not have been possible without Reagan’s deregulation first.
If Congress passes an actual legislation, and Obama signs it (you know he would), it will be much harder for a successive Congress to undo… even assuming a massive Republican resurgence at the mid-term elections. Obama would be sure to veto any such legislation. If he is a two-termer, it will be a minimum of 8 years before it can be undone.
This is not paranoia. It is the explicit, publicly stated intent of Pelosi and Reid to pursue such legislation immediately if Obama wins.
In the meantime: if YOU want to pay, out of your own pocket, for an advertisement on the public airways in favor of either candidate, you may not do so, now, thanks to McCain’s folly, “campaign finance reform”, which he will have cause to regret, I fear.
The Supreme Court upheld it by a 5-4 decision. (Incredibly, Bush seems to have signed it expecting the Court to overturn it, so that he would look like he was in favor of “reform”.) So much for free speech, and “it can’t happen here”. It may or may not turn out to be a “slippery slope”, but it surely is the camel’s nose in the tent. And when the “fairness doctrine” was still in force, before 1985, the Court (our robed masters) upheld it consistently as the proper province of the FCC, despite the lack of legislative intent to support it.
The new “fairness doctrine” will apply only to radio, most likely, since on the whole the Left is perfectly happy with the balance of coverage they get from TV and newspapers. As a sop to free speech advocates, and a smokescreen, it’s likely that some TV version of it will exist, but it will be worded in such a form as to change very little, while the radio version will simply put right-leaning radio out of business.
I’d like to believe that the Right “will not allow their voices to be silenced”, but it would be a good many years before the law could be changed, once enacted. About all they could do is send letters to the editor, and use the internet.
The one exception to the wholesale cancellation of Right-leaning radio would probably be Rush, whose show is so profitable that many stations would keep him on, possibly, and just eat the the loss of the three hours of “balancing coverage”.
This is the quota-based Left at its very best.
aly hawkins 10:23 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
I hope it’s clear from my post (but maybe not), but I’m not in favor of the Fairness Doctrine, purely from a pragmatic standpoint (and I hope you all appreciate how incredibly difficult it is for me to view anything from a purely pragmatic standpoint). Neutrality is just not something that is humanly possible, outside severe autism. Idealistically speaking (and as an admitted liberal), the philosophical idea of utilizing the public’s airwaves to inform and enrich the public (disinterestedly) is wonderful…I just don’t think it’s within human power to do so. I’d rather know up front where everyone is coming from so that I can measure those analyses against my own acknowledged bias. Get it all on the table, baby.
Chad: You may be right. If so, I think McCain’s win will signal the last gasp of pre-reformed conservatism. There are just so many factors (a for instance) that, so far, conservatives have ignored and that together equal diminishing returns (to their peril). If, as George Will contends, conservatives value freedom above equality and liberals value equality over freedom, I think we might be seeing the “come to Jesus moment” for both. I hope so. The two go hand in hand, as anyone with half a brain and a well-intentioned heart can see.
Blah, blah, blah. Too…much…tequila…
harmonicminer 10:52 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
Aly, I tend to agree with Will on this, but on the freedom/equality front, the two don’t go “hand in hand” unless you believe we’re all the same. We aren’t. With freedom, different people will have different results, which is the kind of “inquality” despised by the left, and which is why, at bottom, they despise freedom wherever they think it gets in the way of “equality”.
We are equal in “value”, and in deserving the protection of the law from crime, and in getting one vote each… i.e., we are politically equal, but economic and social inequality is a permanent human condition, and every attempt to make it otherwise so far (by government fiat) has created more evil than any inequality that was the “problem”.
Compare the French revolution to the American one. The first was primarily about “equality”, the latter primarily about “freedom”. How many heads were lost in a vain search for “equality”? In the twentieth century, upwards of 100 million people were murdered by regimes pursuing some kind of “equality”, but certainly not freedom.
I recommend three books on this topic:
A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell
and
AThe origins of totalitarian democracy by J. L Talmon
and
The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
And I’d point out that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Left is moderating ANY of its positions on any major topic, while the Right does indeed seem to be in flux, as witnessed by the fact that nearly every Obama position is quite left, while McCain is a mixed conservative… some would say mixed up. (For example: he wants to appoint “constructionist” judges, who are the types who be likely to declare McCain/Feingold to be an infringement of the 1st Amendment. There is no evidence he senses the contradiction.)
These two imperatives, freedom vs equality (of other than a pure political sort, which is not what the Left has in mind) are in permanent conflict. I might wish it were otherwise… but wishes do not change the facts, nor impugn my “well-intentioned heart”.
harmonicminer 10:53 pm on 6 September 2008 Permalink
yeesh… I can’t believe I said “who be likely”.
sigh
aly hawkins 9:01 am on 7 September 2008 Permalink
Looks like I have some reading to do, Phil! Now for that BN gift card…
I don’t believe we’re all the same — that if given the same opportunity we will achieve the same results. I do, however, believe that where possible, our social institutions (including, but not limited to, government) can and should work to limit unfairness that stands in the way of equal opportunity. In what ways this should be done is up for grabs (as is a definition of “unfairness” that is broadly agreed on), but I hope everyone’s best ideas will be considered and debated.
By suggesting that freedom and equality go hand in hand, I had in mind the personal stories of many former oppressors who confess that their efforts to perpetuate inequality limited their own freedom (I was thinking particularly of John Perkins’s story told in Let Justice Roll Down and Bishop Tutu’s work on the So. African Truth & Reconciliation Commission). I think our freedoms are hollow when they are bought at the expense of others’.
I chose my words poorly, and for that I am very sorry. I didn’t at all mean that anyone who disagrees with me is ill-intentioned (though that’s what I implied, quite heavy-handedly). I try, as a rule, not to make sweeping statements that insist my point of view is self-evident…but occasionally my inner idealogue wins the day. I apologize!
JC 6:31 pm on 7 September 2008 Permalink
I’ll start with A Conflict of Visions…a little more affordable than the other two. Thanks for the tip Phil…looking forward to it.
harmonicminer 7:52 pm on 7 September 2008 Permalink
I think you’ll be impressed at how very careful Thomas Sowell is to shelve his presuppositions, and simply try to describe the two main competing perspectives he sees. In his other writings, you’d have little trouble discerning which approach is his… but if you don’t start out knowing his perspectives, you may have trouble telling which he supports. There are subtle hints, if you start out knowing what to look for… and that’s it. I was actually disappointed… I wanted him to CHOOSE one. He does so elsewhere, but not in this book.
And I’ve found it to be extremely helpful in understanding why seemingly disparate interest groups band together politically, and in articulating why the two main sides in these ideological debates behave as they do.
harmonicminer 8:09 pm on 7 September 2008 Permalink
Hey Ali, it was the tequila talking… are you a mean drunk? It’s OK, I didn’t feel punched in the nose or blackeyed, although I did learn a new smiley face to show that:
‡+(
Whadday think?
Picasso is in no danger from me….
Obviously, oppression is wrong, and should not be sanctioned by governmental power. Generally, however, it is not the combination of freedom and “unfettered capitalism” that creates oppression. It’s far more likely for the government to create problems by meddling in the market to create particular outcomes, fail to create those outcomes, or create new problems that are worse, and then blame “capitalists” for some excess or other, and bringing on a new round of regulation. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen regulators blame their failure on “not enough regulation”.
Here’s an example. There’s a link near the bottom of that post that takes you to more discussion on the problem.
I’m inclined to see “equal opportunity” as an outcome itself, not a condition of a society that can be determined by government, outside of limiting the most egregious kinds of abuse, like failure to honor contracts, violent suppression of competitors, etc. There are simply things that government cannot directly fix; the most it can do is remove obvious barriers, and try by incentive, rather than fiat, to encourage good behavior. And even when it’s just incentives, as opposed to threats of legal action, there is great danger of abuse. The lobbying mess in Washington is precisely because government takes in so much money, and spends so much money, and taxes so much, with so many ifs/ands and buts, that the main incentive in operation is to game the system.
michael lee 9:50 pm on 7 September 2008 Permalink
to point.