The new big thing is coming…
… and that thing is podcasting. Any iPhone user will probably have noticed the little purple Apple Podcast Logo 
nestled within their app icons. This is new. It wasn’t there before and now, and with it, millions of people are discovering a new thing to shove in their ear-holes. This is good. Apple have suddenly achieved what longstanding audio companies like SoundCloud and Audioboo have failed (read as: not allowed) to do in one tappy click: this is easy.
But this alone is not enough:
there needs to be creation, not just consumption.
Along comes Alex Bloomberg with his company ‘Gimlet Media‘ and the subscribers, well, the numbers run into the tens! Gimlet is all about podcasting the business of starting a podcasting business. Seriously meta there for you.
Why is this big? Because Alex is big. He’s a producer for This American Life and Planet Money, and operating out of New York, oh and one more thing… he’s just nabbed $1.5 million in investment funding. Not only that but, in his Startup podcast, you get to hear from (some of) the (potential) investors about the expectations, and driving motivations. Where is Gimlet heading? What does it want to achieve? For that you’ll need to click the purple podcast icon and search for it yourself.
But that aside, I have my ear to the ground and I’ve noticed a ripple of connected-ness. We’re all commuting, with earplugs in; we’ve all the music we could ever want; we’ve gone long enough without talking to new people; we’ve all been exposed to serial fiction tv shows and want more of it; we’ve all the bandwidth speeds we need; we’ve played around for long enough with content production, and now, we’ve got the purple icon incentive to click ‘play’.
This is coming – it’s already hit me – and more and more people appear to be mentioning great shows to listen to as they travel about their business or wait patiently in line for their business to arrive. Personally, I’m loving Better Off Undead and from the same guys over at the Self-Publishing Podcast.
What do you think? Have you started listening to podcasts recently? Or am I the only one?
Mark
About the photo: the BacktoFront show is a nice blog about the tech web by Kieran and Keir – you should give it a go if you like that sort of thing.
Related articles: The new radio stars: welcome to the podcast age (theverge.com)