State-of-play: Blogging and podcasting in Australia today

Around the world blogging and podcasting are driving a resurgence of interest in the potential of online media, as people embrace the simplicity, individuality and authenticity of these upstart mediums.

Blogging and podcasting have yet to attract the same prominence in Australia as they have recently achieved in the USA. Yet there are plenty of signs here that the era of personal media in Australia is not far away.

The global growth figures for blogging are astonishing. According to Technorati, a blog monitoring and live searching service, the blogosphere has been doubling in size every 5 months for the past 20 months - a 16-fold increase in less than 2 years, and has no signs of slowing down.

Blogging is already dwarfing the print media in terms of content generation. Technorati is now monitoring up to 500,000 posts each day. That means several hundred thousand people each day are spending anything from a few minutes to a few hours writing content for public consumption.

Though still in single digit percentages of the population, blogging readership is also growing fast. In 2004, blog readership in the USA jumped 58 per cent to 27 per cent of Internet users, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In fact, Pew found the number of blog readers as a percentage of Internet users is growing much faster than the number of blog creators. An indication that audiences are being created for blog content which extend well beyond the bloggers themselves.

Podcasting seems to have been invented in about August last year. Yet already there are well over 3,000 programs being distributed via RSS - the “really simple syndication” software - to people around the world. Some of these programs are already attracting sponsorship and advertising dollars.

The potential is so obvious that the industry association Commercial Radio Australia has asked the federal government for a decade of protection against new entrants. While Austereo among others has started its own podcasting experiments as it looks at how to respond to the podcasting phenomenon.

Public radio has also been quick to see the opportunity with the BBC, National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA, CBC in Canada, and the ABC (Dig and JJJ) locally all starting to experiment with program podcasting during the past few months.

In Australia too, we have seen the birth of a commercial experiment The Podcast Network (TPN) which, like traditional media, has a business model of aggregating and distributing content and seeking commercial sponsorship to provide the revenue. TPN has attracted media coverage in Australia as well as in England and the USA. TPN has so far put together a list of 12 programs and is looking to build its offering to about 100 titles. That’s a lot of audio content.

Although it grew out of blogging, podcasting also owes its popularity to a range of recent technologies which have made the creation and distribution of audio content extremely simple. These include RSS software used for subscribing to blogs, and the burst of popularity for mp3 players driven by Apple’s iPod phenomenon.

In addition, bloggers and podcasters are big users of Skype the free software package, which allows people to use VOIP and make (and record) free phone calls throughout the world. So far Skype, which is now offering premium services as well as the basic service, has been downloaded over 72 million times. That’s bad news for traditional telcos.

Until recently, the rollout of broadband in Australia, especially the wireless version, has been desultory, and this is no doubt a significant factor in our slower than the US take-up rate of new media.

“Broadband is the key to the success of any of these online services”, according to Australian Record Industry Association's (ARIA) chief executive officer, Stephen Peach. ARIA tracks a decline in music sales in the past 12 months to the recent upsurge in broadband usage in Australia, which makes illegal music downloads, among other things, much easier.

Australian media, particularly print media, has also been slow to embrace blogging. Nevertheless, blogging is now seen by many news media companies around the world as a way of driving traffic to their sites and of breaking out of their traditional news cycles into more continuous flows of reportage and commentary.

There have been some experiments in Australia, particularly during the last Federal election campaign when the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald sites hosted journalist-written blogs. But we are a long way from seeing anything like the Le Monde (Paris), IndiaTimes and Ohmynews (Seoul) experiments in this country.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the local arm of IDG media, the publisher of several IT magazine titles, is proving to be far more adventurous. It recently started a 20 minute weekly podcast called Computerworld Live based on its magazine Computerworld and its deputy managing director maintains a blog called filtered, perhaps the only blog by an Australian media executive.

The Pew Center also found that around 75 million Americans (equivalent to over a third of the number of actual voters) used the Internet in last year’s Presidential campaign. They went to the web: “to get news and information, discuss candidates debate issues, or participate directly in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to candidates”.

So far, the basic tools of blogging are just starting to emerge in Australian politics. The ALP offers RSS feeds on its news releases and several politicians now have blogs, including Malcolm Turnbull and Andrew Bartlett.

Nevertheless, Australian bloggers have not yet generated the sort of media attention that well-known coups (Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Eason Jordan) have won for blogging in the USA. These “affairs” showed that blogging could change agendas and we are still waiting for some high profile agenda-changing from Australian online media community.

The closest Australia has come to this sort of notoriety-driven publicity for online media in Australia has come from the efforts of Stephen Mayne and his team at Crikey! This sort of approach and energy is probably essential to shake the audience out of its traditional media consumption habits.

Beyond the traditional media and political parties we have seen several new online offerings in the past 12 months.

New Matilda which has been going along for nearly 12 months has had some good writing but little audience participation so far and is not really living up to its charter to be a forum. So far New Matilda has not moved to embrace blogging or build a relationship with Australian bloggers.

The On Line Opinion journal started down the path of working with bloggers when it set up its Domain page during the last Federal election. The Domain, which provides feeds and links from about a dozen Australian political bloggers, shows the depth and breadth of Australian political blog commentary.

A more recent online entrant (launched 21 March) is the Your Democracy site which promises that “politics is not a spectator sport”. It is a Margo Kingston (SMH author of the popular Not Happy John book) inspired operation which harbours some ambitions to create a local version of the successful US moveon.org.

Other areas where blogging has not received the same sort of attention it is getting in the USA is through conferences and books. Conferences and books dedicated to blogging are becoming a feature of the American landscape but they are still rare in Australia.

A blogging conference scheduled for Melbourne in February this year had to be cancelled, partly through lack of sponsorship interest. Another, Blogtalk Downunder, is scheduled for Sydney in May. It has attracted support from at least one commercial sponsor, iBurst, and is also backed by a number of higher education institutions. So hopefully it has a good chance of success. The Walkley Foundation is also including a session on blogging in its freelance writers’ conference scheduled for May 1 in Sydney.

Unlike their US counterparts, Australian book publishers generally seem to believe that people who write blogs don’t read books (or so they tell me). A book about blogging, tentatively titled Uses of Blogs, and written primarily by Australian contributors (including me), has recently been given the go-ahead by a New York publisher. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before some Australian publishers catch-up.

2004 was hailed as the year of the blog in the USA. Partly this was the product of the presidential election which saw online media play an unprecedented role in all aspects of campaigning from fund-raising to reportage to fierce debate.

Australia’s year of the blog is likely to come in either 2006 or 2007, driven by a faster broadband rollout, the coverage of blogs out of the USA and the desire of more citizens to participate in politics, as individuals, in the run-up to the next federal election.