In these two posts from Seth's Blog (post one, post two) Godin is surprisingly ambivalent about podcasting.
I know there's a lot of hype and excitement over the multimedia possibilities of RSS...so it's refreshing to see a calm viewpoint.
Note that Godin isn't anti-podcast. He's just a little more cautious and pragmatic about them:
I am fascinated by the math of the situation from the creator's point of view.
What would have happened to radio if
a. it was really cheap to start a station
and
b. the dial could hold a million stations, not forty?We certainly wouldn't see the huge profits and high production values of radio today, would we? If there were thousands and thousands of stations to compete with, it would be an amateur medium, with nobody making enough to invest.
Podcasting feels a little like that. There will be millions of listeners... and there might be millions of podcasts.
But, then I think about A lists. Inevitably, a few podcasts will become like boingboing, the default channel for people getting started listening, or for people who want to listen to what everyone else listens to.
Additionally, MarketingVox shares their ambivalence of the "bloggish audio downloads" in today's edition.
Our take: It's another channel - and certainly an interesting one. I'm personally pretty excited about the prospects of podcasting. It's still early in the game, but with the success many marketers see with webinars and teleseminars (and their respective playbacks), I think the future for podcasting - at least from a marketing perspective - is bright.
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