J.D. Lasica. Personal Broadcasting opens another front for journalists. Excellent. The only thing I want to reinforce is the idea of audio and video weblogs as discreet entities is wrong-headed. It is the combination of all media in a single weblog that has power.
The only element that is missing from taking video and audio weblogging mainstream is an efficient delivery network. It is too damn expensive to for an individual to do otherwise (an audience of 10,000 people that view a short video clip every day would cost a small forture in bandwidth).
I wrote about this in 1996, while at Forrester, in a report entitled, “Personal Broadcast Networks.” The report was a very forward looking effort (5-10 years out) and proved so popular that Forrester used it as the theme for their conference that year (I got tons of play at the major papers and TV networks due to it and some efforts at Microsoft, Netscape, and Akamai used it in their start-up phase). The idea was that an open delivery system (a combination of a Napster P2P clone, weblogs, and RSS with desktop software/browser) would push the Web to a new level of experience.
Unfortunately, this concept was distorted by the popular press into something called “PUSH” in early 1997 (primarily due to Wired’s fumble). That coverage plus Pointcast’s demise (due to a grossly expensive distribution system and difficulties dealing with corporate networks — I got the quote on the launch of the system in ’96 in the WSJ and predicted exactly what happened) tanked the concept. Now Personal Broadcast Networks are back with the open architecture necessary for some very exciting things. [John Robb’s Weblog]