I listen to a lot of podcasts. No, really.
Take all the podcasts you listen to.
And your buddy listens to.
Double that.
Add some more.
That’s what I get each day.
So, I’m very familiar with the problem I’m calling “organizing podcast listening”.
This isn’t a new problem, really… It happens in any medium where you have a sufficient size of possible items to consume. There are too many TV shows to watch them all, so you figure out the ones you really want to watch, figure out the most convenient times to watch them, catch up on others by TIVO’ing them or buying/borrowing the DVDs later. There are too many books to read, so you pick up some to put on your shelf to read, or make wishlists in Amazon or Chapters, make reading lists or otherwise organize them.
There’s a difference with all this new “digital format” media, of course: it’s much easier to get stuff from just about anywhere, and it’s also a lot cheaper to get it — blogs and podcasts being, for the most part, free to access.
So, it’s a 5 billion channel universe for podcasts, and there’s way too much on.
But wait! There aren’t any channels. There are, in fact, no ways to reliably organize your podcasts. Unhelpfully, the “genre” tag for podcasts is set to — of all things! — “podcast”!
It’s time we start thinking about how to change this, because it’s gotten out of hand. All my podcasts are scattered around in makeshift piles that I had to cobble together out of a combination of manual hackery and wishful thinking. Any resemblance between these piles and useful playlists are purely coincidental..
In fact, the only playlist types which tend to work at all are based on time. There are a number of podcasts which produce daily (or even hourly!), short podcasts. Another set of podcasts in the “medium” range of 10-20 minutes. Another set of dailies which run up to 45 minutes. Beyond that, the reliability tends to vanish.
Ah, but this really sucks! Nothing worse than subscribing to a pod-novel, get a little behind, and then one of the shorter episodes ends up on my medium range list — an episode from the middle of the book somewhere that has no place being listened to just yet.
What am I looking for? I’m looking for something akin to the radio experience, I think.
Radio works for a number of reasons, not least of which because it doesn’t require manual intervention for the listener to organize its content. It builds playlists for you, all you have to do is tune in.
Why not look to have this feature with podcasts? Just because they are a more “on demand” medium doesn’t mean that we have to constantly demand them manually, does it?
Don’t we have all kinds of fancy tools to help us organize things? Or rather, shouldn’t we?
A few years ago, Mevio (then Podshow) started doing something rather interesting: it built podcast channels — or rather, it was building a tool to allow its users to build their own podcast channels. I heard Adam Curry talk about it excitedly on The Daily Source Code, raving about how it had great tools for organizing your podcasts. With this tool, you could organize podcasts into a channel, and then tell it how to organize the channel: all unheard shows sequentially and grouped together, all unheard shows but in order they were released (interspersing podcasts based on release date), only the most recent episodes of each podcast in the channel, only the least recent unheard episode from each podcast, etc. The idea was, it creates a channel RSS feed, and you point your podcatcher at that instead of the individual feeds.
I drooled over this, even back a couple of years ago. When Podshow became Mevio, however, it seemed like this idea got scaled back and eventually neutered. It faced philosophical problems, too, because now you had to move podcasting subscription back behind the tool, rather than subscribing locally on your podcatcher. Podshow shows also had prominence, and were the most easily added to channels, which some felt was an unfair advantage. At the very least, it caused confusion when you added someone else’s feed to your channel at Podshow, and as it played havoc with podcast stats, too, because all the subscriptions would come from the same place — Podshow — rather than from each individual subscriber. If you did subscribe to the channel and to the podcast itself, there was no way to synchronize “marked as played” between the two tools. There were other flaws, but those are illustrative.
It was an interesting idea, one that at least attempted to move things with the backing of a (arguably) major player in podcasting, but suffered from a fatal flaw: it got in the way of things at least as much as it solved a problem. It was a thing between the user and their content, not beside them.
So, what to do?
We can go down this road again, building some fancy tool (web-based or local) which sits between the user and the podcasting world, helping them organize. Everybody either uses the tool and gets the benefits, or doesn’t use the tool and suffers.
Or we can try to do something a little more fundamental, but more broadly applicable. Something like tags.
(An analogous situation can be pointed to here with Twitter and TweetDeck. TweetDeck, I find, is a wonderful tool. It provides some great features beyond what Twitter has, such as a ReTweet button and lists. Twitter recently added these as fundamental features, so that every client can use them. I want the latter solution, not the former, here.)
Genres, as typically used in things like iTunes, are single categories into which an item goes. Anyone who has tried to figure out the genres for music knows how hard it to really pick something — one thing — that is appropriate.
Just try labelling Tom Waits some time.. Sheesh!
So, the “single-label” model of genre tagging seems inadequate for podcast, not only because one word is barely a good descriptor of anything, but also because there are more than one feature you need to describe.
There are at least two: the format of podcast, and the subject of the podcast.
Format is meant here to describe the structure of the podcast, how long it tends to be (not in minutes, but in fuzzy values like “short”, “medium” or “long”, “very long” **), how frequently it is released (”daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “randomly”) or what kind of thing it is (”serial”, “standalone”). The WEIRD Show is “long”, “weekly” and “standalone”. A podiobook is (typically) “medium”, “daily” and “serial”.
(** Of course, the length of a podcast is self-evident, so it might even be possible to leave that out and have it automatically interpreted by the clients..)
Subject is the more broad of the two features, meant as analogous to genre. The WEIRD Show is “news”, “weird”, “commentary”, “single host”.
Notice that each of these feature is not a single category, but rather a collection of (non-conflicting) tags. Tags has been used widely as perhaps the most flexible and meaningful way to label something, largely driven, I believe, from the blogging world.
So: if we can establish good practices of labeling podcasts with at least these two features — along with a healthy, semi-standard set of tags for each feature, not restrictive, but usefully suggestive and sufficiently large for most uses — what does that give us? It’s not a mechanism for organizing!
True, but it is a tool for organizing. Once this is established, then it will be possible to build smart lists in iTunes or the podcatcher of choice to take advantage of these tags and organize things better. Once we can say that podcast XYZ is “serial”, we can take action to only put episodes in a playlist in order, perhaps even only 1 per playlist. Once we can say that a podcast is “news”, we can put all “news” podcasts in the same list.
Note that there is an additional problem being addressed there: a rule that says “given X type podcast, I want (least recent/most recent) unheard Y episodes, in order”..
We need these tools if podcasting is truly to survive the incredible growth that it has undergone. Otherwise, it turns into a blurry, unmanageable mess. Television added its TIVO (or before that, the VCR and good schedule); the book industry added Wishlists to online sellers; music has always had a collection of (partially) useful genre descriptions, and radio.
What do you think? Would you do this as a podcaster? Would you as a podcast listener like to organize your podcast playing more easily? Do you have other ways you’d like to organize things?
I’m curious to see what the world can come up with…
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