What's Stopping You?

If you’re on my facebook feed, you’ve seen me ranting about the inadequacies of my new iPad’s user interface.

~sigh~ The podcast world continues to suffer the same problems that drove me nuts back in 2008, which is the last time I got super excited about New Media(CC). Even the video podcast world suffers from these problems, which I find really surprising — and its really, really clear that none of the major software developers out there have spent any time thinking about the CONSUMERS of podcasts. Like the self-publishing world, the underlying assumption is that this is all pointless narcissism on the part of some much abused-consumer who does not actually produce anything of substance or value. That there is no actual audience for these products, and the money lies entirely in catering to the producers of this content, and not their audience.

And truthfully, this is because the bell curve for these markets does show that the majority of these product consumers are amateurs. But maybe that’s because no one is producing software that encourages them to be anything else.

“You can print photos straight from your phone!”

“Just press record and it autmatically uploads to Youtube when you’re done!”

The difference between an amateur and a professional is that they edit their work. Professional authors have editors and publishers. Movies show different versions to test markets. Computer games beta test their games. Hellfire, even politicians test market their speeches.

Steam now offers fledgling game designers the opportunity sell “Alpha Testing Rights” on their network, bringing in capital, pre-sales advertising and feedback into the game design.

So why do podcasts, podiobooks, self-published authors and so many photogra….so many people who own cameras think they can just send it straight to mass publication, and then convince themselves that the reason their work looks so amateurish is because they’re not any good at what they do.

I cannot find a marketplace for podcasts that will tell you if a series is still active. I can barely find one that let’s you sort out the non-English language ones.

You want to have some fun sometimes, try browsing the iTunes store for Religious/Spiritual podcasts that aren’t about Christianity without using the search bar.

Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. You can comment here or there.