Pew Internet & American Life responded to comments from the blogosphere that its report on podcasting may be erroneous. They are standing by their data.
Two brief thoughts on that. (Yes, I did read their memo, repeatedly.)
First, and I make this deliberately broad, the report shows a lot of people are using MP3 players to grab stuff from the Web. A great finding! As I have said before, information doesn’t want to be free; it wants to be captured and organized.
Second, Pew says “Our intention was to see how many people had done something that could be functionally defined as podcasting.” This means Pew is deciding that podcasting is the same as broadcasting. I have heard this before, once from someone who doesn’t listen to podcasts, doesn’t own an MP3 player, and wouldn’t know an RSS feed if it held him up at gunpoint in a dark alley. It doesn’t make me a pedant to say that the key to podcasting is the manner in which it makes MP3 broadcasts available to tools such as aggregators; it’s no different than pointing out that the key to television is turning it on and finding shows you can watch.
Maybe one third point: lighten up, Pew. You do great work. All of these terms–podcasting, MP3 players, downloading–are up for grabs as the world evolves, and you’re as entitled as anyone else to explore the boundaries. However, when you do that, prepare to push some buttons.
Posted on this day, other years:
- April Showers Bring Link Flowers - 2008
- Sophie: The arrival of the networked book - 2007
- ALA Election Results So Far - 2006
- Letter to ALA from OLOS on Gay and Lesbian Rights - 2004
- Gay and Lesbian Librarians Seek ALA's Help - 2004
- First Anniversary of the ALA Web Site Roll-Out - 2004
“All of these terms–podcasting …”
While it’s not my issue, some people are very proprietary over that term, and have strong feelings about letting others dilute it.
Pew asserted they we’re correct. They are correct. Podcasting is not well defined. So if say a freerangelibrarian puts out a podcast, even a dumb under a minute podcast of herself singing happy birthday, and I simply download it and listen; well yes I’ve listened to a podcast. Adam Curry talked a little about the methodology on his, more famoust podcast about a day after I first read your comments. The Pew survey may be incorrect, but the methodology is as good and as valid as Nielson(I’m not sure how to spell this, but since I saw Gorman’t comments, I always hope everything I put out on the net is rife with spelling errors) or Arbitron or any other statistical media rating service. 9 million people having done something once as a percentage of US adults is pretty small.
Also information doesn’t want to be organized; it just wants to be searchable. Listen to the podcast from IT Conversations by Clay Shirkey. Isn’t it a little presumptious that we might doubt a survey because it says that we are part of a much larger group of people than we think.