Dec

17

Podcast Directories

December 17, 2005 |

Garrick van Buren has some interesting thoughts on podcast directories.

Now my feeling has been that the overabundance of directories isn’t very helpful. Take Odeo for example. They just pretty much switched their layout so that the podcast directory has more or less disappeared. Why? It doesn’t have any traction. To be in their Top 40, 300 listeners are enough. That’s not a phenomenon worthy of New York Times coverage. They have switched on their podcast creation tools, but come on guys. Podcasting is not blogging. The cost of entry is so much higher in term of time invested and soul bared. There are only so many people out there comfortable enough with their voice to broadcast it around the world. There is no market for this kind of stuff and I see Odeo closing the doors sooner or later (my prediction - before the summer of 2006).

Also, as of right now, there simply isn’t a market for more podcast directories.

Podcast Alley is still kicking around, but lets face it, the only directory out there that matters is iTunes. Being featured on iTunes is what drives podcasts over the edge.

This monoculture is a horrible situation as well. What if Apple decides the whole experiment isn’t worth the time and just drops the project? Nobody there to stop them from doing so.

Now lets get back to Garrick’s post. He talks about Google as a good podcast directory, but only if you know what you are looking for. But I don’t know. Here we are, talking about the goodness of social bookmarking, networking etc. There must be an alternative to this. Maybe a digg.com for podcasting would be a good idea. Maybe a recommendation mechanism that is more straightforward than voting at Podcast Alley. Something like Garrick’s five stars at the bottom of his page.

Garrick proposes a more tagging oriented approach so that more nuances of the content are captured. Not a bad idea, but so far, there are only a limited number of podcasts out there and many podcasters are happy to be part of one of those categories offered. So it is not a problem today. The problem is to find interesting shows. Personal recommendations and ratings are the way to go, I think. That’s where directories are failing right now, because iTunes doesn’t have this mechanism, Podcast Alley’s voting has been controversial since its inception and no other directory matters. Time for a new one?

Anyway, enough ranting. Interesting post on Work Better. Read it if you haven’t done so.

So, why are all the directories shoehorning podcasters into 15 main, meaningless sections when each podcaster could declare their own unique categories - plural - and standout?

A single-dimension directory is like trying to make money hosting podcasts or sanitizing telephones - it’s only fulfilling at the most cursory level. This is why Google is still the best podcast directory - it takes very specific queries, ones with multiple qualifiers. Then returns fulfilling results.

Bringing me to the podcast directories splogging up the search results. Yes, podcast directories are guilty of the same crime as the the other PageRank-loving sploggers - taking an RSS feed and republishing it for higher placement. 6 of the 10 items on the first page of Google results for “first crack podcast” are directories echoing one another. This redundancy makes each result less valuable.

» The Problems with Podcast Directories » The Work Better Weblog » Working Pathways, Inc


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