nextmarket:

Leo Laporte is one of the giants of podcasting, and perhaps one of the first to make a successful standalone media company built around podcasting. Part of the larger podcast project, this conversation features Leo’s thoughts about the word podcast itself, the growth of TWiT, how TWiT…

nextmarket:

I was asked to present on the Future of the Connected Living Room by the US Telecom Association, the biggest and oldest trade industry association for the telecommunications industry in the US.

I figured I would share my slides. Below is a slightly modified version of what I presented last week. Enjoy.

The Future of the Connected Living Room from NextMarket Insights

nextmarket:

Mari Silbey wrote over at Zatz Not Funny that she wanted an Android TV box because the ability to get any Android app on her TV is something she’d really like (as would many of us who use Android).

All I can say is just wait, as I think that’s likely the future of Google’s efforts for TV and…

Scott is a former standup comedian who has been creating his very funny webcomic, ‘Basic Instructions’ (which can be found at basicinstructions.net) for over a decade, and recently published his first novel, ‘Off to Be the Wizard’. Scott and I talk about his comic, getting discovered by Dilbert creator Scott Adams (and how the subsequent traffic swallowed his site for 48 hours), his novel, working at DisneyWorld and the sheer weirdness of Florida.

If you enjoy this podcast, I’d encourage you to subscribe through one of the following channels: iTunes, Stitcher, RSS or Soundcloud.

nextmarket:

Like Apple, Microsoft has been one of the most supportive big tech companies behind podcasting. Rob Greenlee has been there for the entire ride, helping to get podcasts launched first on Zune and more recently being the go-to guy for podcasts on Xbox and Windows Phone. I talk to Rob about…

Rob was really helpful in helping in sharing his knowledge about the podcast market. I’m talking to him tomorrow at 9 AM on the GeekNewsCentral podcast about the project, so join us!

nextmarket:

In this conversation I talk to This American Life’s Ira Glass. He shares his thoughts on the podcasting market and how he thinks it’s changed during the last decade or so, as well as where it might go in the future. He also shares a few thoughts about what podcasts he listens to and who…

I’m a huge This American Life fan, so talking to Ira Glass was a pretty cool experience. 

Let’s get this out of the way: I haven’t paid attention to the whole Lean In thing.

Actually, that’s wrong; I’ve paid attention enough so as to know it is a thing and that I should be paying more attention.

And before you women and more sensitive (and kind of judgmental, if I do say so) men types think I’m a terrible person, let me just say in my defense that I also knew enough to know it’s book about women and work, one to which women are responding to by reading it, talking about it, creating reading groups to talk about it, posting on Linkedin about it and, before long,will probably be performing a skit on Saturday Night Live about it.

In other words, lots of women are really leaning in*,  while I, and maybe many others like me, are leaning out* (*To be clear, I don’t even know if my clever use of the term here is even clever or even makes much sense since, as I’ve said, I haven’t read the book or paid much attention to it).

And I do feel a little bit guilty about the whole thing since I see myself as fairly progressive on women’s issues, am married to a woman, and I even know how to read. I mean, it’s almost as if this book was written just for me. 

Which gets me to the point of this post, which is a Twitter conversation I had with my high school friend Janet Payton.

Those of you who know Janet know how both how funny and nice she is, something that she’s been, well, since high school, which is probably a big part of the reason she’s essentially become our high school graduating class’s unofficial spokesperson/blogger/friend to all. 

ButI  this post isn’t about Janet and her darn niceness, but more about a Twitter conversation we had yesterday. 

It all started with me tweeting to in my usual ‘promote-something-I-just-did’ format:

Here I talk to @5by5’s wicked smart @danbenjamin; have a listen: soundcloud.com/nextmarket/5by…

— Michael Wolf (@michaelwolf)

April 10, 2013

Which Janet responded to by tweeting:

@michaelwolf Have you interviewed any women for your podcasts? I’d volunteer, but no one wants to hear a half hour of me saying, “Huh?”

— Janet Payton (@janmasterp)

April 10, 2013

A tweet which, to be perfectly honest, made me stop short a bit since it made me realize I actually hadn’t done a whole lot of podcasts with women (though I have done some). I mean, how did I not notice this before? (again, I’m leaning out*)

But of course, given this my funny high school friend Janet tweeting at me, my response was this:

@janmasterp Women scare me.

— Michael Wolf (@michaelwolf)

April 10, 2013

Now, it should be noted that, in most cases, women don’t actually scare me (unless of course, that woman is my wife and I’ve done something stupid, which is a good reason for any married man to be fearful) and that I was just being flippant and jokey on Twitter, a medium that, other than allowing people to overthrow governments and put newspapers out of business, was kinda of made for being flippant and jokey.

How does Janet respond? With not one, but two tweets. 

First this:

@michaelwolf Well that would make it even more entertaining.

— Janet Payton (@janmasterp)

April 10, 2013

And then with this: 

@michaelwolf Lean in!

— Janet Payton (@janmasterp)

April 10, 2013

Which brings us to the whole Lean In “thing”.  Those who know Janet know she is a veritable pop culture sponge, someone who knows about the Zeitgeist before it actually becomes the Zeitgeist, and she often reflects on both modern pop culture and that eras gone by in her very funny blog, If Janet Ran It. 

And while I know about things that are Zeitgeist-y on a surface level because I’m on Facebook now and then and work on a computer with Internet access for most of the day (hey, it’s not like you don’t do some surfing yourself there, Mister Judgmental), I often stay at the surface level, unless I need to go deeper (like I did with my recent binge-watching of the first three episodes of Game of Thrones in order so I could actually ask questions of the people behind Game of Thrones without sounding like an idiot). 

But because I have stayed surface with Lean In, I half-jokingly asked Janet if she could explain the main idea behind Lean In in 140 characters (i.e. one tweet). 

Which she did! But she also did much more:

@michaelwolf Women, stop trying to do everything. Start by making dudes look stuff up themselves.

— Janet Payton (@janmasterp)

April 10, 2013

So there you are. With one Bon-mot (bon-tweet?), my high school friend Janet both conveyed the essence of Lean In while also showing how dudes like me make Lean-ing In more difficult (but necessary). 

nextmarket:

Some have called Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 “NPR for geeks”. Given the fast-growing podcast network’s mix of shows that go deep and long into tech and geek culture - and do it very well - it’s a pretty apt description.

In this conversation, Dan and I talk about a number of topics, including: the…

I’m a big fan of Dan Benjamin and 5by5. In this conversation, we talk about the start of 5by5, the podcast market, monetizing podcasts and more…

nextmarket:

In this conversation I talk to Stephen Dubner about why he started Freakonomics Radio, the growth of his podcast and how it allows him to stay in touch with his audience, the growth drivers for podcasting, as well as the “hidden side” of podcasting.

This conversation is one of the many I making available over the next week or two from the Podcast Project. If you’d like to learn more about this project, go the Podcast Project page for more details.

the Freakonomics podcast is one of my absolute favorites, so I was really excited to talk to Stephen Dubner. My favorite moment? Asking him what is the ‘hidden side’ of podcasting. 

nextmarket:

As a market analyst who has made a living writing about digital media for the past decade, I recently became intrigued with the podcast market.

Part of the reason was I had started my own podcast a few months ago, which I had decided to do as part of an open-lab model of market…

So I talk to Ira Glass, Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics), Adam Carolla and a few more here. I put them together in a narrative that roughly corresponds to the Forbes piece I did here, but it’s a little different.

I’ll be making the full conversations available over the next week or so. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast in iTunes or Stitcher, that’s a good reason, isn’t it?

nextmarket:

“The podcast is as old as two people talking on street corners” – Adam Carolla

This project was more a labor of love than anything, though I will likely have a small report on the podcast market in the next little while. But here’s the mass-market version over at Forbes :)

I talked to Carolla, Ira Glass, Stephen Dubner, as well as Libsyn, Microsoft, and a few others.  

I also put an audio version of this story together (well, about 80% similar), which is here. I’ll do separate post as well for that. 

So I did this little labor of love project looking at the podcast market, and it took longer than it probably should have (I’m self-employed now and gots to pay the bills!), but here it is.