Blazing a trail and the “Dateline: RIT” brand
I’ve written quite a bit about audio beds and sound effects in prior posts and comments. I’ll end with this prediction:
More podcasters will increasingly utilize beds and sound effects. For listeners, they will help create what I described last time as ‘theater of the mind’ and mark a natural progression as a growing number of podcasts are created using sophisticated audio-editing software and sound studios—resulting in podcasts that sound more produced and polished (if you can, why wouldn’t you?).
I would further argue that very little about the five-year-old medium of podcasting can be considered “tried and true” . . . and today I’m blazing the trail.
Beyond differentiating and adding production value, the effects used in “”—specifically the teletype to sound effect—contribute to an overarching “Dateline: RIT” identity connecting the , and future Web site:
• “Dateline: RIT” name: Traditional newspaper dateline usage
• “Dateline: RIT” typeface (in the ): Old newspaper style
• Content: Pulled from the pages of newspapers and other publications
• Actualities and teletype sound effect (in the ): “Breaking news” direct from the UNS newsroom (like a radio newscast)
Coming up: The making of a podcast (hardware and software used) and a familiar voice (to me) in “The Coach’s Corner”
I am not sure I entirely agree that podcasting is five years old. Dave Winer exteded the RSS specification to include embedded media files in the summer of 2004 and Adam Curry used the new standard as a way to deliver his shows automatically to people. Adam was clever enough to call his show The Daily Source Code to attrack developers to his show so he could convince them to develop an application that would pull in the audio files and and push them to your mp3 players and iPods hence where the term podcast was made. The application was named iPodder (which would certainly be nailed by legal whoas now-a-days) and development continued until Apple included a more streamlined version of pulling in podcasts into iTunes early last year. I think the earlier arguments we had with the teletype machine wasn't so much it's use but it's volume and that it was distracting from the message that was being conveyed and it made it hard to understand...I think since that first podcast the teletype machine has gotten to the point where it isn't so hard to understand whoever is talking.
Although pinpointing the precise birth date of various technologies is problematic (in part because new communication technologies typically imitate earlier technologies)—and while true that the term “podcasting” is only a couple years old—the iPod itself is about five years old (see the Oct. 23 Newsweek article, “The Power of iPod”); and audio-file downloading to portable music players was popularized around the same time. (Remember the Rio? I was quoted in an early article about “just-for-me” technologies—including the Rio—in a September 2000 issue of Gavin magazine.) So let’s agree that “podcasting” is less than five years old—and that many regard Adam Curry as the father of podcasting. It provides even more reason to believe there’s little about podcasting that’s tried and true (which was my primary point in highlighting the relative “youthfulness” of podcasting).
[...] Next time: The “Dateline: RIT” brand and blazing a trail