Lots of folks have been talking about and posting to Doug Kaye’s call for input. It’s called How Should I Make IT Conversations Self-Sustaining?.

But definitely go and read through the suggestions and voiced support. It’s tremendous! And teh page is a Wiki - so you can go right ahead and add you own shekels to the dance. It’s some of the best range of ideas on the subject I’ve ever seen.

It’s clear Doug is gonna ‘cake out’ now.

Here’s what I posted:

Wow! First of all - this thread can be the opener of Doug’s First Book “How I changed the Internet by charging for audio streams.”

Seriously now that you’ve got a brand and streams are flowing - I think it’s clear your listeners don’t mind it if you make soa few shekels. And if “(Heaven forbid)” you make a LOT of shekels, then maybe, because the good lord of technology has made you a fine mensch, you’ll give some of those shekels to your ‘voices’. Such a good thing!

The poor school kids in Brazil or India won’t mind listening to ads and if someone wants to get rid of those horrible nasty beasts - then let them become a subscriber or make micro-payments.

Banner ads, sponsorships, Phil’s idea of positioning yourself to enterprise and new kinds of ads and deals (like we’re doing with Marqui) are all ways of making bucks. And Ross Mayfield is right - “ferret out the best stuff and highlight it.”

Paying for premium stuff is also a no-brainer. Focus on the good stuff - whatever it is - and run a quick analysis of the snippet - with others commenting on THAT. Analysis is what people will pay for. Give away the analysis stream ‘highlights’ and provide the FULL analysis to premium subscribers only. That’s fair.

They get the original streamcast of the ’speech’ - but they only get the highlights of the analysis.

But I’m gonna emphasize on the area which you called “features”. This is where I can add the best advice.

I really believe that you’re missing a whole new kind of community/tool opportunity. Ever heard of an audio editor before?

How come the web site isn’t a communal tool which can create interactive audio threads, almost like an audio Wiki? Greg Elin has been expanding the notion of Wikis with images, why don’t you do the same with audio?

I’d pay for that - for sure - as long as it had a free dabble mode.

And while you’re at it:

- add a full aggregator to the environment - start indexing all this stuff - with categorization, subjects, participants, etc. Then get into the ‘Technorati’ business

- support all the coolio, burgeoning open standards in this area. But I don’t have to tell you that, as much as let everyone else know - you are!

- create some connections between your world - and others. Now you’ve got a publishing empire. I bet there’s a guy doing this for the NASCAR/auto nerds world. And Sex for sure. And probably within teh Hollywood world as well. You got a model that works. Why not become the Nick Denton or Jason Calacanis of “‘Audio Conversations’”?

And finally, I wanna put in my other 4 cents for user experience. Plain Jane HTML is fine for free, but when you start paying for things, wouldn’t it be nice to get it as a “rich media app” - built with Laszlo or something?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a desktop quality environment with easy editing, managing and annotating of audio streams - as a built in feature? The community could evolve these threaded audio streams, dragging audio snippets onto a comunal timeline editor.

While they’re at it - the community will annotate, transcribe and attach meta-data to these trheads.

I’d pay for that.

- Marc Canter http://marc.blogs.it

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2004 at 11:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.