Podcasting proliferation (procrastination)
08 Nov 2005I 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.