And I say: go ahead and do your own podcast! You know what they say: the best way to beat procrastination is to put it off for a while and do something else..

I’m an old radio guy too. Used to work at a campus radio station in college, then some local stations for a time. Waiting for my procrastination to end so I can start my own podcast of some sort (while I’ve worked on others that aren’t mine).

Your panels sound interesting, if the audio turns out well, I look forward to listening. A suggestion: bring your own recorder (something small) and set it up separate from the in-house system, or see if the board in the room has an line-out jack you can hook your recorder into – but I’m sure you’ve thought of both of those, since you’re the one actually doing this, and I’m an old wannabe!

Have fun!

Is that going to work for everyone? I don’t know. The artificial sense of urgency that a schedule creates helps a lot of people get over the learning curve hump, but even though that’s a fairly common technique it still doesn’t prevent the majority of podcasters from abandoning their projects. There’s an unspoken, and I think unsustainable, expectation that podcasts, once they’re started, will continue into perpetuity.

I think the miniseries is an incredibly underused model in podcasting (and blogging). RSS feeds can clearly deliver a stream of content, but they can also be used to deliver sets of files, too. Look at how it’s done on Podiobooks. It doesn’t seem somehow acceptable that someone can podcast a certain number of episodes, and then stop. Unless it’s a book. But even then, writers seem to be expected to continue to create new, related content after the book is over.

Is there ever going to be one community that meets all of our needs? Not without sacrificing something. So it’s either get your needs met deeply or shallowly. And of course belonging to a smaller community doesn’t mean you don’t belong to the larger tenuous one.

I’m not sure that anything can hurt the beast that is podcasting. Now if you narrow down to podcast fiction (as @braindouche often points out is what we’re usually really talking about on Twitter) I’m sure that there are. One thing that can hurt is this notion that there are “cool kids” and not cool kids. Personally from Day One of podcasting I’ve found all of the more well known podcast fiction folks have been very approachable. I didn’t have to swim out to the float to interact with them. I just had to be as respectful as I would be of any other human being.

I hope that everyone in the podlit community knows that we’re all on roughly the same level fame-wise. Granted Nate may have 10K+ listeners and I may only have 1K, but when you pull back a bit that’s not a big difference in the scheme of things. Only a few authors have “made it” and they’re all still approachable in my experience. But there are many folks who, I think wrongly, view those people as celebrities and out of range. I suppose that there are even a few that think that about themselves.

My take on this “community” as loose knit as even the podlit community is is that of the rising tide. The more producers we get, the more content we put out, the more we push each other to do better, the more we all benefit. That’s why I like what Dan Sawyer is trying to do with ANMAP http://www.anmap-foundation.org/. That’s why I think that ignoring the podcasts that aren’t very good instead of helping them be better is a bad idea. I’ve gotten some excellent advice from folks and it’s helping me improve my game. I got it because a) I asked for it and b) people with more skills where happy to help where they had time.

That’s one way we break the echo chamber. I recognize that not everyone is capable of or willing to give and receive public criticism, but you can give it in private and cross your fingers that it will be well received. If it’s not, well I guess you should keep trying. On the receiving end, you should toughen up and take it. I’ve said it before, if you want to move out of the valley then any critique you get in the valley, no matter how tough it is, will seem like a pillow fight compared to what you’ll get in the mainstream. And if you’re satisfied to stay in the valley and keep it on the hobby level I’d think that anyone would want to get better.

We need more public critics. We need more private critics. We need more groups like ANMAP and Podiobooks who offer mentoring. We need to mentor.

Okay drum beating over for now.

When podcasting was new, it made sense to have a common community of “podcasters”, but as the size grows, this seems to be less important. Now that the books are written, so to speak, it’s time to turn the focus from the structure to the content. Or something like that. Think about communities of /interest/, not communities of /accident/ or of /common tech/.

Do people who have a certain gadget all gather ’round in a community? Maybe, but is that as coherent a community as people who have a certain gadget and who /use it for a specific purpose/?

There is probably room for both communities, I suppose: your grand, expansive organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and smaller, local, specialized Linux User Groups (LUGs), as well as groups focussing on content areas. (Sorry, I’m a computer researcher, so it’s where I tend to start thinking..)

I agree, too, that there is a certain amount of “organic growth” in these communities. You can’t start a camp fire without flame, to put it colloquially (and somewhat inaccurately, on a strictly universal basis..). But not having wood does you no good either: the structure around which organic growth can form.

There is a certain amount of community-building that can be done, which can be accomplished using a combination of technology and social organization. You want to target a group that may already exist, but in loose form, and organize them — again, I point to Podiobooks as a good effort in that direction.

But there has to be a certain amount of commonality for it to work. For example, I’ve attended a couple of local Tweetups (“Twitter meetups”) back home. Despite being an avid Twitter user and a local of the area, I found myself without any real commonality between me and the group, except for a few rare occasions. The group felt hollow, manufactured, without a common basis. We weren’t all there to share our common feature — Twitter — but just /because/ of it.

So, while I don’t like the idea of trying to actually manufacture community, I do see a need to support it, and provide the appropriate skeletal tools on which the algae may bloom..

Thanks for stimulating response!

Your analogy is a good one. I can’t address all these points — not enough time or knowledge — but I’ll toss my two sous in on community.

At something over 100,000 podcasters (numbers are impossible because too many people call themselves podcasters but have no RSS feed) I think it’s important to remember that this group is hardly homogeneous. As you point out in your article there are different genres of podcast and I think each of those probably needs its own community.

Granted, there are some things we share — production, distribution, promotion — but the nature of those things probably doesn’t overlap that much between a fiction podcast and a news podcast, as example. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It focuses a lot on the production side of the equation and, while that’s helpful for a subset of people, I think the community is a more complex entity.

Taking the Podiobooks community as example of a kind of meta-community. It’s made up of communities of authors/producers and listeners. There is a sort of clique stature to this community but it’s not a closed group by any stretch of the imagination. Listeners can join just by leaving a comment or rating a podcast on the Podiobooks.com site. Others can take a more active role by joining the community ning site. The author/producer group is wide open — with the proviso that you actually have to produce something that’s delivered via Podiobooks. There are a couple of authors working hard to promote their print-only works at the community site and, frankly, they’re not getting a lot of traction because they’re ignoring the group mores re membership.

The complexity doesn’t stop there. Within that community of listeners and authors there are mentors, critics, and casual fans. The community has sufficient flexibility to support all those roles and I would welcome more people who’d take them on. Within all that, we have a group of fans for a particular genre or specific author — even a certain title. It’s like Shrek says, “An ogre is like an onion.” And like Shrek, when you peal the layers away you’re left with a big green beast that you might want to think twice about inviting to dinner.

I think part of the perception of cliquishness is that the barrier to entry — getting to be one of the “cool kids” — is technological. You need to have enough technical savvy to get there. I picture one of those old school floating platforms out in the middle of a summery bay with the cool kids all swimming and partying waaaay out there and a lot of us just can’t swim well enough to get out to them.

Now, whether there’s sufficient community across production platforms — news, music, fiction, etc — to provide cross pollination and support, I’m not sure. I’d love for every listener of the Dragon Page Cover-to-Cover to know about my books, but I’m not sure that most of them don’t already. Being able to talk to Brian Ibbit about Coverville and the music license world might be useful, and he certainly participates in a larger community of music podcasts, Do those two have enough shared values and constructs to form a community?

I don’t know. Seems like the community forms around the subject area, not the technology, which actually goes back to one of your points.

And there’s one more factor I want to throw onto the table. Something that comes from education and sociological research regarding communities of practice. They’re organic. They grow where there’s need. Attempts to force grow them within organizations like schools and businesses fail. They can’t be mandated into existence – not that I’m suggesting you’re doing that – but I think it’s one of those wonderful experimental opportunities we have. With all the communications technology we have available, it’s pretty cheap to run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.