Behind the scenes

Rabble posts about some back-end geeky stuff he's thought about while building Odeo.

Posted by Ev. at 3/31/2005 | 1 comments | links to this post

Production Servers!

Everything has been moved over to the new servers and we are buttoning stuff down. It's nice to be off of the development machines to see the every running faster and in production mode.

Posted by Noah at 3/23/2005 | 2 comments | links to this post

New Media Public Lecture Series

I am going to be speaking tomorrow at Berkeley.

MONDAY, MARCH 21
12:45 - 1:30 p.m

The Topic of the session is "Audioblogging and Podcasting". I will probably talk about what trends I have seen in audioblogging over the last 3 years and maybe show Odeo. So if you are in Berkeley...stop by and say howdy.

Posted by Noah at 3/20/2005 | 9 comments | links to this post

See Odeo at Etech

I'm going to be doing a talk at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference next week (Thursday, 1:45pm - 2:30pm to be precise) about podcasting and Odeo.

Come see!

Posted by Ev. at 3/10/2005 | 6 comments | links to this post

On money and podcasting

The trouble with having news about your product come out before the product itself is that it doesn't let people judge for themselves what the product is really about. The angle of the article, and the speculation the article generates, is all they have to go on. And, as anyone who's been the subject of much press in their life will tell you, well, it's hit and miss.

We were very happy that John Markoff wanted to break the news about Odeo, and he's a very smart reporter—better than most. But he was writing for the business section, not the Power-to-the-People section, so he focused on a particular part of our story that isn't necessarily how we would tell it.

Not that he revealed anything we don't want people to know. But in glancing about the web, it seems that some people have taken the idea that Odeo plans to make money off podcasting a little too seriously and as if it's our one and only objective. It is not.

My focus for almost six years has been on enabling people to publish to the web—and very seldomly has money been involved. The democratization of media is something I take very seriously. I think it's one of the most powerful forces in society today. And it's what inspired me to help develop and spend my time on Odeo. Noah and others who I'm working with feel the same way.

We are starting a company, so we have answers to the questions of how we're going to make money, when prodded. But we're not even building in money-making functionality from the start. We expect the vast majority of content on Odeo to be free—and even free from advertising. Indefinitely.

We are not building an "eBay," except in the sense that we will make it possible for individuals who want to do business with each other to do so. I don't think there is any way someone could have a monopoly on audio content, nor are we trying to. In fact, our system will be open in a bunch of different ways.

Our focus is on humanizing a very promising technology. Making it easier for those already doing it (listening or creating). And getting many more people involved by creating a great experience.

If we do that right, maybe money will come—to us and others. If not, someone else will do it. I'm pretty confident it will be good for the democratization of media either way.

Posted by Ev. at 3/01/2005 | 29 comments | links to this post