David Emery Online

One Year

27 March 2007

Time for something completely different. Today (and this idea is totally stolen from nostrich.net) I’m going to look back 1 year to see what I was writing about then, and how right or off-base I was.

First up is Free is much better in which I proclaim that we’re all screwed.

About podcasts, at least.

Luckily – and I’m not normally quite so happy to be proved wrong – the Ricky Gervais podcast, which moved to a pay-for model in it’s highly successful second season, seems to have been a one-off with no major people following in their footsteps. Indeed, the latest season has switched back to a free, sponsor-based system, although it also seems to be made available as a audiobook (which does cost). I have a sneaking suspicion that we have been saved from this fate by Apple, although merely accidentally.

Apple have surprisingly little time for things that fall outside of their core music store business – witness the fate of music videos, which take an age to get onto the store and still number in their hundreds, not thousands. The same applies, I think, for paid podcasts – Apple just don’t have the time, or don’t think it’s worth finding the time, to starting getting podcasts onto the store to sell.

Next up is A person who tells anecdotes in a skillful and amusing way, which briefly mentions a very small (~150 people) Raconteurs gig that I went to – it probably turned out that it was my best gig of 2006. Very gratifying that they went on to do so well, although it wasn’t too surprising considering the genius that is Jack White…

Feed you. 400 feeds last year, 622 this year.

Continuing on the RSS theme, in Feed I talked up the inherent problems with RSS. Sadly, I don’t think any of the usability problems have been fixed in any real way – RSS readers on the whole still haven’t got any smarter when presenting updated (as opposed to new) items, and people still post half a dozen different feeds on their site (for no real reason whatsoever).

From my own anecdotal evidence, RSS usage is slowly on the up; of the sites I manage all of their RSS feeds have grown in users, and I know more and more “non techy” people that are using it. I do have a feeling, though, that it’s going to plateau fairly quickly – most people just don’t browse enough sites to make it worthwhile.

The ideas set out in Music-Pass I still think are pretty great ideas; the whole concept of abandoning the album format and moving to a more off-the-cuff, online distributed model – possibly including subscription to either an artist or a label – will happen, it’s just a matter of timing and the right artist/label combination.