Evan Williams is interviewed at Ipodlounge (says Dave Winer on his newly minted podcatch.com) and quoted thusly:
“…More good ideas in the world. More knowledge. Less ignorance. Less conspiracy. Less corruption. And more funny. That seems important to me.”
Mmmmmm… “More knowledge. Less ignorance” – hey you know a great way to deal with that – talk to people direct about what you’re doing instead of chatting to an invited audience of people you know in advance are going to agree with you, and write a blog (yeah 10 contentless posts in as many weeks is fine) that’s so poorly maintained that archives from a two months ago throw a 404. Now *that’s* funny!
You know what would make this oh so much better? Can you say “Here we are folks with the first Odeo podcast”? Obviously not.
Perfect Path 
Who did the market research for these new start-ups? Where’s the trend analysis? I find it vastly interesting that these companies (Odeo, Boku, etc) are flocking to an unknown market, then trying to justify their efforts with the PEW report (what stinks about that), without a decent survey of what’s already going on. It’s fine and dandy to try to drive a market, define it’s parameters, create a following and form a community. However, it seems that Podcasters are an hornery bunch and the grassroots nature of the movement and the independentness of it all is going to lead to a lot of turmoil and perhaps setbacks or failure. We’re all out there; we’re all vying for recognition– why not survey the podcasters and their listeners–there’s less than 5000 podcasts so it should be relatively easy at this point–on a list of topics and see where they agree and where they differ. Then the founders, the early adopters, the wanabees can all feel a sense of unity, participation, and discourse. When the pyramids form, the conglomerates take over, and the changes happen those of us on the first and ground floors will have a sense of belonging to the movement rather than being at odds in an “us” and “them” situation. The developers of these new podcasting production suites should stop trying to woo a new audience and at least get behind the first wave before they sell something which already has a damaged reputation: ie, hard to access, poor. . .ah . . .um . . ug. . .quality, full of technical qlitches and geekery. These businesses are so afraid of producing something less than quality that they are failing to impress. So let’s keep out there in their face–with the wind in our mics, traffic in the background, telephones ringing, ah-ing and um-ing and f’ing and blinding, dropping our equipment, and show em how its done!
I’ve been thinking about this today. I think that the biggest potential mistake is assuming that podcasting is the same as blogging and that the opportunities to monetize are therefore the same as for Blogger (providing simple, integrated tools and selling advertising on the back of that). I’m still not sure that this is the case – even if people continue to get the podcasting bug – you can’t listen to as much as you can read and you can’t skim posts from thousands of feeds. Plus it’s just harder to create a podcast once a week than it is to write a blog post once a day. So there aren’t going to be as many listeners and there aren’t going to be as many producers. Oh yeah and quality isn’t about crackle and hum it’s about what you have to say and the way you put it over, it’s about the content in the real sense of that word. Rant over, off to bed.