Those who read this blog daily (and I know how many of you there are!) know that I don't fisk. I'd rather point and giggle than tear down. But, the BBC article on podcasting is just begging for a little fisk glove treatment. It makes interesting reading, especially since it is so easy to actually talk to the people who pioneered podcasting (Dave and Adam). 
I don't have a problem with the research, but with the sneery sociology that the BBC push whenever the word podcast comes up. I have discussed this before, of course. They still keep doing it, and it's still about as interesting as a Dido record on repeat.
Even broadcasters can only take a rough guess at many people are actually listening to their podcasts.
You mean, like they do today with Nielsen ratings and the suchlike. Let me give you a tip: stop the stress over how many people listen. Count the IP's who are polling your RSS feed, and if they are asking on a regular basis, count them as a "subscriber". Put yourself in the magazine editor mindset and think of that as being equivalent to a magazine subscription rate. People's podcatchers might grab the file a few times because your servers suck, or what not, but if they are polling your RSS feed more than once a week, you can be pretty sure they are a "subscriber". Count in the numbers from services like Bloglines and Odeo, and you've got reasonably good working figures.
Programmes like In Our Time and From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4 are not the kinds of programmes people normally associated with the MP3 generation, said Ms Prag.
"You would expect Chris Moyles to do well but what this tells us is that Radio 4 is doing extraordinarily well," she told the BBC News website.
"It's knocked some of our assumptions on the head."
Oh, that might be because you believe that the "MP3 generation" are all a group of MySpace-addicted morons who can't sit still for longer than five minutes.
Perhaps that's because the television and music radio departments of the BBC are spending enormous amounts of time trying to target the Heat magazine market segment that you fail to realise that there are people out there with an IQ that reaches beyond that of Posh Spice who aren't particularly interested in celebrities.
Of course, the BBC have been doing this for years. I mean, for crying out loud, my parents - the British version of the Vietnam generation - have been complaining about the way that the BBC underestimate the intelligence of Radio 4 listeners. At every opportunity, the BBC have been shooting for this demographic of adult children who are at home in "txt spk" but can't put a sentence together.
Tip: they're out there. They're pretty fucking dumb. They've scraped the brain cells together to switch the computer on, but there's no way they are going to be downloading podcasts.
If the BBC want to know what their audience is for podcasts, let me clue them in. They're educated - usually got a degree, sometimes two - sometimes neither, but are self-educated to a similar level. They work in good jobs in urban areas. They're mostly male, but the females are the same. They're connected, and they don't accept bullshit.
I read somewhere the other day (perhaps I linked to it) of how geeks experience everything about a decade before everybody else. The example? Ringtones. We had them a decade before everyone else. Only we called them MIDI files. They still are. If I switch my phone on, I can add a ringtone by dragging a MIDI file to it over Bluetooth (which averages 5Kbps, btw).
And MIDI files were cool for about half an hour when we got our 16-bit SoundBlaster cards back in 1995. And then they got on to websites, and BGSOUND was cool for half an hour on our Geocities websites back in about 1996. Then it got boring and we found Napster.
Everyone else is now doing what we all got bored with back in 1996, only they've commercialised it, and are paying £2.99 to download the same files we were giggling about in 1996. I predict that in 2016, there's gonna be a lot of people going "Wow! You can, like, download radio programmes and put them on your MP3 player".
The report says that it will take a long time for people to ditch their transistors and join this small group of breakaways because downloading programmes is complicated and content is sparse.
That's funny. Nobody ever complained about the BBC "play it back" RealPlayer interface thing, even though that thing had the most horrible user experience imaginable. You had to go and download this shitty, bloated client to listen to a tinny, horrible feed of a programme. The web site was a monstruous frame-ridden beast.
As opposed to subscribing to a podcast which is - these days - mostly one-click. Look for the iTunes Subscribe link, click it, and you're done. Wait for your feeds to update, plug your iPod in and it's done.
Perhaps Danah Boyd is right - people really do prefer shitty interfaces to good ones. It certainly explains the success of MySpace.
As for their being a lack of content? Well, blow me down. I can't keep up with all the quality content available via podcast. It literally could entertain me 24/7. If I had the rights to do so, I could build a radio channel which would never run out of content.
