Last night or technically very early this morning, I was honored to be asked to call in as a guest on Strange Love Live. For those of you that don’t know, Strange Love Live is a great technology oriented streaming video show based out of Portland. Of course, the show is also available to watch on their website, via download or through their podcast feed. The segment which I was on was after the main show was over, so I’m not sure if it will be available to watch later via podcast or not. I’ll update this post later with a link if it does become available.

Last night’s episode of Strange Love Live was dedicated to discussing predictions for 2010. Since Dr. Normal and I are friends on Twitter, he saw my post yesterday with predictions. Since my predictions on video and podcasting touch on areas of interest to their show, they read and discussed those predictions. (You can find those predictions here.) During that discussion, Rick Turoczy of Silicon Florist fame made a prediction that Google would find a way to index and make podcasts searchable in 2010 using technology similar to that used in Google Voice’s speech to text voicemail transcriptions. If Google were able to do that well, it could mean that people would more easily find the content they were looking for in podcasts, thereby bringing podcasts to a wider audience. I totally agree that something like that would be a huge benefit to podcasting, but I personally doubt that it will be available before 2010 is over.

There is a company that indexed audio and allowed you to search for spoken words a couple years back, but I can’t find the site in any of my recent searches, so maybe it’s gone. I do know that Google did this with political videos during the 2008 election campaign in one of their Google Labs projects: Google Audio Indexing. The challenge for Google is to index the audio for all the audio and video content that is flying around as podcasts. It’s possible they might start with all the video on YouTube and branch out from there though. Could that mean that video or audio that was hosted elsewhere would be left out in the cold? Possibly. At least in the short run I think that is very likely. Are considerations like that why Talli and I put her Being Healthy TV video podcasts on both Blip.tv (whose quality I like better) and on YouTube? Definitely. That and the fact that people were more likely to stumble across our content on YouTube than on any other video hosting site.

Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal made some good points about the role of Big Media, money and celebrity making it difficult, but not impossible, for independent producers to become big players through streaming, podcasting, etc. I won’t try to give their points here because, to be honest, by that time we must have been nearing 1 am and I can’t be trusted to not confuse who said what.

What I can say is that we somewhat agreed that there would be a big divide between mainstream celebrity and internet celebrity for quite some time to come. That gap comes from all the money that Big Media has to promote their media properties and the stars that they employ. An Ashton Kutcher can talk all he wants about how anyone can be famous and do it on their own, but let’s face it, it’s easier to do it on your own when you’re already famous. It’s much harder to get in front of your camera and throw your show up on the internet and get it noticed without that fame. 9,999 times out of 10,000, nobody will ever even see your stuff without good promotion. If you do promote it and promote it hard, it’s still enormously difficult to get noticed by more than a few thousand people. An audience a few thousand strong is a great thing to have, don’t get me wrong, but it’s hardly the numbers that will enable someone to make a living.

We covered so much more than I’ve touched on here, but it would take much too long to write up what took almost thirty minutes to cover on the show. Hopefully, the show will get put up as video for Strange Love Live or possibly as audio on Dr. Normal’s other show, Crazy Talk. Whether or not the segment I was on gets put up though, you should check out those shows or Cami Kaos & Rick Turoczy’s other video show, MemePDX. Those podcasts cover some great Portland related tech as well as other tech topics beyond Portland.

(Update: Here’s the link to the show my post was discussed on and here’s the link to my appearance, which made the CrazyTalk podcast.)

Related posts:

  1. Obligatory 2010 Trend Predictions