Robert Scoble is a prominent blogger (actually one of the most popular blogs on the internet at http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/), and he recently pondered his new role as an employee of Podtech.net, a podcasting business funded by $5.5MM in venture capital. He realizes the people who put up the money want to profit from their investment, and therefore, his job is to make Podtech.net much more valuable.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to come up with ideas for http://www.Podtech.net to make some serious dough. Once we've got some good ideas, we'll share them with Scoble.
Sure super geeks can configure the microphone software and mixer board software and all the other stuff needed. Can you identify the big stumbling blocks and solve them with software?
Create a system where any member of the PodTech.net community can submit a short podcasting "segment", covering any topic they wish. The submitter can then tag the podcost with as many keywords as he / she would like. The podcast is then added to the pool. The rest of the community then listen to the new podcasts coming in based on their interests, at their leisure. This community reviewer has the ability to add other tags that they feel are relevant to the podcast, as well as rate it up or down. As the podcast is filtered through user after user, it develops a "value" based on the reviewers vote, as well as an incredibly refined tag base for easy sorting. Now, back on the listener-side / front end, I go to PodTech.net and select a tag (or even conjoin multiple tags) of topics I am interested in, and select a quality threshold - For example, I... [show more]
Create a system where any member of the PodTech.net community can submit a short podcasting &uot;segment&uot;, covering any topic they wish. The submitter can then tag the podcost with as many keywords as he / she would like. The podcast is then added to the pool.
The rest of the community then listen to the new podcasts coming in based on their interests, at their leisure. This community reviewer has the ability to add other tags that they feel are relevant to the podcast, as well as rate it up or down. As the podcast is filtered through user after user, it develops a &uot;value&uot; based on the reviewers vote, as well as an incredibly refined tag base for easy sorting.
Now, back on the listener-side / front end, I go to PodTech.net and select a tag (or even conjoin multiple tags) of topics I am interested in, and select a quality threshold - For example, I tell PodTech that I would like to listen to all podcasts with the tags linux + music + weirdnews, with a quality ranking of +25 or above, and limit the result to either 10 segments or 30 minutes, whichever is greater.
Here's where the magic happens - PodTech's backend software retrieves the relevant segments, stitches them together (using thier own signature transitions in between segments to maintain continuity, branding, and familiarity), and spits out a download link for my &uot;personalized&uot; podcast, complete with an optional RSS feed that regenerates a podcast with my settings every week.
A system of pointing out Great Podcasts. I personally enjoy diggs methodology. Though if you could add in a review system and a community tagging system. That way you could search by community tags, and then sort by the average reviewed ranking.
http://www.communispace.com/ partners with Fortune 500 companies to build online communities so their customers have a voice -- and the company can listen. Provide their video/audio blogging platform.
I'll play devil's advocate since Holotone doesn't seem to doing the usual duty: but podcasting? Am I the only person that sees it as an annoying trend? I think it can be handy at times, but as for something revolutionary, even profitable on a large level? Nah.
Plus, I would argue (unsuccessfully) that there are more good bloggers (text-based, writers) than there are podcasters--the skills required just aren't taught. Everyone takes a writing class in college, but public speaking? Good public speakers, ergo good pod casters, I would imagine, are fewer and farther between.
True true. But look at the market of audience members -- do you think more are interested in reading elegant prose, or being entertained and informed by video/audio? Where is the bigger opportunity?
Checking.... 
on July 20th, 2006. Tags: podcast
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Plus, I would argue (unsuccessfully) that there are more good bloggers (text-based, writers) than there are podcasters--the skills required just aren't taught. Everyone takes a writing class in college, but public speaking? Good public speakers, ergo good pod casters, I would imagine, are fewer and farther between.