Tech Goes Boom

Podcasting, and MP3s

Russell Beattie has a new rule, no Podcast navel-gazing. I tend to agree, like movies about movies, self-referential media gets tedious real quick. Of course, some people get a free ride, namely the people who are developing the platform. There's a big difference between "hey look I'm pod casting. Podcasting is cool" and "These are some new methods of mixing for better sound". Adam gets a free pass for now.

He then goes on to talk about how mobile phones are going to make MP3 players go away. This I don't agree with. He sites Dan Gillmore saying he never used his iPod anymore because he has a large memory card in his phone. Seems to me Dan may be a special case, i.e. the group of people who want everything in one device, even if that device does a half assed job at a lot of things. It was predicted that tiny cheap flash based players would destroy the iPod. Umm nope, that hasn't happened. Why not? It the whole package. iTunes along with the awesome user interface on the iPod make it a hard product to beat. I don't care if I can get 4GB of music on my phone if I can't easily find the music I'm looking for, or my battery life is destroyed by listening to music on it, or the sound quality sucks. Phones have a VERY long way to go before they will replace my iPod. Will it happen? I'm sure it will at some point, but the interface will have to evolve a great deal.

But this is a good segue into another thing I've been thinking about recently and Adam Curry mentioned yesterday in the daily source code. Flash storage. Specifically SD. Almost every computing device and peripheral I own can read SD cards. You could easily set yourself up with a camera, phone, PDA, video camera, MP3 player and computer that all use SD in a seamless way. Large capacities are extremely cheap these days as are the USB 2 based readers. We're coming really close to a universal storage medium for digital files. Once these cards hit the 10GB range, most users will be able to take every file they have, be it music, movies, word processing documents with them everywhere they go. 1GB cards can be had for less than $100 now.

I could also talk about the whole Balmer iPod thing, but I think that's been bashed to death. Let it be enough to say, "Developers, Developers, Developers... yeeeeaarrrgghhhh!"