Netizen

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Podcasting Should Be Easier

The logo used by Apple to represent Podcasting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It just occurred to me that there are no easy, obvious podcasting tools. For text blogging (and photos) you have platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr. Granted you can embed audio files into your tumblog posts, but that is not what I have in mind.

Video blogging is easy. You can use something like YouTube.

And I don't count iTunes. It is a walled garden. I don't consider it part of the web experience.

The last podcasting platform that I used and liked for its ease of use was created by people who brought us Twitter. Too bad they shut it down. They should perhaps revive it.

There is tremendous opportunity with audio. For one, language barriers are less of an issue. It is less pressure than video blogging, and yet there is more emotional connection than in text blogging.

Quora: What Are The Best Podcasting Tools?
Podcasting With SoundCloud
Audacity

I'd have liked the SoundCloud option, if only because it is so easy to embed a SoundCloud file into a blog post. But there seem to be hoops to podcasting on SoundCloud.

Do you know of good options?

English: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Facebook, at the press conference about the e-G8 forum during the 37th G8 summit in Deauville, France. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fred Wilson: July 1: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.

User experience is not the only big change/challenge for companies trying to navigate this transition. Monetization is different too.

Approaches like display advertising don't work as well on mobile as they do on the web. And they don't work that well on the web. ARPUs (avg revenue per user) on mobile are lower for display based revenue models on mobile across the board.

On the other hand, commerce works great on mobile if you have a well integrated (one click) purchase experience. The freemium model (whether it is virtual goods in games, in app upgrades, or something else) works very well on mobile.

Mark Zuckerberg: July 13: Zuckerberg Says Mobile Shift Is His Biggest Challenge

Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said his hardest job right now is figuring out how to adapt the world’s largest social network to mobile devices.

Bringing Facebook’s features to handheld gadgets is difficult because the user experience is so different than on desktop computers......