Breaking News
The news that Spotify acquired a couple of podcasting companies certainly resonated for those of us who were around in the early days of RSS, the attachment extension, and the birth of podcasting. For those of you who wonder what the “pod” part refers to, it’s become the iPhone and its Android competitors. And mobile is the fundamental accelerator of the return of podcasting.
Actually, podcasting never went away. It started small, but with a huge impact. Remember, this was the early days of blogging, where anybody with a PC and a modem could publish to the Web, the World Wide Web. Prior to this moment, media was controlled by publishers, the inheritors of the printing press popularized by Gutenberg and Charles Foster Kane. When Dave Winer added the attachment extension to his version of the RSS protocol, it brought the power of the radio station, and eventually video, beyond the control or gate keeping of the FCC and a broadcast license.
When Wordpress supported RSS, the floodgates were wide open. Techcrunch materialized, providing accelerant to a climate where raw intuition was rewarded with the credibility of a self-healing infrastructure for ideas, humor, personal brand promotion, and free-range marketing. God, we had fun. To my mind, Twitter seemed like the social extension of RSS, not in fact but in effect.
Tonight, when the richest man in the world posted an attack on the attempt by the National Inquirer to extort him, he used Medium, an extension of Twitter by one of its former founders. All the news channels, old and new school, lit up notifications on my Apple Watch. On MSNBC, Laurence O’Donnell is making the same point I’m about to make, that this is a turning point in digital communications, or as I like to call it, communications.
My Watch won’t yet do what I want it to, which is literally play the CBS News notification, but certainly it will soon skip the step of moving to the iPhone to watch the CBS Evening News and its top story. But significantly, these CBS News notifications are often from CBSN, a live news network that plays breaking news on demand. When Nancy Pelosi holds a press conference, you don’t have to fight the pundit filter of cutting away to the repetitious cable news hourly format. You become the director, the theater, the network scheduler. Not only has the printing press and the broadcast transmitter and the receiver been liberated, but the business model itself.
That’s what Spotify is on about with its bet on podcasting. It’s not that podcasts are making serious money yet; it’s that they are not costing serious money to produce. We use Anchor, one of the two companies acquired, to produce an extension of the Gillmor Gang called GGX. The studio is an iPhone, the editing suite is GarageBand on the iPad Pro, and the network is Anchor’s multiplexed RSS bridge to multiple endpoints including Spotify. God, this is fun.
We don’t know how this is going to play out, but what we can guess is that we will find out soon. When the richest man in the world chooses this emerging platform to strike a brave vote for democracy and courage in the face of bullying and corruption, he reminds us that nothing comes without a cost. We can decry social media and its addictive hold on us, but there are times when the only way to put out a fire is by dousing it with a strong dose of the truth. If that’s good enough for the rich and powerful, maybe it’s good enough for those of us who see technology as rich with possibility and equally with danger of abuse.
