Tag Archive: feedback


Podcasting Community Grand Central Station

"Phone Me" by spierzchala@Flickr; used under CC license“The community of podcasting” reminds me of an old-fashioned party line telephone. For those too young to know what that is — and I am just on the cusp, having experienced this technology at my grandparent’s place, never my own — back only a couple of decades ago, it wasn’t feasible to give everyone in a rural area their own phone line. Switching technology wasn’t as advanced as today, and it simply wasn’t worth stringing additional lines or putting up additional boxes or whatever they needed to do to get everyone their own line for customers that lived far enough apart, and didn’t really talk on the phone as much anyway. (No ordering pizza when you are 30km down a winding, possibly unpaved, possibly dirt/mud/rock-strewn roadway..)

Now, for each person to get their calls, they each had their own special ring — one long, two short, that one’s for Martha; two long, that was for the Demerchant farm; three short, that’s for you! This sort of open ringing system meant that, once you got to know the ring, you could see — or rather, hear — who was getting calls.

Since it wasn’t a dedicated line, there was another wrinkle: anyone could pick up the phone and hear and possibly interact in the conversation. The term “party line” probably didn’t refer to the idea that groups of youngin’s could get together and “party” on the line, but I’m sure that it eventually co-opted the term. Imagine: easy conference calling was once an accidental feature more available for rural customers!

Ok, so my (probably inaccurate but hopefully illustrative) history lesson is over. How do I draw the analogy to the podcasting community? I think it has to do with them both being open, rural, evolving, neighbourly and having distinct rings. View full article »

Podcasting is often described as a community, implying that we all should be good neighbours. What does that mean?

The point erupts from time to time (see Scott Roche’s podcast ep “Public Critique” from a few months ago, or John Miereu’s taking-the-Canadian-polite-hat-off, “Social Media: It’s Okay to Rock the Boat!” post), and sparked an interesting discussion on Twitter last night (look for the #podcrit tag). (Aside: if you know of more examples of this kind of discussion out there, please add them in the comments.)

(This is part one of a two-part series that sprung up from that discussion. The second part will follow.)

There were essentially four discussions that came up:

  1. Podcasting needs more real criticism in order to get better. Too much criticism is too soft, and really just supportive fluff.
  2. Podcasting needs to grow the pool of listeners, not just cross-pollinate the listeners we already have. New blood, rather than spreading old blood around.
  3. The notion of “podcasting standards” gets raised — not only in terms of production and content quality, but also in terms of the physical structure of podcasts, the use of tags, and other mechanical things to assist intelligent podcast discovery.
  4. The notion of “genre” has been abused within the podcasting arena; specifically, podcasts aren’t given genres, but “podcasting” is classified incorrectly as a single genre.

(These are my distilling points from the conversation. The discussion ranged quite a bit, and I’m sure I’ve missed something…)

What follows is my consideration of these questions, along with some ideas on what we might do.

View full article »

A conversation with podcaster, author and IT professional Chuck Tomasi. Chuck is the host of Radio Yesterday, The Gmail Podcast, Freestyle and co-host of Technorama and The WordPress in 10 Minutes in 10 Minutes podcast.

Chuck and I talk about what has — and hasn”t changed about podcasting over the last few years, what makes podcasting special, and what needs to change.

Find the root of all Chuck’s podcasts at http://www.chuckchat.com.

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