Podcasting: Convergence is Upon Us

Depending on who you talk to, grand ideas about 'digital convergence' have been bandied about for nearly a decade: headlining conferences, discussed endlessly in newsgroups, and the subject of many an anxiety-filled strategy meeting by established media and electronics giants. But true technology revolutions are seldom declared. They just happen - quietly, at the grassroots, based simply on what ordinary people decide is worth doing - forgetting to ask permission or declare their intentions. One morning, the world wakes up and the revolution is a fait accompli. That morning is this morning, as outlined in this startling story on Podcasting. (The full results from the Pew Internet and American Life Survey can be found here in pdf.)

Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults who own MP3 players like... iPod say they have downloaded podcast programs from the Internet... more than 6 million people are listening to a form of communication that emerged only last year... Podcasters create radio-like programs of commentary, music or humor, which are saved in MP3 audio format and posted online. Listeners are automatically notified when a new podcast is available. Podcasts have grown in prominence along with Weblogs, the online diaries that serve as alternative news sources. Nearly half of digital-music player owners younger than 29 years old have tried out podcasts, the survey found, compared with 20 percent of those 29 or older. There were no differences between men and women, or broadband and dial-up users... [emphasis added]

I emphasize the rate and uniformity of uptake because they're the hallmarks of a phenomenon with true momentum. If that doesn't sound intuitively obvious, think about its opposite: the countless "any day now" technologies and applications that have stayed in an experimental 'tinkerer' stage for years because they were missing some critical functionality, were useless to those not blessed with broadband connectivity, needed a platform chicken in order to produce an application egg, or elicited a big yawn from some large segment of the population.

If the survey results are correct, we do not have to wait for maturation of critical features, adoption of an enabling platform, or some clever marketing campaign to convince say, women, that this is not some useless geek invention irrelevant to daily life. Podcasting combines elements of several trends and characteristics already enjoying an upswing:

- blogging
- talk radio,
- file sharing
- instant messaging
- personalized 'push' media
- asynchronous communication

I suspect too, that multi-tasking will be a big component of Podcasting's success - even as that aspect makes it more difficult (and irritating) for those of us over 40 to take to it quite as naturally. Have you ever listened to cell phone messages with a conference call going on in the background, music playing from your PC, television on mute in the corner, while surfing the web, composing an e-mail, writing an essay and keeping several IM chat windows going at once? My 16 year-old daughter has come awfully close. It may be that her brain is wired differently. Or it may be that we've never approached understanding how much multi-tasking humans can handle, or how stimulating it can be to creativity and a feeling of 'aliveness'.

The other thing that leads me to believe that Podcasting is real - and big - is that, like the VCR and TiVo, it is essentially a time-shifting mechanism enabling greater personal choice in media consumption. Never bet against something with both of those characteristics.

So why is Podcasting interesting to this audience? Why should large organizations and strategic planners care? That will have to be the subject of another post. In short though, I believe it is this: technologies that facilitate informal, non-hierarchical information flows, (prediction markets being another example) change expectations for how workers interact with one another, with management, and process information from the extra-corporate environment. The implications of that for organizational structure, culture, function and planning are profound. More later. Promise.