A question about PodCasting

Submitted by Anonymous on November 7, 2005 - 9:18am.

This is certainly a dilemma for any form of time-shifted delivery of media ... whether that be audio, video or anything else. We're actively monitoring our stats and they're quite interesting. It definately seems like there is a long tail phenomena in effect, but we still have a lot of work to do just comparing our podcast stats with those from our other web activities. There are also other questions ... like what are the consumption practices and who are the consumers? That should inform our practices as well. What percentage are CIOs, directors, staff ... are they more security specialists, instructional technologists, etc ... what percentage of our audience is from outside higher education? What percentage are domestic or international? What are their listening habits? Some will subscribe to an RSS feed and download everything (right now those downloads don't show up on drupal). Some will link directly to an MP3 from someone else's blog. Still others will selectively click on a permalink from an email and listen via the flash player while tethered to his/her own computer. If there were select audio/video materials that we wanted to make sure would reach a presdient or a CIO, would we be better served by ripping the content to a CD? Erghh. I don't like it but it is a question that we ask ourselves. How much listening time do busy professionals have in a week to consume podcasts ... or any other form of content. How do we reduce the signal to noise ratio? How do we lower the threshold for finding quality content amongst a mix of consumption patterns? For those that are veracious consumers of content, what is the return back to the community? How do we get more folks to contribute quality content? What types of collaborative environments do they want?We can intuit some of this from our web stats, but not nearly enough. How much should we invest in surveys and web analytics? Do we modify our systems to collect more information about consumption so that we're better informed? Not sure how to do this effectively without introducing barriers to consumption. If we had a great deal of intelligence about this, how would that shape our coverage. Should we pursue more audio or video ... for which audience? What should the format be? Should we have more interviews and less focus on delivering full coverage of conference sessions? Even for interviews, should they be more organic or more professionally scripted? Should the format be a formal monologue or more a debate with lots of voices? What should the quality level be? And how will that influence consumption patterns? Should our goal be to provide quality levels comparable to an ITConversations?This also begs the question about stats for our synchronous web events. How do the stats there compare to those for other web media ... streaming video, podcasting, and even the humble html ... text, images and well, PDFs and RSS more generally. If budgets for travel reduce markedly, does the consumption for "all things web" increase significantly? All of these things (and more) are definately on our minds. We're trying to approach the question of metrics very carefully. The good thing about some of the technologies (depending on how you use them) is that it many are fairly inexpensive to setup, but there is still a question of ROI. Now, having said all that, we're approaching a lot of this with a bit of a R&D slant ... let's invest a little in building our capacity for producing and delivering this content, try to develop some understanding about how to evaluate the success or failure and then try to see how we can adapt, scrap or build upon what we've learned in other areas. We're going to do more on the podcast front for a least one more year and continue experimenting with other forms of ICT to see when and where it makes sense to do what ... trying to become more nuanced about what we do, why and for who at each stage. The challenge is clearing time to make sure that we do effect assessment ... and glean what we can from our audience to make sure we're getting the right information to (and from) the right people, at the right time, via the right modality. That was a long winded comment, but hopefully there is something to be gleened from it. I will close with a personal note about my own podcast consumtion. I regularly listen to audio content from ITConversations on my commute to/from work ... and I love it. I've also had a long history of consuming audio content on planes, trains and automobiles ... but that was mostly from audio books. Now, I regularly tune into podcast materials. BTW, If you need a good place to find podcasts, I recommend Odeo. They're doing great work over there. Cheers, Matt

To badly paraphrase an old

Submitted by Anonymous on November 9, 2005 - 9:33am.

To badly paraphrase an old cliche, there are lies, damn lies, and web log statistics. I can understand the desire for valuable, informative data, but like Matt, I would not be in favor of anything that puts extra barriers in front of access to content... that is a losing proposition.Correct, just downloads don;t tell you much, though they could give you trends. I am not sure if podcast subscription tools such as iPodder, etc, provide a user agent on their request-- this might give some sense on the access logs what percentage of access to feeds is via subscribed downloads. Referrer data might also reveal a few things (e.g. if the link to an MP3 originated from a web page (blog summary) or directly form a feed link.Any of these numbers, if you are trying to get at user habits (e.g. how many they listen to, where they listen to, how much of a cast they listen to) are going to have to be done via some type of survey or focus group. Maybe with some reliable numbers there, you can back calculate some extrapolations based on total downloads.To me, this gets at more interesting topics- how people are doing that time-shift Matt mentions. But you could get evcen pickier and into murkier wonderings- I can have an hourlong podcast plugging in my ears, but what if I am not paying any attention?Frankly, it's all too new to expect a lot of "reliable" data. I find that people make little distinction between "podcasting" and just lumping MP3s on a server.And at some point soon, the novelty of this thing will pass, and folks will be ading in a glut of audio, trying to discern what ought to be listened to and what can be tossed. There will be gems of quality 'casts and scads of "shovel" audio-ware.Frankly from where I stand, I don;t put a whole lot of effort into trying to distill pure numbers on usage of new technologies, or what smells like alchemy of "ROI"-- we take some decent educated guesses at what works, try and get some feedback, make some mistakes, and adjust.And as for my own consumption, it's not much. I have a total of zero sites I regularly subscribe to for audio... I hand download ones from several sources or what other people blog about. I may listen to a few here and there when I am running or traveling in a plane, but I am just as motivated to listen to my choices in music. I think it is an effective medium that opught to be pushed, and there is some value in finding ways to get content to people in a place/time/mode of their choosing.

You make some excellent

Submitted by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on November 9, 2005 - 1:07pm.

You make some excellent points Alan. When I wrote the article I was hoping that there was some neat tool to do this that I was unaware of. Sadly there doesn't appear to be.Since we're listing our personal audio consumption: I don't consume audio I can't dance to, and prefer to consume it on the dancefloor.

		A question about PodCasting Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on November 6, 2005 I'm not someone who has engaged with the whole PodCasting thing, but I would have to be blind not to notice the wave of PodCasts on the Educause site, and also the extremely respectable number of hits many of them any getting. I have question though: how many of these hits (downloads) are actually listened to? Since I'm not a PodCast producer or consumer myself and never having used to tools, I have no real feeling whether these are downloaded and languish in forgotten corners of iPods, are listened too once, or are regularly revisited. The question is one of more than academic interest, since a number of centrally funded educational ICT services in the UK are expected to report usage statistics to bodies such as the JISC Monitoring unit and a failure of their ability to measure their impact could have impact on their on-going funding. If PodCast consumption cannot be reliably measured, then this makes their use much less attractive. Educational Podcasts \| ipod \| Podcasting \| Podcasts Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 3594 reads This is certainly a dilemma Submitted by Anonymous on November 7, 2005 - 9:18am. This is certainly a dilemma for any form of time-shifted delivery of media ... whether that be audio, video or anything else. We're actively monitoring our stats and they're quite interesting. It definately seems like there is a long tail phenomena in effect, but we still have a lot of work to do just comparing our podcast stats with those from our other web activities. There are also other questions ... like what are the consumption practices and who are the consumers? That should inform our practices as well. What percentage are CIOs, directors, staff ... are they more security specialists, instructional technologists, etc ... what percentage of our audience is from outside higher education? What percentage are domestic or international? What are their listening habits? Some will subscribe to an RSS feed and download everything (right now those downloads don't show up on drupal). Some will link directly to an MP3 from someone else's blog. Still others will selectively click on a permalink from an email and listen via the flash player while tethered to his/her own computer. If there were select audio/video materials that we wanted to make sure would reach a presdient or a CIO, would we be better served by ripping the content to a CD? Erghh. I don't like it but it is a question that we ask ourselves. How much listening time do busy professionals have in a week to consume podcasts ... or any other form of content. How do we reduce the signal to noise ratio? How do we lower the threshold for finding quality content amongst a mix of consumption patterns? For those that are veracious consumers of content, what is the return back to the community? How do we get more folks to contribute quality content? What types of collaborative environments do they want?We can intuit some of this from our web stats, but not nearly enough. How much should we invest in surveys and web analytics? Do we modify our systems to collect more information about consumption so that we're better informed? Not sure how to do this effectively without introducing barriers to consumption. If we had a great deal of intelligence about this, how would that shape our coverage. Should we pursue more audio or video ... for which audience? What should the format be? Should we have more interviews and less focus on delivering full coverage of conference sessions? Even for interviews, should they be more organic or more professionally scripted? Should the format be a formal monologue or more a debate with lots of voices? What should the quality level be? And how will that influence consumption patterns? Should our goal be to provide quality levels comparable to an ITConversations?This also begs the question about stats for our synchronous web events. How do the stats there compare to those for other web media ... streaming video, podcasting, and even the humble html ... text, images and well, PDFs and RSS more generally. If budgets for travel reduce markedly, does the consumption for "all things web" increase significantly? All of these things (and more) are definately on our minds. We're trying to approach the question of metrics very carefully. The good thing about some of the technologies (depending on how you use them) is that it many are fairly inexpensive to setup, but there is still a question of ROI. Now, having said all that, we're approaching a lot of this with a bit of a R&D slant ... let's invest a little in building our capacity for producing and delivering this content, try to develop some understanding about how to evaluate the success or failure and then try to see how we can adapt, scrap or build upon what we've learned in other areas. We're going to do more on the podcast front for a least one more year and continue experimenting with other forms of ICT to see when and where it makes sense to do what ... trying to become more nuanced about what we do, why and for who at each stage. The challenge is clearing time to make sure that we do effect assessment ... and glean what we can from our audience to make sure we're getting the right information to (and from) the right people, at the right time, via the right modality. That was a long winded comment, but hopefully there is something to be gleened from it. I will close with a personal note about my own podcast consumtion. I regularly listen to audio content from ITConversations on my commute to/from work ... and I love it. I've also had a long history of consuming audio content on planes, trains and automobiles ... but that was mostly from audio books. Now, I regularly tune into podcast materials. BTW, If you need a good place to find podcasts, I recommend Odeo. They're doing great work over there. Cheers, Matt Login or register to post comments To badly paraphrase an old Submitted by Anonymous on November 9, 2005 - 9:33am. To badly paraphrase an old cliche, there are lies, damn lies, and web log statistics. I can understand the desire for valuable, informative data, but like Matt, I would not be in favor of anything that puts extra barriers in front of access to content... that is a losing proposition.Correct, just downloads don;t tell you much, though they could give you trends. I am not sure if podcast subscription tools such as iPodder, etc, provide a user agent on their request-- this might give some sense on the access logs what percentage of access to feeds is via subscribed downloads. Referrer data might also reveal a few things (e.g. if the link to an MP3 originated from a web page (blog summary) or directly form a feed link.Any of these numbers, if you are trying to get at user habits (e.g. how many they listen to, where they listen to, how much of a cast they listen to) are going to have to be done via some type of survey or focus group. Maybe with some reliable numbers there, you can back calculate some extrapolations based on total downloads.To me, this gets at more interesting topics- how people are doing that time-shift Matt mentions. But you could get evcen pickier and into murkier wonderings- I can have an hourlong podcast plugging in my ears, but what if I am not paying any attention?Frankly, it's all too new to expect a lot of "reliable" data. I find that people make little distinction between "podcasting" and just lumping MP3s on a server.And at some point soon, the novelty of this thing will pass, and folks will be ading in a glut of audio, trying to discern what ought to be listened to and what can be tossed. There will be gems of quality 'casts and scads of "shovel" audio-ware.Frankly from where I stand, I don;t put a whole lot of effort into trying to distill pure numbers on usage of new technologies, or what smells like alchemy of "ROI"-- we take some decent educated guesses at what works, try and get some feedback, make some mistakes, and adjust.And as for my own consumption, it's not much. I have a total of zero sites I regularly subscribe to for audio... I hand download ones from several sources or what other people blog about. I may listen to a few here and there when I am running or traveling in a plane, but I am just as motivated to listen to my choices in music. I think it is an effective medium that opught to be pushed, and there is some value in finding ways to get content to people in a place/time/mode of their choosing. Login or register to post comments You make some excellent Submitted by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on November 9, 2005 - 1:07pm. You make some excellent points Alan. When I wrote the article I was hoping that there was some neat tool to do this that I was unaware of. Sadly there doesn't appear to be.Since we're listing our personal audio consumption: I don't consume audio I can't dance to, and prefer to consume it on the dancefloor. Login or register to post comments
		© Copyright 1999-2009 EDUCAUSE Need Help? \| Feedback \| Privacy Policy
	Unless otherwise noted, EDUCAUSE holds the copyright on all materials published by the association, whether in print or electronic form. In certain cases the work remains the intellectual property of the individual author(s) (see Special Circumstances). Content from conference speeches, presentations, blogs, wikis and feeds reflect the opinions of the author, and not necessarily those of EDUCAUSE or its members.