EchoDitto

Ask any geek: Asterisk is the new hotness. The open source voice-over-IP software is revolutionizing the world of Private Branch Exchanges, or PBXs. You’ve used a PBX before, even if you don’t know what it is: every time you dial into an company’s call-receiving system and navigate a series of menus through the use of your phone’s keys, you’re working within a PBX system. The same goes for when you check your voicemail at the office, or route a phone call to an extension one meeting room over.

PBXs used to be implemented via expensive hardware from unapproachable vendors. Asterisk is changing that. You can install the software on even a modestly specced machine, subscribe to an inexpensive VoIP provider like BroadVoice and be routing calls in no time — and doing it between a variety of data streams. Asterisk allows VoIP, SMS, fax, the Plain Old Telephone System and the internet to be stitched together with relative ease. It’s not exactly user-friendly (although there are GUIs that make it a bit less hostile), but it’s not rocket science either.

On my "What I've Been Reading Lately" list is the book The Working Poor, by David Shipler. From the description of the book on Amazon.com:

The Working Poor examines the "forgotten America" where "millions live in the shadow of prosperity, in the twilight between poverty and well-being." These are citizens for whom the American Dream is out of reach despite their willingness to work hard. Struggling to simply survive, they live so close to the edge of poverty that a minor obstacle, such as a car breakdown or a temporary illness, can lead to a downward financial spiral that can prove impossible to reverse.

It has been an amazing book to read, packed with stories of real people trying to survive day-to-day life in America, discussions of the multi-layered challenges they face and lots of good statistics I can throw out during dinner with my Republican brother-in-law.

At 10:56am today, I sent an instant message to a colleague in DC. It said "Holy cow, I am at a panel about podcasting."

Why were my whereabouts such groundbreaking news? Well, because in our company, I'm not generally known as a fan of podcasts. I'm an organizer at heart, and it's hard for me to see why EchoDitto, a firm that specializes in building online communities, is spending energy on what's basically a broadcast medium. I mean, no matter what you call these things, you're still making a radio show, right? What's new about that?

I'd gone to EchoRadio and downloaded the mp3's. They were interesting, but a bit time-consuming to download and then listen to. Then, last night, things changed. I was going through my RSS feeds when suddenly, music started coming out of my computer. Christian music. I assumed it was a tab I'd left open in Firefox and started madly clicking through. Nothing. Finally, it stopped, and I went back to Newsfire. I started reading Colin's blogpost on the new Todd Solondz movie. Then I looked more closely--in the bottom of my Newsfire was a little play button. The music was coming from my RSS reader!. I didn't have to press any buttons or drag anything into iTunes. It just started playing.

Quickyblog! Quick, blog! Blog quickly!

ITEM ONE: EYEBEAM CONTAGEOUS MEDIA SHOWDOWN!

Announcing the world's first Contagious Media Showdown. Do you have what it takes to corral enough traffic to win the cash prizes? Can you make the next Dancing Baby, All Your Base, or Star Wars Kid and ride into the sunset with the bounty? This is your chance to prove you are the best in the West... In short, it's a formalization of the general phenomenon of lots of people making lots of silly stuff on the internet, some of which lots of other people see and enjoy.

ITEM TWO: LIZ WINSTEAD SAYS CBS SHOULD PODCAST!

Liz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show, talked with The New York Times on Sunday about how CBS should change the format of their evening news and recoup their sad sad third-place market-share. Among her excellent recommendations:

It's also important that they provide this as a podcast. They could charge people. You could listen online. You could listen at the gym.

ITEM THREE: PEW STANDS BY ITS DATA!

The saga continues:

We also thought that it was useful to report these findings even on a relatively small sample because there is growing interest in podcasting and we at the Pew Internet Project are being asked more frequently if we have any data on this subject. We thought these numbers were legitimate to report because they are the first from a national sample to take a stab at defining the podcast-user universe.

OK, we're cool. Actually, "Stand By Your Data" sounds like a great title for a great twenty-first-century love-ballad. So does "Listen At The Gym". Consider this story in-development.

A few days ago, The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 6,000,000 Americans have listened to podcasts-- a figure which I then called "surprising", but should now more accurately call "surprisingly WRONG".

Pew is the primary source for most of what we think we know about how Americans use the internet, so it's bizarre that their own research director doesn't appear to stand behind their methodology or conclusions.

Engadget's Peter Rojas puts it aptly:

"Not that podcasting as a phenomenon isn't growing rapidly or anything, but there's no reason to overinflate its importance, you know?"

Pew should respond officially to the controversy, or they risk damaging their credibility. Meanwhile, I've learned to read the fine print on a survey before I believe it. (Thanks, Reed.)

Yesterday, The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a report on podcasting. Their numbers are a little surprising:

• 22,000,000 Americans own iPods (or other MP3 players), and 6,000,000 Americans use them to listen to podcasts or internet radio broadcasts. (So more Americans listen to podcasts than own reptiles.)
• Nearly half of those who own iPods/MP3 players between the ages of 18-28 have downloaded podcasts.

Read the whole thing for details, but the main take-away is that the numbers seem to back up the hype. (!!)

I'm something of a newcomer to podcasting myself, though I have a few under my belt now. We've also had some pretty interesting people come through our offices and stop long enough to record podcasts. Some folks on our staff have even invented "spotcasting" (a podcast of 1 minute or less). We're off to a pretty good start but, if recent news is any indication, podcasting is about to go bigtime. Seriously. John Edwards is set to podcast.

If you have a Windows computer, you can view video of last Thursday's trendspotting NBC-4 News segment about podcasting. Go to NBC4.com, scroll down until you find the "Podcasting Moves To The Mainstream" link, and then click on it. It features Ed Churchman and myself representing EchoRadio, as well as Eric Gunderson holding it down for Development Seed.

Two earnest suggestions for NBC-4: Consider providing permanent links to your content so that tedious instructions like the ones above aren't necessary. And: I know your corporate partners might not like this, but consider adding support for Macintosh machines to your streaming video.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, the folks who brought you such classics as "The Future of the Internet" and "The Internet and Everyday Life", have just released a new study. "The Internet and Campaign 2004" looks at the effect of the internet on the recent campaign cycle — and the ways 75 million Americans used the internet to decide on a candidate, get involved or contribute money.

I've only had a chance to skim the report — and I'm sure that in coming days more will be said about it — but, in addition to the credit given to the Dean campaign for their innovative use of the internet, two things jumped out at me. The first is that for the first time since Pew started doing these studies in 1996, the internet passed radio as a primary source of political information. In doing so, online has inched even closer to newspapers in this category while still lagging pretty far behind television.

The second thing that I noticed: under the chart that lists "The news media Americans use regularly..." was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which 5% of Americans apparently say they use "regularly." Honestly, even though I'm a huge fan of the show I was surprised to see it on that list — and that it beat out traditional news sources like The Atlantic and The New Yorker — as well as blog powerhouse Daily Kos. Amazing.

Then, just as I was feeling really good about Americans and their choice of news sources, I saw the line above The Daily Show in that chart and saw Rush Limbaugh. Ugh. The same number of Americans, 5%, claim to be Dittoheads (no relation), listening to Limbaugh's rantings on a regular basis. How can so many Americans be so wrong? At least Jon cancels Rush out.

I'm always faintly embarassed by the word "podcasting". Like "blog", it's always felt a little self-consciously cute, its phonemes precision-engineered to stick in your head and Go Viral. (That on-line "grassroots" movements seem to spontaneously co-opt corporate branding techniques might deserve an entire post of its own sometime.)

Broadcast media's attention to podcasting was officially kicked off last month by the perpetually buzz-starved Wired, which declared "THE END OF RADIO!!", and then added-- in tiny parenthesis-- "...as we know it". Coy, Wired. Very coy.

The meat behind the media is this: There's now a new infrastructure for distributing audio, and the "podcasting" buzz may be the first wave of a cultural change brought on by a change in how we, as a culture, can receive and send information.

I.J. Hudson gets it. He's a reporter for the DC-area NBC-4, and he decided to do a segment about podcasting for his trendspotting technology program Digital Edge. Thanks to Eric at Development Seed, he wound up chilling in the EchoRadio studio last week discussing the new medium with Ed and me.

I.J.'s been producing news radio and television since the 1960s, so he has a solid perspective on podcasting and its ramifications. I tried to spin the show as "Old Media vs New Media" but had trouble finding much we disagreed on. Maybe the Old and New aren't as diametrically opposed as Wired would like us to think.

Our podcast about broadcasting is now live on EchoRadio-- download it any time. NBC 4's broadcast about podcasting is live on DC-area television tonight at 5pm.