I note with some inter­est that WSG reg­u­lar Syd­ney and Mel­bourne meet­ings are being recorded and will, at some time in the near future (i.e. after the meet­ings have hap­pened), be avail­able for down­load some­where. Ear­lier, WSG event Web Essen­tials ’05 was made avail­able for pod­cast down­load. On Sun­day, my church announced they were mak­ing ser­mons avail­able for down­load (and, just for the record, their site is get­ting re-done :P So ugly-factor will soon dis­ap­pear, and I’m hop­ing to fig­ure out a way to make the pod­casts more acces­si­ble when that happens!)

Last time I checked (and I keep a fairly close eye on these things in a web con­text), band­width and disc space didn’t get dra­mat­i­cally cheaper. Nor, I haz­ard, did record­ing equip­ment. So what gives? Sud­denly we all decide we can be both­ered? Is this just buzzword-compliance 101?

One of the rea­sons I have for being wary of pod­cast­ing is not so much band­width (which can be paid for if exceeded and so forth with­out too much dif­fi­culty), but stor­age space! Stor­age space, unless you’re buy­ing a server, is gen­er­ally rather scant. Espe­cially next to band­width: most hosts assume that your entire site will attract enough traf­fic to have it down­loaded in its entirety sev­eral times over. To be fair, so does base10solutions — but our stor­age is geared to the size site that, rel­a­tive to its band­width, could con­ceiv­ably attract enough traf­fic to go over with­out dif­fi­culty. What I’m talk­ing about is peo­ple with blogs on 6GB accounts with 100GB of trans­fers — it’s utterly disproprtionate.

The web doesn’t have much respect for per­ma­nence. Which is prob­a­bly one rea­son why low-storage accounts have lasted so long. With pod­cast­ing, if I put some­thing online I want it to stay there per­ma­nently, because it’s con­tent! A cer­tain image gallery won’t stay there for­ever, but to me that’s okay as it’s act­ing in a ‘closed com­mu­nity’ con­text — the only door is my web­site (to the best of my knowl­edge, few, if any, other peo­ple have linked to it).

So I have some burn­ing ques­tions about where all these resources are com­ing from, and if they’re sus­tain­able. It could just be that peo­ple have decided they’re pre­pared to spend money on host­ing now, and more money in the future if storage/bandwidth costs don’t scale as quickly as antic­i­pated. Or — and this is what I think is most likely hap­pen­ing, though not nec­es­sar­ily with the exam­ples cited — peo­ple are host­ing things with­out think­ing what they’ll do when they come to “that” — “that” being, of course, the inevitable wall at which point they need to expand/upgrade/reach further/… or delete content.

The other ques­tion, of course, is why now? We haven’t seen any quan­tum leap, so it must be that peo­ple are only now real­is­ing the poten­tial of the medium. You could argue for broad­band uptake, but I’d argue back that as pod­cast­ing is mostly spoken-word con­tent, its band­width require­ments are no greater than that of talk­back shows that have had 28.8kb streams since 1997. Maybe it’s just aware­ness. That’s where I’m lean­ing. I think it’s peo­ple see­ing a buzz­word that’s been given some degree of cre­dence — though lit­tle recog­ni­tion out­side of web cir­cles, accord­ing to a hand­ful of sur­veys (I’d meant to find links for that but haven’t got time… there was some­thing on CNet News.com a few months back) — and attempt­ing to catch the wave as it rises.

On the note of waves ris­ing, it should be noted that, yes, I am one of the nay-sayers that believe this “Web 2.0″ thing is a farce and will see some set­back. We might emerge more seman­tic or application-oriented or what­ever because of it — just like Web 1.0 left us with a bunch of empty stores and Flash web­sites that we’re still try­ing to get rid of/turn into a more appro­pri­ate use of the plat­form –, but money is going to be lost. So there are my thoughts on that, whilst try­ing to clear my mind of var­i­ous “I know noth­ing” stress before going to bed and sit­ting my last exam tomor­row. Hence “pro­cras­ti­na­tion” in this posts’ title.