I get a lot of email from listeners who would like to have a way to discuss IT Conversations programs after they’ve heard them — something more than our trackbacks, particularly since most listeners don’t have their own weblogs. So what tool(s) would work best?

About 18 months ago I installed one of those discussion-forum packages and linked it to the database. There was one discussion-forum ‘topic’ for each program. But after a few months, there was virtually no traffic to the forum and a whole lotta spam. Of course there weren’t many IT Conversations listeners in those days.

Should we just create a ‘comments’ feature? Should we try the discussion-forum idea again? A wiki? A blog with comments? Something else I’m just not thinking of at the moment?

Wednesday was the first day IT Conversations delivered more than 200GB of audio files in one day. Yes, if sustained, that would be 6.0 terrabytes for a month. Thank you Limelight Networks for your awesome worldwide content-delivery network. About 85% of the ITC traffic goes through Limelight. The rest comes off servers somewhere in Texas.

I had a nice long chat with Chris McIntyre on the phone today. He really wants to do the right thing and he’s very open to advice from podcasters and the listening community. I pitched the idea of a ratings system like Amazon, Netflix or IT Conversations, but as he pointed out, that doesn’t work for his site. Chris can’t just publish an ‘average’ rating for each podcast, even with some minimum number of votes required. Why? Because a podcast with five votes of “five stars” each, would then be rated higher than one with one thousand five-star votes and just one four-star vote. It’s not a problem for IT Conversations and these other sites because ‘ranking’ isn’t as important as the how-good-is-it rating for each item.

For that matter, I wonder if Chris’ problem is only from his Top- lists. Maybe there’s a way he can provide almost as much value without the Top-10 and Top-50 lists and not have to spend all his time messing with this stuff.

What the podcasting world really needs is the equivalent of an Arbitron or Nielsen service. Can Chris build it? Will someone else figure out how to do it? Will it be a part of Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry’s Attention.xml concept?

People often (well, once in a while) ask me, “Doug, what podcasts do *you* listen to?” I was going to post my entire iPodder list, but I realized that would be misleading, since I listen to many podcasts just to keep up with the podcasting biz rather than because I enjoy them. So here’s the list (in no particular order) of the podcasts I actually listen to and enjoy.

• Coverville [feed]
• Reel Reviews [feed]
• Evil Genius Chronicles [feed]
• The Daily Source Code [feed]
• WGBH Morning Stories [feed]
• The Podcast Brothers [feed]

As others (including Dave Slusher and Michael Geoghegan) have blogged, Chris McIntyre’s Podcast Alley site is on a path towards self destruction. It began as a fun and amusing site within the podcasting community, but the recent spate of coverage in the mainstream press has elevated Podcast Alley to a position of supposed authority.

A few podcasters asked their listeners, somewhat innocently, to go to Podcast Alley to vote for them. Seeing that IT Conversations was down in the #29 spot (and knowing our shows were far more popular than our rating would suggest) I asked our listeners to vote for us. Hey…it was nothing more than honest campaigning.

But somewhere along the line, two things happed. From what I’ve been told, in order to make the system “fairer” to new podcasts, Podcast Alley allowed one vote per person per day, and some sites encouraged their supporters to “vote early, vote often.” And then some podcasters whom I would refer to as less than scrupulous, encouraged their listeners to actually cast negative votes against other podcasts, even for podcasts they’d never listened to.

So why am I wasting so many bytes on what appears to be so trivial? It’s because that due to that major-media coverage, Podcast Alley has been granted a franchise. Lacking any alternative, journalists and others are turning to Podcast Alley as an authority of podcast popularity. It’s the lazy thing for a reporter to do, and they can cover their butts by writing loophole copy such as, “According to web site Podcast Alley…” rather than survey users for themselves.

There’s only one solution, and that’s for Chris McIntyre to solve the problem. Don’t allow more than one vote (total) per person, and log the verified email and IP addresses. That won’t stop hardcore hackers, but if you don’t do something, Chris, the franchise you’ve been handled will slip through your fingers.

In response to my post a few days ago about my Creative Commons Dilemma, Denise Howell pointed out a CC license I had somehow missed. It’s a license designed specifically to permit sampling. The version I am considering reads (in its summary form):

You are free:

• To sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform this work for commercial or noncommercial purposes.

Under the following conditions:

• You must give the original author credit
• You may not use this work to advertise for or promote anything but the work you create from it.
• For any reuse, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
• You may not perform, display, or distribute copies of this whole work for any purpose.

The formal version is here.

As Denise pointed out, there may be a loophole or two for my purposes, but living with those loopholes might be outweighed by the benefits of remaining within the Creative Commons umbrella.

Scott Kirsner wrote a good article on podcasting that appears in the business section of today’s Boston Globe and mentions IT Conversations.

Doug Kaye operates one of the best podcasting sites, ITConversations.com, which collects interviews and panel discussions with big thinkers like Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen, Amazon.com chief executive Jeff Bezos, and author Malcolm Gladwell. Last year, Kaye put up an electronic ”tip jar” on the site, which so far has collected donations of $10 or $20 from about 130 listeners. He works about 70 hours a week on the site. ”ITConversations is my labor of love, but it’s also my full-time gig,” Kaye writes by e-mail. ”Most other people don’t have that luxury – to be able to devote themselves full time to podcasting.” Kaye estimates that his Internet bandwidth would cost about $5,000 a month — if it weren’t donated to him by a site sponsor.

My wife says, “70 hours? That would be only ten hours per day every day! It’s got to be more than that.”

[Meta: Rather than a single post the size of a small phone book, this week I’ve blogged items separately with links here.]

(Hear the MP3.)

New Shows

• Mobile Gaming (rated 3.6) recorded by yours truly at a January meeting of SofTECH.
• Mary Meeker at Web2.0 talks about the Internet in China (rated 3.1)
• Gordon Bell at Accelerating Change 2004 on MyLifeBits and the Memex Vision (too late for a valid rating)
• And catching up with a backlog of terrific Tech Nation shows with Moira Gunn:
  • Dr. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and author who’s evangelizing alternative treatments (rated a whopping 4.0)
  • John Barry, who talks about the incredible influenza pandemic of 1918 (rated 3.8)
  • Robert Herbold, former COO of Microsoft, on technology education in the U.S. (rated 3.6).
  • Dr. Nancy Mize, explains the drug-trial process and fills us in on the concept of “personalized medicine.” (rated 3.6)
  • And of course Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, who talks about his new book, Blink (rated 3.6)

Other Stuff

• Stewart Copeland replaced. Well, not Stewart himself, but the MP3 and AAC files. We had a nasty encoding problem with this show, so I’ve uploaded a better-sounding file.
• A Creative Commons Dilemma. I’m considering replacing the Creative Commons license we currently use on IT Conversations.
• The Gillmor Gang: Still on Hiatus. No, the show’s not dead. It’s just that there are things going on that I can’t tell you about. Stay tuned! In the meantime, check out some of The Gang’s classics.

With all the recent mainstream press coverage of podcasting, barely a few days go by that I don’t get yet another offer to distribute IT Conversations’ programs. A few of the proposals make sense, but most of them do not. Maybe I’m missing the point, but here’s how I see it.

Distribution of a podcast (or whatever you choose to label IT Conversations) isn’t like distribution via broadcast radio, for example. When you pickup a new radio station outlet, you add listeners in a geographical area that you couldn’t previously reach. That’s the way you expand your listenership in radio, and thanks to Arbitron you can report that increased coverage to advertisers or underwriters. But there’s no Arbitron for podcasts (yet), so just having your MP3s delivered by another web site adds no value, again — at least that’s how I see it.

When I evaluate a distribution opportunity, based on today’s state of the Internet and podcasting, I want one of two things: either (1) distribute the content for free and report back on the number of listeners, or (2) charge for the content and share the revenues. The former can be converted to revenues in that I can add those stats to my own when I report to underwritiers.

But if you just distribute the shows for free without reporting back to me, or if you charge for the content and don’t share those revenues with me, I don’t see any reason to release the shows via your channel. At least that’s how I see it.

I love Creative Commons. I love its goals, its implementation and its simplicity. From the moment I first learned of it, I decided to grant a Creative Commons license for IT Conversations programs. Now, however, I find myself having to reconsider that decision. Here’s the problem…

In my quest to fund IT Conversations and at the same time keep the content free for all listeners, I need corporate sponsors and underwriters to help pay the expenses. (Those tip-jar donations are great, but they’ll likely never be enough on their own.) Advertisers need to know what they’re getting for their money. They need to know how many people are hearing their promotional announcements, and for that reason I need statistics: counts of the number of listeners.

I’m happy when anyone links to IT Conversations recordings, and I want everyone to be able to hear them. All I ask is that I be able to count those listens so I can report them to advertisers. But if you copy an IT Conversations recording and host it on your own web site (as currently allowed by our Creative Commons license), we won’t be able to include your listener counts in our totals.

But what’s the point of copying and re-hosting IT Conversations shows anyway? Why would someone want or need to do that? You don’t let others just copy and re-host your complete web pages; you want readers to come to your site to read what you’ve written. Google page ranks and all that. It’s no different with audio programming. So long as the shows are available on our site via a permanent URL, what’s to be gained by offering the same files at a second URL? One could even argue that it’s bad design (in the global sense) to have two permalinks for the same object.

So is there any reason I shouldn’t replace the CC license with one that doesn’t allow for copying the files to another server? I look forward to your feedback and recommendations, but don’t forget that fundamental need to keep the site alive by attracting sponsors.