Welcome to the New Media, Pt. 2

This is the second in a three part series. You can find the first part here. In that part, we covered some of the new ways that people are getting their music out. In this installment, we'll cover talk radio.

I'll admit it right now: I'm a talk radio junkie. The radio in my car is more likely to be tuned to ESPN or Fox Sports Radio than it is to music. I think it's partially my frustration with how modern music radio rarely plays anything that I actually like. I've basically turned into my father when it comes to being a music curmudgeon. Maybe that's why I'm so enamored with my iPod and the fact that I can listen to whatever music I want to (as long as I own it) whenever I want. That's also how I'm coming to prefer my talk radio. You see, along with being able to carry music inMP3 format on my player, I'm also able to bring along podcasts. Yes, I know that word is starting to fall into the same range of annoyance as "Web 2.0" when it comes to overused buzz words, but until they come up with a better name for it, that's just what we have to go with.

For those who don't know, podcasts are periodic audio or video content that can be delivered automatically to your computer and then uploaded to the MP3 player of your choice, or simply burned to a CD to be listed to at your leisure. The format and content come in as many flavors as there are along the radio dial. The key, however, is the fact that these podcasts are able to be targeted to a very specific audience since the expense for producing a show is relatively low, depending on the level of professionalism that thepodcast desires. There are shows that focus on technological issues (such as This Week in Tech), sports (The Fantasy Football Guys, The NBA Show), and, of course, drunken debauchery (Michael and Evo's Wingin' It and Diggnation). The point that I'm trying to make is that if you want something to find out more about, there's probably a podcast about it, and you can download and listen to it when you want to and not based on whatever schedule someone decides on. On the video side, there's comedy (TikiBar TV), video games (PC Gamer) and even a cooking show (Ctrl+Alt+Chicken).

Now that podcasting has been catching on a bit, some of the larger media players are starting to do their own podcasts. C|Net is doing a daily tech podcast that covers some of the top tech stories of the day. Wow, that was redundant. ESPN is podcasting portions of some of their radio shows (for the whole show, they provide a fee-based download) along with podcasting PTI in its entirety. "The World's Finest News Source," The Onion also is podcasting a news story every day. They make me smile. Podcasting is what you want when you want it where you want to listen to it.

The big problem with podcasting is that it is very hard to monetize . How do you prove to advertisers how many listeners you're able to deliver for each episode? How do you format the ads? After all, one of the things that people like most aboutpodcasting is the Tivo-like quality of no or very few ads, so a content provider needs to find a way to make their ads unobtrusive enough to not alienate their audiences while still bringing in the ad revenue. There are also the avenues of merchandise sales such as Teeshirts, coffee mugs and thongs. I know I've always wanted intimate apparel with my favoritepodcasting personality's logo on it.