Podcasts to Hit Inflection Point in ’07

Dur­ing a radio inter­view yes­ter­day (iTunes — mp3), Jon Gor­don, the host of Future Tense, asked me

whether uni­ver­si­ties will con­tin­ue pour­ing con­tent into their iTunes troves in 2007. The answer boiled down to this: Pod­cast­ing stands poised to pro­lif­er­ate in ’07, much like the web did back in ’95 and ’96. Just a year ago, the New Oxford Amer­i­can Dic­tio­nary select­ed “pod­cast” as the “Word of the Year.” The buzz is out there. But how many peo­ple have ever lis­tened to a pod­cast first­hand? It turns out not too many. In a recent sur­vey, the Pew Research Cen­ter found that only 12% of web users have ever worked with pod­casts (as com­pared to 7% one year pri­or), and only 1% down­load them dai­ly. These num­bers are part­ly a reflec­tion of sup­ply and demand. Not too long ago, pod­casts were fair­ly lim­it­ed in num­ber. But, dur­ing the past 12 months, many uni­ver­si­ties (see our full col­lec­tion) have carved out some space on iTunes and devel­oped sub­stan­tial col­lec­tions. Some­where in ’07, we should hit an inflec­tion point. Sup­ply will increase demand. Demand will trig­ger more sup­ply. We’ll see expo­nen­tial growth and nev­er look back. The days where you could per­son­al­ly keep tabs on all the great new pod­casts will sim­ply be over, although we’ll sift through them and high­light what’s worth your time.

Resources Men­tioned in Inter­view:

• UC Berke­ley’s 59 cours­es avail­able via pod­cast
• Stan­ford cours­es avail­able via Pod­cast
  • The Lit­er­a­ture of Cri­sis
  • Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Quan­tum Entan­gle­ment (Video)
  • The His­tor­i­cal Jesus
• Stan­ford Lec­tures
  • Fac­ul­ty Lec­tures
  • Vis­it­ing Lec­tures