Public Radio, podcasting, the future of information
Here is an interesting article:
NPR defining new Podcast strategy.
NPR has had an agreement with Audible.com, but didn’t renew their contract and will be announcing a new policy “for making NPR content downloadable and portable.”
A somewhat related story,
The Future Of Public Radio by
Doug Kaye, 8/10/05, has some interesting
ideas about high cost of production, low cost
of distribution, the “long-tail,” the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” and so forth. Sample:
If you haven’t read
that book [The Innovator's Dilemma] by Clay Christensen, you really should. As it applies in this
instance, the dilemma is that the established organizations can only
approach innovation on the basis of protecting their current way of
operating.But the real problem is coming from the fact that listeners want
long-tail time-shifted content. They want to hear programs that are more
meaningful to them, and they want to listen at their convenience. The
entire broadcast-radio system, with its distribution, simply can’t
provide what the customers want.
Are libraries faced with an Innovator’s Dilemma? Libraries
don’t face the same market issues, but libraries do have to
have a service that, on average (read: “including long-tail contents
and services”) is worth funding. It is discouraging that
so much library-like innovation is happening outside libraries at places like
the Google library project and del.icio.us and the Internet Archive, but it is encouraging that libraries are
seeing the importance of digital preservation in a way they didn’t a few
years ago and that so much good digital preservation work is being done within the library community.