Mike Butcher

BandaAID.com, a disaster relief initiative which directs all MP3 download receipts to aid foundations for natural disasters, has launched a “Disaster Relief Music Portal”. Their press release is here. However, they appear only to have one artist. Good idea – but the execution isn#039t there yet.

Motorola’s next-generation RAZR2 is to sport Apple iTunes software: The phone is described as “slightly heftier”. Hmmnn…

I’m at a conference for editors at a large traditional business publisher, Reed Business Information. I’m here to about how blogs have successfully used personality, character and attitude to gain attention (that’s a simplification – obviously there’s the whole Cluetrain stuff as well, among many other things). Mention is made of Rafat’s PaidContent, which is described as a blog about paid-for content (except, to be brutally honest, outside of its reports, it is all free). While sitting at the back I go through an article by Simon about the importance of permanence and free archive (by implication – although he doesn’t advocate paid/free either way, it depends on the publisher). Remember, I’m at an event where vast amounts of the content being talked about is paid-for.

The conference is then addressed by Drew Cullen and Angus Banks, who basically tell the audience (I paraphrase) that their paid-for content doesn’t have much chance against free content, because the game today is “all about links” (Angus also throws in his theory about RSS leading towards a future where publishers will feed full content into a new internet content backbone). Then, while browsing, I come across a fight between Ben, and Hugh and, talked about by Tom. This is interesting because Tom nicely summarises my feeling about things at the moment, especially haveing attended PodcastCon (the first ever in the UK actually) conference recently.

Tom says: “I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause – and I’m also slightly sick of more moderate voices being drowned out under the revolutionary fervour of people fresh with their first wave of excitement about user-generated content on the web. Weblogs suffer from this enormously. Someone said that every journalist that writes about weblogs thinks that the year they discovered them is the year weblogs went mainstream. I’ve watched this for almost six years now. I now need people to think about what’s more likely to happen – that big media organisations, and governments and businesses will dry up and evaporate, or that some of them will adapt and change to a new ecology, renegotiate their place in the world and have a role in fashioning and supporting whatever it is that’s coming?”

Drew Cullen is now lambasting actual members of the audience who work on tech titles like Computer Weekly for not “getting” RSS. (Question – why did they invite him to the conference, exactly? In fact El Reg competes against several of their own titles, so they must know they are missing something).

It’s very interesting to be at the coal face as media owners are trying to work all this out…

I’m talking to journalists and editors today at the Reed Editors conference in sunny (well, not today) Brighton. The entire day is about the Internet – and it’s fascinating to see a business publishing company like Reed getting to grips with the ‘new wave’ of online publishing. I’m talking about blogging. Hope it goes well…

[Reuters]: Popular file-sharing site WinMX.com has shut its doors, along with eDonkey.com, appeared to be closed, following the landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that held anyone who distributes a device used to infringe copyright is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by others. In the wake of the decision, the trade group Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last week sent out “cease-and-desist” letters to seven file-sharing groups. A spokeswoman for the RIAA declined to name the targets, but it#039s believe they included including WinMX.com and eDonkey.com. See also Hollywood Reporter.

Playlouder, has licensed acts from SonyBMG, the world#039s second largest record label, and is confident that the other two big record labels, Universal and EMI, will follow suit.

Is the geeky, sniggering, know-it-all world of ham radio alive and well in the UK? The answer of course is, who knows and who cares. But it’s clear a similar crowd is being attracted to a new craze – podcasting. That, at least, could well have been the impression some took away from PodcastCon.co.uk, the first ever conference held on podcasting in the UK yesterday.

Ok, let me back-up here. True, the conference was a great expose of some of the new, innovative and interesting things being done with podcasting. And unlike a lot of Internet movements, podcasting – creating audio shows designed to seamlessly download to an MP3 player – has hit the mainstream consciousness even faster than blogging took. A recent BBC Radio 3 podcast got a million downloads, for instance.

At the event I chatted to Mark Hunter from Tartan.Podshow.com, Scotland’s first music-based podcast which hunts down hot unsigned bands and gives them a platform. There was someone doing a regular podcast about archaeology, another producing a niche technology show.

This was Podcasting playing to its strengths – aiming for an enthusiast audience and giving them what they wanted – not unlike the best blogs. The atmosphere was boosterish and upbeat.

But then James Cridland stood up.

Cridland is the affable head of strategy and new media for Virgin Radio.

Unusually for a mainstream media guy, he wanted to be on the side of the podcasters. Podcasting should not be described as “amateur” he said, but as “me-casting” – creating radio-style content for niche, targeted audiences.

It appears Virgin plans to use podcasting to make more of it’s “Long Tail” of content – both its niche-focused and archived material. These could “time-shift” the personalities of radio which don’t date, unlike the music which does. This included a “Best of the guests” Podcast and one for Unsigned bands, which, he proclaimed, other podcasters would get access to, to ‘re-podcast’.

But the delegates weren’t impressed. Here was “MSM” incarnate – a “Main-Stream Media” guy who presumed to tell all assembled that he ‘got it’.

One questioner rounded on Cridland: “You fundamentally misunderstand the nature of podcasting. You just don’t get it. Mainstream media doesn’t know what is going to hit it.”

Moreover, in not facing up to the music industry to allow podcasters to broadcast music inside their shows, he was ‘part of the problem.’ Did I detect some frustrated Chris Tarrants in the audience?

The crowd seemed determined to turn this into the downfall of Ceausescu on his balcony, Romania’s old dictator. Ironically, I’d seen a video played of Ceausescu’s last speech before the baying democratic mob over ran him at a blogging conference barely two months before, designed to illustrate how ‘citizen media’ would swamp the mainstream.

But was Cridland a Ceausescu in waiting? Evidently not. He’d come to explain to the podcasters that he wanted to encourage their exploitation of the medium. This was the equivalent of the record companies saying to music lovers in 1998, before Napster arrived on the scene, “we’ll release some digital music which you can share with your friends, how about that?”

If Cridland didn’t ‘get it’, what the hell was he doing at PodcastCon, an amateur conference advertised only on Wiki’s and blogs?

Half way through his mauling one of the conference organises whispers in my ear: “We didn’t expect he’d be quite so attacked, honest.”

The criticism Cridland got on the podium was made even more ironic, given that we’d all just been the audience on a ‘recorded live’ podcast for the Vobes.com ‘podshow’. A former “children’s TV entertainer”, Richard Vobes has cottoned on to podcasting as a new hobby-come-job. Alas, the show was like being transported into the film Good Morning Vietnam, which featured an Army-appointed DJ whose attempt at humour is a child’s squeaky toy and a few ‘funny’ voices, prior to the arrival of the brilliant Robin Williams. When the show veered off into a discussion about beer tasting, the picture of CAMRA members at a ham radio event was, alas, complete.

And there was further irony in the crowd attacking “the man” from the radio industry.

Cridland pointed out research which shows that nearly 80% of owners of mobile phones with FM radios built-in, shock horror, listen to the radio. Radios are also appearing inside MP3 players as standard. In other words, live radio has a bright future, even if the ‘time-shifted’ nature of pod casts are gaining in currency.

In 1997 I went to a debate about the future of multi-channel TV. It concluded that there would one day be a TV channel only about beetles.

This is absolutely fine if you like beetles. Indeed, I predict that there will shortly be a podcast only about beetles. And that is a strength podcasters must play to. But whether the “Long Tail” of the Internet can wag the mainstream media dog is a debate which… will probably be appearing on a podcast near you very shortly.

I’m at PodcastCon. Lots of podcasters here, from the UK and abroad. People range from the big media firms (Virgin, BBC etc) to lots of ‘amateurs’ (ie they have a day job too). Interesting stuff. I’ll write it up later (my notes are not great blog material, and I’m too busy making them to blog them as well, sorry).

Actually scratch that, here are some badly typed notes form this latest presentation:

**Talk by James Cridland, head new media Virgin Radio

Talking about the relationship between broadcassting and podcasting.

He rejects the idea that podcasting is amateaur.

Virgin started on one station, one platform, one engine, built in 1020 by BBC.

Now more platforms – 26 different platforms (real, Windows, DAB, TV, AM/FM etc etc)

1958 – Silvertone 305 radio.

Broadcasting isn’t new, but podcatsing a “me-casting”.

Virgin – 3G, visual radio.

Pete ans Geoff – chops music (rights) but also you are time-shifting the personalities, not the music. The music you can get anytime,

Announced new podcats: Best of the guests Podcast. Time from their ‘long tail -’ – archiveed guests as well as new.

Unsigned bands podcast – putting together.

How do Virgin maybe make their podcast unsigned bands available to other podcasters? (Spreading word about virgin???)

They find that people go back and grab archibve, and they didn’t appreciate what people wanted to listen to until they did it.

Now have a commanding position on iTunes. Does increadibly well in Weekdays.

3,600 downloads for a niche show which doesn’t get much listeners.

Threat to podcats: 77% listen to FM radio on their Nokia mobiles during the week.

83% listen to

Radios in iPods could be a threat to Podcasting.

Also get pix on a radia=o phone Virgin Mobile also douring 3 live TV stations.

Audi is just as important to phone users as Tv is in teched-up South Korea.

Nokia’s Visual Radio adds visuals to radio experience (not video).

Adding visual to podcasts could be a future trend.

41% of Virgin listeners have a portable media player.

32% have an iPod, 68% have another brand of player.

Benefits of

This wek in Tech is a good podcast but a terrible web site.

You go into an o2 store and use a pic to send a pic to Pete and Geoff, to ask if they are ugly:

Audio. Tying audio with visual of Web site is a new method that podcastswrs should look at.

I’ll be blogging for MocoNews.net (news about mobile content btw) this week at Mobile Content World in London this week. Come say hi, if you’re around. I’ll be in the press office.

I’ve decided to pull back from a couple of things I’ve been doing lately and make myself more available for new projects. No, that is not a round-about way of saying ‘gizzajob’! And I’ll still be writing for the usual suspects.

I’m just saying I’m a ‘gun for hire’. There are a number of interesting things going on right now, so it seems like the right time to be open to new possibilities.

So any editors, companies, start-ups, or anyone else who thinks they could use me (freelance I mean), feel free to get in touch. For more info see here.

Indeed, even if you can’t ‘use me’ but you’d like to meet up for a chat, go ahead.

One of the things I’ll be doing soon is speaking to a conference of editors about blogs, and organising an event about the convergence between ambient media and mobiles. Should be fun…