Subscribing to people I had a phone interview today with Ron Bloom, co-founder of Podshow, and came away thinking about podcasting in a whole new way. Bloom is what you'd call a technology visionary. He sees things the way they will be many years from now. I found his thoughts very thought-provoking.

The way we use podcasts now is not how we'll want to use them in the future. Today we subscribe to programs. In the future, we'll subscribe to people and ideas. You may find my thoughts on social media to be interesting but you could care less what I think about the Boston Red Sox So you'd have the option to get a subscription only to my comments about the topic that interests you. My comments would be captured through a variety of mechanisms, not just through a microphone, as they are today. If I wanted to "broadcast" my opinion, I might pick up a phone and say what I'm thinking. Depending on the way I tagged my comments, it would be distributed to a certain group of people via podcast. People who didn't subscribe to my posts on that subject area would never see them.

This makes sense. RSS as we know it is a primitive tool implemented in a primitive environment. We subscribe to people but not to topics. Unless, that is, we go to Technorati or Feedster or PubSub and set up topical profiles. But even those are imperfect because keywords are not a good way to specify what we want. The best programs will learn what we want through competition and field experience.

Today's podcasting landscape is really very primitive, if you believe Ron Bloom. The next generation of podcasts will be much closer to a utility that delivers us only the information we want via whatever viewer we happen to have at a time. He has a very compelling argument. I hope he's got it right.  ¶ 12:23 AM