Power Law Pod Squad Redux
A couple of weeks ago, I drafted my now scorned "Of Power Laws and the Pod Squad" piece. The basic idea of the article is that a new trend is emerging, Podcasting, and the A List has formed incredibly quickly, the Pod Squad.,/p>
The purpose of that post was two-fold. First, it acknowledged that we have a unique opportunity before us to learn about Power Laws and how they work in the wild by watching Podcasting grow. Secondly, I proposed that, as is always true with any A List, that it will be a force to be reckoned with for newcomers.
This initial post got circulated quite a bit, well above the average for this site, and the comments were on both sides of the fence. I initially wrote it not to attack or condemn anyone but simply to collect the voices that were whispering in my ear. Unfortunately, it also served to ruffle some feathers.
Now we're moving on. And others are paying attention which was really the real goal. A recent MSNBC article (via Newsweek correspondent) seems like it could have been written reading the comments on this site. Here's a blurb:
The alphas, or "A-listers," as they call themselves, commonly cross-link to one another, with the effect of having one of their comments amplified and commented on. In the case of podcasting, they conducted a deep asynchronous conversation about the practice. Was this a new form of personal, do-it-yourself radio? Could it replace radio? Even though its workings were fairly esoteric—no one is close to making podcasting as simple a process as Apple has made music downloading—the accumulated buzz from the blogs became deafening.
The inevitable result was that podcasting suddenly became the hot topic in geekdom. In early October bloggers began keeping track of how many Google results you would get if you queried the word "podcasting." Day by day it rose... 5,950... 7,510... 13,000. By the end of the month it was more than 50,000, and by mid-November the number was 387,000. By that time the din of the blogosphere was too loud for traditional writers to ignore, and articles about podcasting appeared in the L.A. Times, The New York Times and BusinessWeek.
In other parts of the web, Dave Slusher, of The Evil Genius Chronicles, has commented on the previous post as well as given some attention to it in one of his podcasts. I sincerely thank him for doing that. He's made many good points on the matter and seems sincerely concerned with helping grow this thing.
He has made a couple of points that I think should be addressed. In his comments and podcast he asks "What do you want me to do?". The simple answer is nothing. There's nothing to be done since you're not doing anything wrong. The not so simple answer is to fight the clumps whenever you can. It's hard to do that because it requires familiarity with tons and tons of other stuff out there and he's only got so much bandwidth. I don't blame for thinking that's hard to get done. He relates this problem quite adeptly when he describes "the old days" when he could listen to pretty much all the podcasts out there compared to now where there's thousands upon thousands available. His point on this matter is that we should go out there and "bust the Pod Squad".
On the same point, I'll tie in some comments that came from many on the mailing list. The crux of their opinions is "screw the Pod Squad, I Podcast because I want to". I think that's admirable and probably the best force to rely on in terms of keeping your Podcast up to date. Of course, that's not exactly why all of us are in this and that form of recognition is desirable, if not required, for success. To those people, it boils down to marketing. The Pod Squad is still very approachable and if you want to get in touch with them you still can with ease. Get your message to them creatively and memorably (they've only got so much time). That will come back to help you two-fold.
A second comment Dave made in his podcast was that "A-Listers are made all the time". I don't actually think that's true. I do think that new people become popular all the time. It's easy to become popular, but quite the opposite when it comes to hacking your way to the top of a Power Law curve. Gaining popularity or notoriety does not earn respect or authority. It does not earn residual nodes - nodes that persist over a period of time. Being on the A-List, as far as Power Laws is concerned, is all about the number of nodes behind you. Anyone can be Flavor of the Day, but still everyone mostly remembers Chocolate and Vanilla.
The last observation about Podcasting worthy of mention is the shear speed at which it is growing. Many people have drawn parallels to blogging as they digested my first piece. I think they are completely right, except for one part - the timeline. Blogging has been around for YEARS. The people in the A-List of bloggers have been doing it for many many years. The people in the A-List for Podcasting, however, have been doing it for many months. When those timelines are juxtaposed, it's quite clear that there's a multiplier applied to this calculus.