Infinity Tries All-Podcasting Radio Format

Broadcast radio has been suffering from a downward trend in the past few years. The popularity of digital music, a growing population of fanatically loyal satellite radio listeners, and an increase in the amount of radio advertising is forcing a re-evalutation in the industry. In an article released today by AP writer, Seth Sutel, Seth describes Infinity Broadcasting's newest attempt to counteract these trends with an experimental "retrofit" of one of its lagging stations in San Francisco, CA. On May 16, KYCY-AM will convert from a talk-radio format to an experimental format... broadcasting PodCasts.

According to the article, Infinity Broadcasting is planning on airing listener submitted pod-casts. Although it doesn't name any pod-cast streams in particular, I believe they will probably also venture into podcasts from other internet sources. I am happy to see podcasts being embraced in this way, but it certainly raises a couple of issues.

One issue that I immediately see becoming a problem is that the radio station has no plans to pay for the podcasts which it airs. This is gonna be a problem; probably very quickly. I'm not too concerned about those listeners who freely submit their podcasts for broadcast by the station, but rather, am worried about the chance that that the station may play podcasts which were never intended for submission. After all, not everyone is willing to license their work to be broadcast freely, for the benefit of a money-making radio station (controlled by the number two broadcasting company in the nation). Infinity, (KYCY-AM) had better be careful they don't mistakenly air a podcast to which they weren't licensed.

Another issue, "If you don't plan on paying people for their pod-casts, How do you expect to get quality programming?" I just don't see how those pod-casters who develop great programs are going to allow their content to be aired absolutely free of charge. Basic economics will come into play, and the the station may find that the content it receives is less than premium, and although free, it may not best serve their audience. I can see how the station can benefit from this experiment, in that it no longer requires paying for the programming, but still allows them to air advertising... However, Im not sure that people who develop popular podcast content, are going to allow a media barron such as Infinity Broadcasting, to benefit from their work. Especially with the incredible profit margins that radio stations currently enjoy.

In Summary
I have a feeling the station will be able to make this work, but I can see podcasts doing much better on Public Broadcast Radio. I think that a system like PBS can better guarantee that my content won't unfairly benefit a company such as Infinity Broadcasting. I certainly hope to hear more about this issue as the station moves forward with its plans.

Whats your opinion?

Truly awesome advertising

As a long time subscriber to Maxim, Stuff, Blender, and FHM magazines, I have witnessed a dramatic shift in the capabilities of magazine advertising. Ads have left the 2 dimensional space of paper, and reached a 4th dimension that was for a long time simply unreachable; and found only in the dreams of idealist ad executives. These changes are based on new found creativity, a greater understanding of New Media, and a truly revolutionary increase in advertising budgets. I'm not talking about pop-up books, but about interactivity, and how it has reached unbelievable levels. A couple of recent examples (that I can remember) are listed below:

1) The Stickers Advertisement, from Mini-Cooper USA. This advert -which ran in several magazines- contained a full page of of decals. The stickers were for mini-cooper enthusiasts to place on their Mini's, for everytime they raced another sports-car and won (kind of like when the Red-Barron would mark his airplane each time he shot down an enemy). In addition it had several lettering decals for car-owners to use in detailing their cars with their names, or some other message. That was a tremendously successfull campaign, as I remember it today. I even used the lettering on my own car. Though I wasnt a Mini owner, I still appreciated the gesture.

This ad campaign was a stroke of genius for Mini. On the budget side, the stickers would have been only slightly more to print (compared to other possible textiles), yet produced a whole new level of interactivity for the reader.

2) The Jeep Sponge: "Grows right before your eyes". Remember those "incredible growing dinosaurs" that used to come in little plastic pills for you to drop in a bucket of water. Anyway, it used to be a popular and cheap kids toy in the early 90's. Jeep harnessed the power of those toys in order to emphasize the new length of the 2005 Jeep Wrangler (usually described as too small for extra passengers). In the recent magazine ad campaign, Jeep stamped the same sponge material into little Jeep Wranglers, and sealed them up on the page of the advert. Readers were greeted with a quick blurb about the newly lengthened Jeep Wrangler, and told to play with their new toy. Like an 8 year old I ripped that wrangler right out of my magazine and ran to the bathroom sink. And what do you know, it did get bigger!

So there you have it folks, another effective advertisement that worked, and emphasized its message pretty darn clearly. Though, as I said before, it was probably much more expensive than a color ad would have cost. After all, its the same kind of toy people used to pay for just a few years ago.

Share your Ideas with a Blog [Director's Cut]

Blogging isn’t rocket science; that’s why it’s growing at an astronomical rate. Since the beginning of the web, people have been sharing ideas more easily, but with blogs the communicative properties of the web have been harnessed for us mere mortal’s. Truly the idea of a personal webpage has come to the masses.

Sharing ideas is a piece of cake with blogging, especially so with some of the tools I found for this month’s review. With them you can write down your thoughts and post photos to your cubbyhole on the World Wide Web. As with every web industry these days, some of the tools you have to pay for, and others are free. Below I’ll cover a few of the best FREE tools available for new bloggers.

Blogger
One of the easiest blogging services around today is Blogger (www.blogger.com) by Google. Through Blogger you can create a free user account, pick a sub-domain for your blog, (e.g. sinkroutine.blogspot.com) and then pick a title for the page. From there it’s incredibly easy to begin posting to your blog using a WYSIWYG editor or straight html. Blogger features a good number of standard templates with an excellent variety of colors. Each one is very well “polished” and is something most people would be proud of displaying. For those eager to customize their blog, Blogger.com allows advanced manipulation of content through tags and CSS style sheets. Once your blog is online Blogger makes it easy to start sharing your ideas with the world by allowing you to make yourself public for other users to find. Public blogs are searchable through the various blogging indexes, and Blogger.com blogs can even be found on Google.com if you search hard enough. Blogger’s big downfall is this same public availability. “Un-public” blogs are not locked down by user (their just not indexed), so if someone randomly stumbles across your blog they will be able to read it. Overall Blogger.com is a very user-friendly blog host, which covers all the basics of blogging.

Movable Type
Movable type is a product of Six Apart (www.sixapart.com/movabletype), a company looking to master the art of blogging, in more ways than one. Movable type is a blog tool which can be downloaded by advanced users in order to setup a blog on a user’s own host, rather than using a free (and often times, ad-based) blog host. Movable Type is the leader in custom-developed blogs which accomplish exactly what a user wants, with more features than can be listed in most articles. Movable type is available to individual users; and a limited version (1 author/ 3 blogs limit) is available for free, so long as you don’t expect any sort of customer service for the product. Movable Type is a product worth looking at if you know what Perl scripts are and aren’t scared of installing something on a web server.

Flickr
Flickr (www.Flickr.com) started as a community to efficiently share your photos with the rest of the world, in addition to your own circle of friends. Through Flickr you can post your photos, organize them, comment on them, and allow comments from others. Plus their still in beta which means they haven’t “gotten all corporate” yet. Their service currently allows you to share your 100 most recent photos or you can pay a service fee to share an unlimited number of photos if you wish. The reason Flickr is discussed here is because it’s become a popular way of posting photos to your blog. Their tools work with a majority of blog hosts, and even if you’re not quite ready to start blogging, it’s a fantastic place to start sharing your photos with others, and enjoy a community truly built for idea/ photo sharing.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal (www.LiveJournal.com) is another popular product of Six Apart. As the name describes, it’s aptly suited for bloggers who wish to post journal entries to the web. The LiveJournal community of users is truly built around interacting with people on a personal level; allowing users to post lists of their favorite things and share them for other users to find. It promotes friendship development, and in addition to Blogger.com’s standard feature set, has the added ability to lock-down your blog like Area 51. For each post, an author can decide who in the LiveJournal (and general web) community can see that post, and private pages will not be found without user approval. LiveJournal is originally based on an open-source project, and now offers low-cost premium options for paying users. It might not be open-source ideology; however it does cost money to serve 6 million user’s blogs.

Blogging is ready for the masses, and whether you wish to share your plans for world domination, or simply break up the monotony of the web with the sound of your voice, a good place to start is the services mentioned above.

Sean Rekhi is webmaster for DashingMan.com, and also authors a business and technology blog at www.SinkRoutine.Blogspot.com.