Trendsurfing: Podcasting (The Times)
By David Rowan
Tired of the Today programme? Bored with bland FM music stations? Frank Edward Nora may have the answer. Nora's quirky radio talk show launched barely two weeks ago, but already it is attracting fan mail from Alaska to Singapore. Each Sunday, Nora, 37, locks himself in his New Jersey apartment and records what he calls "two hours of pleasantly inane ramblings". But it is what happens next that promises a grassroots media revolution.
Nora is one of a fast-growing band of "podcasters" -- mostly amateur programme-makers whose radio shows are designed to be heard on iPods and other MP3 players. Since September, when new software called iPodder first allowed listeners to download their favourite shows automatically, hundreds of new advertisement-free radio channels have emerged in cyberspace. "They're downloaded while you sleep, so when you grab your iPod the next morning, your favourite shows are there to listen on your way to work," explains an excited Nora, an advertising executive by day. ""With conventional internet radio, you'd need to stay near your PC. The beauty of this is it's portable."
This week, for his show, Nora interviewed a man who has visited 4,000 Starbucks, reviewed an ear-cleaning product, and shared his "prophetic dreams" of zombies raiding his apartment (two weeks later, his listeners learned, an actual burglary did occur). His audience is tiny by conventional standards -- 130 downloads last week, 200 this week -- but this, he stresses, is just the start. There may be 4 million iPods out there, but soon there will be hard disks on hundreds of millions of phones -- each a potential storage device for the latest episodes. "What is so great is you can talk about whatever's on your mind, without having to satisfy some great commercial entity," explains Nora, whose shows appear at theovernightscape.com. "And a lot of the guy-in-a-basement programmes are so much more compelling that mainstream radio."
Adam Curry, a former MTV video-jockey, is credited with launching this home-made radio boom. Curry, himself a podcaster, is the man behind iPodder, whose ease of use is the key to the medium's rapid growth. You simply download the software at iPodder.org and decide which audio feeds to subscribe to, which are stored automatically on your iPod when you next sync.
This is different, by the way, from iPod pirate radio, which involves turning the player into a low-power FM transmitter; for that, you need a gadget called an iTrip. It is officially illegal in Britan -- but let's leave that one for another Trendsurf. As for podcasts, there are already specialist programmes dedicated to board games, film reviews and sex education. Public radio stations are podcasting; so too are obsessive fans of football chants and embarrassing song covers (William Shatner's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is a particular hit at Coverville).
The medium's novelty can lead to a certain introversion: the big issue at Not Work Safe Radio this week is "podsterbation", the use of entire shows to comment on rival podcasts. The unprofessional nature of programmes, too, is provoking concern: Jimbob at Whole Wheat Radio last week moaned that podcasting was attracting "every sick sleazy greasy-haired evengelist and sliderule-pocket-protected geek", all pumping out "a pile of steaming doo-doo".
Frank Nora rejects such disdain as nonsense. "Some of these shows are better than the commercial stations," he says. Besides, his own show recently led to a $500 voiceover job. Although Nora is insistently not podcasting to make money. "It's about being part of a cultural revolution," he says from his improvised studio. "This must be what it felt like to be a hippy in the sixties."
(The Times, London, November 8 2004)
Tired of the Today programme? Bored with bland FM music stations? Frank Edward Nora may have the answer. Nora's quirky radio talk show launched barely two weeks ago, but already it is attracting fan mail from Alaska to Singapore. Each Sunday, Nora, 37, locks himself in his New Jersey apartment and records what he calls "two hours of pleasantly inane ramblings". But it is what happens next that promises a grassroots media revolution.
Nora is one of a fast-growing band of "podcasters" -- mostly amateur programme-makers whose radio shows are designed to be heard on iPods and other MP3 players. Since September, when new software called iPodder first allowed listeners to download their favourite shows automatically, hundreds of new advertisement-free radio channels have emerged in cyberspace. "They're downloaded while you sleep, so when you grab your iPod the next morning, your favourite shows are there to listen on your way to work," explains an excited Nora, an advertising executive by day. ""With conventional internet radio, you'd need to stay near your PC. The beauty of this is it's portable."
This week, for his show, Nora interviewed a man who has visited 4,000 Starbucks, reviewed an ear-cleaning product, and shared his "prophetic dreams" of zombies raiding his apartment (two weeks later, his listeners learned, an actual burglary did occur). His audience is tiny by conventional standards -- 130 downloads last week, 200 this week -- but this, he stresses, is just the start. There may be 4 million iPods out there, but soon there will be hard disks on hundreds of millions of phones -- each a potential storage device for the latest episodes. "What is so great is you can talk about whatever's on your mind, without having to satisfy some great commercial entity," explains Nora, whose shows appear at theovernightscape.com. "And a lot of the guy-in-a-basement programmes are so much more compelling that mainstream radio."
Adam Curry, a former MTV video-jockey, is credited with launching this home-made radio boom. Curry, himself a podcaster, is the man behind iPodder, whose ease of use is the key to the medium's rapid growth. You simply download the software at iPodder.org and decide which audio feeds to subscribe to, which are stored automatically on your iPod when you next sync.
This is different, by the way, from iPod pirate radio, which involves turning the player into a low-power FM transmitter; for that, you need a gadget called an iTrip. It is officially illegal in Britan -- but let's leave that one for another Trendsurf. As for podcasts, there are already specialist programmes dedicated to board games, film reviews and sex education. Public radio stations are podcasting; so too are obsessive fans of football chants and embarrassing song covers (William Shatner's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is a particular hit at Coverville).
The medium's novelty can lead to a certain introversion: the big issue at Not Work Safe Radio this week is "podsterbation", the use of entire shows to comment on rival podcasts. The unprofessional nature of programmes, too, is provoking concern: Jimbob at Whole Wheat Radio last week moaned that podcasting was attracting "every sick sleazy greasy-haired evengelist and sliderule-pocket-protected geek", all pumping out "a pile of steaming doo-doo".
Frank Nora rejects such disdain as nonsense. "Some of these shows are better than the commercial stations," he says. Besides, his own show recently led to a $500 voiceover job. Although Nora is insistently not podcasting to make money. "It's about being part of a cultural revolution," he says from his improvised studio. "This must be what it felt like to be a hippy in the sixties."
(The Times, London, November 8 2004)
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