I had the good fortune to spend some time with David Weinberger at Syndicate. David is the author of Joho, as well as several other blogs, and is at work on a book about tagging.

I’ll admit that I never gave tagging much thought before speaking to David, but after hearing his perspectives on the potential of this very simple yet powerful technology, I am kind of bowled over.

Think of the Internet as a vast collection of information about very specific topics. For the most part, we have limited information about how to find and identify these topics. Authors tag – or self-classify – their own information because they have to tell people where they think that information should be stored. Publishers and sellers may add to or modify those classifications, but the reality is that they probably don’t change much from what the author intially defined.

In a world bounded by physical limitations, these rigid and very inflexible classifications were necessary. The Dewey Decimal System, for example, dictated that a work of non-fiction had to occupy a single physical space on a shelf, even if that book covered a broad variety of topics. You had to do that in a physical world. But in a virtual world, there’s no need for that kind of rigidity. A book or an article about the Civil War, for example, may belong in the history, military, sociology, anthropology, government and geography sections of a library. You couldn’t possibly classify it that way with a conventional library system. But you can do that – and much more – with tags.

Tags allow authors to self-classify their work – whether it be a book or a blog post – in multiple categories. But what’s cool about services like del.icio.us, digg, TagWorld and many others is that they enable the community to also tag content. So not only authors but readers can classify what an article or other work is about. That means that over time, content can be indexed by what the readers think it is and not just by what the author believes it is.

Think about this, because it’s very powerful. Tags will eventually enable us to subscribe to people, not just to content. I’ll be able to read about what you’re saying about a very specific topic while ignoring what you say about everything else. No offense, but that’s how I’d rather consume information.

Tagging can be applied to anything because anyone can tag any content. So the New York Times can put out an article on Iraq, for example, but if readers decide it’s really an article about Bush’s political agenda, they’ll tag it that way and the classification of that article will change. Over the long term, tagging takes classification out of the hands of the authors and puts it in the hands of the readers. There are plenty of pros and cons to that. I’m not sure I entirely like it, but I’m intrigued by its potential.

David Weinberger has a book coming out on this topic next spring. I’m know it’s going to be on my reading list.

The two hosts of Mommycast – Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger – were on my podcast panel at Syndicate yesterday. Later, they generously gave me 45 minutes for an interview. It wasn’t hard to see why their program has been successful.

The secret of a co-hosted program is chemistry. The Mommycast formula is straight out of the comedy team mold. Gretchen is the reserved one. She’s had a 25-year career in dance instruction and has owned her own dance studio. She has that Germanic disciplined demeanor that belies a planner

Paige makes up life as she goes along. She admits she hasn’t held any one job for more than four years. That one was as a school bus driver, an incongruous image for one so petite. She’s impulsive, irreverent and chatty, even bubbly. Gretchen is the wise mom. Paige (despite having five kids) comes is the irreverent teenager. They’re perfect together.

Everything has gone right for Mommycast. They’re being approached by terrestrial radio networks that want to take Mommycast to the airwaves. They’ve had inquiries about books and paid endorsements. Dixie, their main sponsor, wants to align as closely as possible with this duo, who bring the dual benefits of family values and Internet coolness. Gretchen and Paige are featured on a back-to-school CD package Dixie is preparing for the fall and the cup maker wants to do more. They have endorsement requests. Movie studios, smitten by the pair’s impact on March of the Penguins (Warner has attributed 25% of the film’s revenues to Mommycast’s recommendations) are inviting them to preview new films.

Paige and Gretchen can take this as far as they want to take it. They may turn out to be the first podcasters to become pop culture icons. It couldn’t happen to two nicer people.

There’s a bit of a preaching-to-the-choir quality to Syndicate. Most of the attendees appear to be bloggers or social media companies. A lot of people are asking where the marketers and ad agency people are. It’s a good question, since Syndicate was sited in Manhattan presumably to reach these people.

I suspect this deficit is indicative of the head-in-the-sand attitude of mainstream marketing toward social media. One possibility is that marketers are scared. They’re deer in the headlights of a fundamental change in the way business and consumer customers want to be reached. So instead of dealing with the change, they’re denying it and simply hoping it’ll go away. A lot of these people will lose their jobs, in the same way that hundreds of CIOs were fired in the 80s and 90s because they refused to make the transition to end-user computing. The value proposition of direct-to-customer marketing is too compelling for this industry not to grow a lot. Marketers who aren’t embracing this change are signing their own walking papers.

A more cynical theory I’ve heard here is that marketers and agencies don’t want to embrace this media because it’s so cost-efficient. A three-month viral marketing campaign can cost less than a single 30-second TV commercial. If you define your value to an organization in terms of the size of your budget, are you going to embrace a new approach that promises to substantially reduce that budget? It doesn’t matter that you’re delivering greater efficiency and lower cost. Budget-cutting is a sign of weakness in most organizations. And ad agencies are hardly going to support a strategy that reduces their commissions.

An agency that gets it is NightAgency. Check out this new viral campaign they did for Symantec called SafetyTown.

Richard Edelman is championing the need for PR agencies to completely change the way they work and has some sharp words for corporate marketers, most of whom are still focused on controlling the message. “You cannot control the message. You have to accept that fact.” He cites the GM chevyapprentice.com campaign as an example of how a company took a chance, got some flack, admitted there were some negative results and moved on.

He says corporations that don’t accept the need for a conversation-based approach to the business are burying their heads on the sand. “Only 30 of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging. That’s pathetic.”

“You cannot just have a top-down conversation where you buy a certian number of impressions,” he said of conventional marketing wisdom. “It’s a horizontal conversation. It’s top down, peer-to-peer and an open discussion.”

Conversation-based marketing is scaring advertisers “The ad guys are terrified. This is ruining their revenue model.” He’s clearly positioning PR agencies as being competitive with advertising agencies in social media and having a chance of stealing away some ad business.

There’s a lot of discussion at Syndicate about tagging, with the first session with Jeff Jarvis evolving into an extended debate over Technorati’s tag-reading algorithms. Technorati’s David Sifry was in the room to defend his company but people were using the wireless network to point out Technorati’s inadequacies in real time. It was lively but a little out of hand.

There were some interesting points on the lack of tagging standards or metadata for blogs. One is that there are too many standards, some open, some proprietary. Standards are needed. Second problem is that too few bloggers even use tags because they don’t understand them or don’t see value in them. One audience member put it well: “It’s like a giant Tower of Babel populated by mutes. We’ve got multiple languages but nobody’s using them. “

I’ll be blogging from the Syndicate conference in NYC for the next two days. Lots of great speakers: Jeff Jarvis, Richard Edelman, Scott Sigler, Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and on and on. Should be fun. Will try to post photos!

Rightlook Radio is an example of a small business that’s using podcasting to grow its profile and establish leadership in its field. The San Diego-based company provides education, training and materials to support people in the auto reconditioning business. It has 20 employees and has been growing between 30% and 50% each year since its founding in 1998.

Stephen Powers is the founder and president. He has been reconditioning cars since he was 17. Powers is savvy about technology and he’s a born marketer. Rightlook’s slick website is a cut above anything else in his business.

When Powers was introduced to podcasting last year, he immediately saw its potential for his business. He spoke to some experts in this field and then invested about $5,000 in good quality equipment. This is important because podcast quality is a differentiator. Rightlook had some experience in multimedia, since it already produced videos for its own training programs.

Rightlook Radio launched early this year. The format is talk show style, with extensive first party interviews with customers. Its purpose is to demonstrate the potential of auto reconditioning as a career and convince people that Rightlook services can help them grow their business.

Format decisions are important. Rightlook could have gone with more of an instructional approach but chose to highlight the founder’s personality and customer successes. This works for Rightlook because Powers has an engaging, friendly style and he’s a natural for radio. Interviews with customers help reinforce the message that auto reconditioning is a great way to make a living. The interviewer is a female employee, which is a good choice because it infers that this is a good business for women, too. In fact, one of the shows spotlighted a reconditioning business run by women.

Powers is clearly a born marketer. Rightlook has promoted the podcast in full page ads in a Professional Car Washing & Detailing magazine (yes, there really is one!) as well as including it in other advertising, both print and online. The company published press releases and made t-shirts. When clients come to visit, they get a tour of the professional-looking studio. Rightlook looks hip and in step with technology.

Powers doesn’t have any hard statistics on the podcast’s success, but says downloads have been in the thousands. It doesn’t really matter. The whole program paid for itself after one customer signed a $24,000 deal after following a salesman’s recommendation that he listened to the podcast. Another show about ozone machines resulted in the sale of several machines in the days after the podcast launched.

Continuing the series is a no-brainer. Operational costs are next to nothing, and the buzz and visibility that the program generates in its industry is well worth the effort, Powers says. “Without question, we’re going to continue to do this for a long time,” he says. Podcast are also an interesting potential channel for delivery of training and marketing materials.

Thanks for Michael Geoghegan for the referral to Rightlook.

Did you catch the quote from Howard Stern that the Associated Press reported this week? It was in response to reports that terrestrial radio networks were trying to get Stern to ditch the satellite show and come back to poppa.

“‘I’m very flattered terrestrial radio can’t let go of me,’ Stern said Wednesday on his morning radio show. ‘But I would throw up if I had to go back. I’m never going back.'”

The quote sounded so familiar to me, so I went back to the notes from my January interview with Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ who’s one of the pioneers of podcasting. Here’s what he said:

“When you’re in a “professional” broadcast environment you’re always thinking about rules you have to adhere to, such as language, corporate rules. With podcasts, your filters are all self-imposed….This is why I’m doing this stuff. I’ve always had the man above me telling me what I can and can’t say…Listeners get tuned in and they love [podcasts]. They’re walking away from radio and turning to podcasts because radio has been relegated by marketing and packaging into something that’s very tightly formatted. It’s so homogenized that people just said ‘screw it.'”

So here you’ve got two notable, successful, in-demand broadcast personalities who are saying no to big bucks and big audiences because they don’t want to deal with the hassles of sponsor pressure, corporate suits and the FCC. If you were a mainstream media executive, do you think this would make you just a tiny bit nervous?

I’m not a zealot about social media and I don’t believe mainstream broadcasting is going away, not now and not ever. But it is going to have to change if it’s going to continue to attract the kind of talent that will keep it innovative and in-touch with its audience. A lot of that talent is bleeding away to alternative outlets.

Just as a kicker, last week I spoke to Paige Heninger and Gretchen Vogelzang, hosts of the phenomenally successful Mommycast podcast program. They have also been approached by commercial radio about taking their program to the airwaves and they are resisting. The reason? They don’t want to lose control.

Lots of people are trying to figure out how to make money with podcasting, a medium that has some structural barriers to audience tracking. Media Post’s excellent OMMA Magazine notes a couple of interesting efforts in the latest issue.

Kiptronic has a service that connects podcasters with advertisers interested in reaching their audience. The service inserts a short ad at the beginning and/or end of a podcast at download time. The podcaster doesn’t have to do anything and the actual podcast file isn’t altered. The service is only four months old, so the company isn’t referencing customers yet, but it’s an interesting approach to making audio advertising as Adsense-like as possible.

Perhaps an even more intriguing idea comes from Podbridge, which claims to have technology that can tell who has actually listened to a podcast, not just who has downloaded it. Users provide demographic information (anonymously) when they first sign up for the service and then the Podbridge software tracks which podcasts they listen to and shoots that information back to the advertisers.

If Podbridge has really solved the problem of monitoring which podcasts get heard, then it has achieved a major breakthrough. However, the site has no detail that I could find on how this game-changing technology works. Not to mention why users would choose to sign up for a service, the main purpose of which is to devliver ads to them. The company is brand new, so it’ll be a while before we know whether its delivery matches up to its promises.

I’m writing a book about social media to be published by Quill Driver Books in early 2007. The working title is The New Influencers and it’s a book for marketers about how bloggers and podcasters are influencing markets and what makes them tick. It’s a book about humans, not technology.

I’m looking for people who are willing to share stories. In particular, I’m interested in stories about people have used personal publishing to make a difference in a market they really care about. The change doesn’t have to be seismic and you don’t even have to be the one doing publishing. Maybe you work in a marketing department that had to react to a blog swarm or used a viral marketing campaign to great success. Or maybe you were just a bystander watching an conversation play out in the blogosphere that advanced the cause of a company or its customers. The Dell Hells of the world have been well documented. I’m looking for some of the thousands of other ongoing stories of how people are making a difference in markets by expressing their opinions.

If you have a story to tell, please post a summary here and include your contact information. Or e-mail me a quick description. I’ll be in active research mode for next couple of months, so any good ideas are welcome. Thank you!