blackrimglasses

This weekend, Steve Jobs (his eminent greatness) announced that iTunes 4.9 shall feature support for the ubiquitous web “cool” technology known as podcasting. What exactly is podcasting you might wonder? Well, the god of podcasting himself (Adam Curry) created it as a method of leveraging “always on” connections to allow subscription based downloading of radio type content. That means its a melding of RSS syndication, audio files and those little white devices known as iPods. You subscribe to feeds, it downloads them regularly and puts them on your iPod for easy, on the go listening.

Quite cool.

Basically you can think of podcasting as distributed, time shifted and locative independent radio, without barrier to entry or any FCC regulation. For content producers, this is a wet-dream situation. It allows the creation of rich and informative audio content for “on the go” users without the need for any commercial interaction in terms of the now dying radio broadcast industry. No standards-and-practices, no five second delay. Just pure and unadulterated voice.

Of course that is part of the problem. Allowing the masses to use mass media is sometimes not such a great idea. Job’s called it the “Wayne’s World” of radio, and he has a point in that. Not in the sense that the import of the technology is over-stated (as it isn’t, anything that reduces hegemonic control can’t be over-stated enough). No, why that term from Jobs is correct is because just like Public Access (which Waynes World ostensibly was on), mass communication with the masses greatly increases the “noise” in signal to noise ratio.

But, if folksonomic and tagging tools like del.icio.us have taught us anything, it is that non-hierarchical, rhizomic (thanks Deleuze!) systems of content aggregation, while having high noise, do allow sufficient amount of complexity to discern signal from them.

What I expect from iTunes supporting PodCasting is the same thing we’ve seen in the blogosphere. I of course refer to that damn term The Long Tail. What this means is that like any power-law situation, you’ll end up with a handful of really active and authoritative pod-casts, with a long tail of secondary and unimportant pod-casts tailing back. This is exactly like any system dependent on user agency: a small number are connected to the vast majority.

So while podcasting will reduce hegemonic control, human nature will implement it again, just as it does in the blogosphere, social network situations and even folksonomic based tools (Flickr, del.icio.us, etc). This is not a bad thing, if anything it is a natural settling point for a new technology. What Apple supporting pod-casting on this level will do is make pod-casting a viable commercial medium (as my new employer already discovered), and in a sense, make it the logical and sensible step in one-to-many audio distribution.

So iTunes 4.9? A first step in a larger puzzle. Good bye Clear Channel Radio.