| Home > News and Views > A new Podcast game: GillmorRoulette - just how long do you have to respect, no, wait until the Gillmor Gang podcast proper begins? A great source for Mac and other news spoilt by Advertising 2.0 |
| A new Podcast game: GillmorRoulette - just how long do you have to respect, no, wait until the Gillmor Gang podcast proper begins? A great source for Mac and other news spoilt by Advertising 2.0 | | Date Created: 03 Apr, 2006, 10:02 AM |
 I like listening to the Gillmor Gang to keep me updated with inside information about the goings on in some of the world that matters to me: IT and those who have a vision for where it's going and taking some of us.
It is now part of a syndicate known as the Podshow Network, with Adam Curry one of its principals. Indeed, Adam was interviewed by Steve Gillmor recently.
The Gillmor Gang has evolved over the past few years into a favoured podcast. Meaning it gets to be auto-downloaded into iTunes/iPod via NetNewswire, my RSS aggregator. This is what podcasting was meant to be at one stage.
I'm guessing many people from the Mac universe do the same, since Apple gets a frequent look in, especially since Steve Gillmor (above left) and a few others of the Gang use the latest MacBooks, and Apple is a favourite subject/whipping boy/model for who gets "it".
But of late as Steve has entered the World of Advertising 2.0 - ie., trying to earn money from his podcast - I have had to invent a new iTunes game to avoid the worst of his excesses: Interminably long advertorials gushing - OK, Steve never gushes - promoting his sponsors: Earthlink and Go Daddy.
The former is irrelevant to me here in Australia, although I have used its services once when travelling through the US (freebie AOL-type disk to get a temporary log-in using an old Powerbook 180 many years ago); while I have a web domain name and redirection via GoDaddy with whom I am very happy (end of non-paid statement of satisfaction - YMMV).
The new iTunes game is GillmorRoulette: pick a number between 1 and 7 and guess how long in minutes Steve's advertorial about his sponsors will be before the podcast proper begins, where mercifully, little or no mention is made again of his sponsors.
The Gillmor Gang I listened to today - all 1hr 21 mins and 74MB of download of it - had seven minutes of upfront promotional messages, spoken to me as if I really needed to know this info. I now move iTunes time marker to about the five minute marker and see if we are into the main podcast or if it's still the promo.
Today's seven minute promo. took me by surprise. Other times have been a minute to five minutes, perhaps and average or 3.
But it seems a little incongruous for Steve to ask us to "respect" Earthlink because it is an early adopter of Advertising 2.0, while disrespecting the listeners who must endure it each and every show (is it my imagination that some of the advertorials are cut-and-paste jobs from previous podcasts?) AND a 74MB download to boot!
It's not so bad I suppose for a 90 minute podcast to be that size if like me you have ADSL2+, but its recording properties could be cut back a little without loss of sonic quality, since it's purely vocal, and the file made considerably smaller.
So I'll keep playing GillmorRoulette until I somehow learn that Steve has changed tack and I can start listening from the beginning once more. It's not a total turn off, but I think there's a lesson here, of not abusing the friendship in the world of Web 2.0.
What an ironic loss of Attention he is inculcating. |
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