Datasheet

American Life, but what he created was uniquely Dave Slusher. What did it do for Slusher? His Evil

Genius Chronicles podcast became a source of revenue from sponsors and the sale of a small collec-

tion of Evil Genius t-shirts, as well as advertising revenue from his blog, which saw more traffic.

The show also made people aware of his coding skills, bringing him consulting work and, basically,

making his effort to earn a living more flexible than he dreamed it could be.

The podcast is, for most people, another piece in a complex puzzle that makes an economic life

possible. But it won’t always be so.

Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus, a married couple living on a shuttered dairy farm in Wisconsin,

launched a funny, truthful show about marriage — their marriage and everyone else’s — that com-

bined banter and sex, sometimes recorded for The Dawn and Drew Show (see Figure 1.2). Dawn

and Drew became some of the first to “go pro” as podcasters, earning their living on podcasting

after a year “on the air.” Their show is sponsored, and they won a slot on Sirius Satellite Radio. The

couple has become something like celebrities, but not quite so full of bull as most of what passes

for celebrity, because it is not manufactured but captured in sound.

Podcasting: Where It Came From and Where It’s Going

Part I

The Longer Tail

odcasting’s history is evaporating as quickly as storage limits for hosting accounts fill up. We can’t

tell you what Adam Curry said, because there’s no copy of the file accessible through any links

exposed by Google and other search engines. Podcasters are often forced to purge their archives to

keep their costs low, yet all these older programs make up the “long tail,” the vast catalog of content

that can serve the incredibly diverse interests of listeners for many years, but only if the programs

remain available. What made the long tail interesting in the first place was the notion that at a site

like iTunes or Amazon, which make available titles that couldn’t be stocked in a retail store on CD

or on shelves, was the fact that almost every title would sell in a year.

The problem podcasting has is a shortage of storage, which organizations like The Internet Archive

(

http://www.archive.org/) and Our Media (http://www.ourmedia.org/) are seeking to

ameliorate by providing free storage to content that can be freely reused.

OurMedia’s message: Share and share alike

However, podcasters have to know to go to these sites and upload their programs, and if they want

to protect the content, they are left on their own. In the former case, society loses out, and in the lat-

ter, audiences and producers lose. As podcasting matures, a full range of business and sharing mod-

els will be needed to preserve the creative efforts of so many people.

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