Podcasting is taking off with amazing speed and this is a very exciting development. I am convinced this will be the future of Internet audio, at least until digital streaming to cell phones comes along. An article in the Wall Street Journal points out that Apple and Microsoft are both going to build podcast readers into their operating systems and that personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are recording podcasts. There is so much to like about podcasting that it’s hard to believe that the move to this offline audio broadcasting won’t be dramatic and very disruptive to convential broacast media.

I’ve been a fan of offline audio for nearly 10 years. I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal on a service called Audible.com since 1996, and I feel an emptiness in my day if I don’t get my WSJ fix.

Yet I don’t think podcasts will send terrestrial broadcasting into the toilet or shake up people’s behavior in the short term. Podcasting is in the hype tornado right now. All kinds of media outlets are jumping on board and individual podcasters are testing this newfound electronic pulpit. But the fact is that most podcasts are really pretty awful. While listening to someone get up and pour himself a cup of coffee in the middle of a podcast may be novel and cute at the moment, in the long term the audiences will migrate to the more polished programmers. Like blogs, podcasts will give a voice to those who choose to use it, but the most successful podcasters will be the most polished. Still, expect that the podcasting movement will produce a few new stars.

The real impact of podcasting — as of any new medium — will be felt years down the road. Terrestrial radio has its work cut out for it as more and more of the two million MP3 player owners discover they can effectively program their own radio stations. Podcasting is to radio what TiVo is to TV, and broadcasters must adjust.

If you’re an IT pro or if you just like following the industry, check out Doug Kaye’s excellent IT Conversations podcast site. He’s posted hundreds of interviews and speeches from major technology conferences, including speakers like Lawrence Lessig, Clayton Christensen and Steve Wozniak. Doug isn’t trying to make money with this site. He just wants to share this wonderful stuff. Send him a donation.

I’ll start by citing a statement I made in my annual predictions column, this one for 2004:

Blogging’s wave has already crested now that millions of online diarists are realizing that not that many people actually read this stuff.
I missed this one by a mile because I was looking at things from the wrong perspective.

The Internet is important not because it’s a broadcast medium but because it’s a narrowcast medium. A lot of publishers made this basic mistake in the early years of the Web; they assumed that the Internet was simply another channel by which to deliver their broad and homogenized information. In fact, what the ‘Net created was a means for people with highly specific interests to connect with each other. The economics of this model didn’t make any sense in the traditional media business. We knew how to build businesses by delivering content to a million people, but not how to build them around audiences of a few hundred.

My own company, TechTarget, has been successful because it figured out the latter problem. You can build a successful business around select and small audiences if they’re the right people. You don’t get multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad deals out of the approach, but you can get a lot of smaller sales that aggregate to the same thing. You just have to approach the problem differently.

The error in my thinking two years ago was that I thought blogging was all about appealing to big audiences. It’s not. In the tech industry, people like Dave Winer, Mitchell Kapor, Jon Udell and Ray Ozzie define the blogosphere. They may not attract millions of readers, but they do attract a few thousand very committed viewers and that’s enough. That’s a proof of concept.

After 23 years in the tech journalism business, I’ve learned a little about a lot of things and not a lot about anything. I’ll leave depth to the people who know their fields very well: the Ray Ozzies and Dave Winers of the world. They are the core of the blog movement. The value that I can provide is in giving some context to the events that are going on in the tech sphere every day. Believe it or not, not a whole lot is new out there and much of the politics and intrigue of this industry has a predictable pattern. What isn’t predictable is the disruptive effects of new technology: how declining storage prices can lead to new applications of data mining or how global positioning systems can change the face of industrial logistics. That’s what really excites me about this industry: Little changes can have very big ripple effects. I’ll try to predict some of those changes in this blog.

And I’ll post a lot of silly pictures of my kids and my adventures. This is a diary, after all. 🙂

See you around. I hope you get something out of all this.