FIR #443: From RSS to ChatGPT — FIR’s 20-Year Tech Communications Chronicle

The FIR Podcast Network Everything Feed

For Immediate Release launched on January 3, 2005. Episode #1 explained what podcasting is, then looked at the role blogs played in the tsunami tragedy in Asia. On our 20th anniversary, Neville and Shel recall FIR’s origins and the many changes the show has undergone in two decades, some significant milestones, memorable moments, some of the challenges we have faced over the years, and other recollections. We will return to our normal programming next week.

Links from this episode:

• FIR Episode #1
• First mention of podcasting for business (Rex Hammock) in September 2024
• FIR Interview: Michael Whiley at GM on the GM Blog (February 22, 2005)
• FIR Interview with Steve Rubel (March 26, 2005)
• FIR #100 (January 5, 2006)
• FIR #191: Two Decades in 2.5 Hours (January 20, 2020)
• Pivoting the FIR Podcast (January 10, 2022)
• FIR at 19: A Milestone in Podcasting
• FIR #377: Two Decades of Podcasting (January 5, 2024)
• Podcast Statistics and Data, Buzzsprout
• The Future of Podcasting: 9 Trends for Creators & Companies”, Riverside
• “The Power of Podcasts: Why Every Business Needs a Voice in 2025”, One Zero Creative

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The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [e-mail].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

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Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 4, 4 3. I’m Neville Hobson in the uk. And I’m she Holtz in the us. And if you didn’t recognize the opening the usual opening was not played today to introduce FIR. That’s the opening that we used when we were brand new. And today the day we are dropping this episode, January 3rd, 2025 is the 20th anniversary.

FIR. We launched this podcast on January 3rd, 2005. Neville. At the beginning you mentioned that this is episode 442, and that’s correct. In terms of the renumbering that I started some time ago we did 824 episodes behind before that. So this is actually episode number 1000. [00:01:00] 266, and that does not take into account the FIR interviews, the FIR book reviews, the FIR lives, and some of the other things that we have done, were probably up around I would say 1400 episodes of podcasting altogether in the 20 years.

We’ve been at this, and today what we’re gonna do is take a look back. We wanna just have a chat about what it’s been like these last 20 years and tell you how all of this came about where we’re at and where we’re headed. This all started with a conversation. In November of 2004 you had heard of podcasting Neville.

I had heard of podcasting. And both of us had started blogs because we had heard of them. Assumed that this was going to be something that, would be important in the world of communications and that the best way to learn about it and be responsive to [00:02:00] our clients about it. We were both I was consulting at the time and you were working for an organization out of the Netherlands.

We thought the best way to learn about it would be to do it. And having listened to a lot of podcasts, we thought that we would break the mold and have. Co-hosts rather than one person just going on and on into a microphone. There was one co-hosted podcast at the time. It was the Dawn and Drew show, I think.

I believe they were a husband and wife, and it was meant to be humorous and rude. And we wanted to give something back to the communications industry. So we decided to start. This we posted an MP three test file to make sure the technology would work more on that coming up in December of 2004, and then launched our first episode, which listening to now just makes me cringe on the 3rd of January.

It was cringeworthy 2005. Yeah, it was cringeworthy the audio quality, not too brilliant as we hear it today, but [00:03:00] at the time, not too bad. Yeah. Among other things, I remember the audio artifacts that you would get over Skype, but we’ll talk more about the technology in a bit. Yeah. Over the years, we have changed the frequency.

This is, this has been a very inconsistent podcast as you’ll hear we started off weekly and the more we went along, the longer the episodes got because of the. The number of things there were to talk about and how much there was going on in the world of communication and technology. So then we went bi-weekly and at some point we went back to weekly.

Then when we reinvigorated this podcast not too long ago, we decided that it would be. Monthly. And then we started doing these midweek episodes because there were things we wanted to talk about and not wait for the monthly episode. So this, that’s one of the changes we went through.

There, there were a lot as you noted. I [00:04:00] agree. I think the frequency thing was something we, as you say too, and froze with a lot. We, but we were back in those days and hasn’t really changed a lot I think. Bursting at the seams to talk about topics that interested us quite a bit.

And as you said, when we started I was actually transitioning out of the company I worked for, I was based in Amsterdam at the time that had been acquired by someone else, and my job had gone, so I was looking for. Things to do. I’d picked up some interesting consulting work on blogs at that time, and I was thinking about podcasting quite a bit, but like you said I certainly wasn’t keen in doing a solo thing, much more interest to have someone to talk to.

And then lo and behold, you and I talked. The rest is history, as they say. That was good. That’s right. And I should point out that we knew each other through I-A-E-B-C and had collaborated before on at an IABC conference when online communication was taking place through CompuServe in the PR and marketing forum in the [00:05:00] IEBC hyperspace section of the PR sig.

We. Coordinated a and an effort among all of the IABC members in that space who were at the conference to essentially live log that conference that was a conference in Boston at that time. So that was, that’s right. That was quite, that was a precursor to what was to come that we now know is FIR.

But I think the yeah, that was the first instance I can remember of anybody live talking. Yeah. Yeah, the thinking about the word podcasting, there’s a lot of talk about this. Oh it was invented by so and so back in 1990, whatever. And the first person to use it was X and all that kind of stuff.

What resonated with me, the first reference to business podcasting was by a guy called Rex Hammock, who was a very prominent blogger at the time, A CEO blogger. As it happened, ran his own company. I remember in September of 20 of 2004, he wrote a blog post, and I’ll read the section that he mentioned.

He said talking a bit about executive communication using [00:06:00] social media or blogs. No one had the term social media at that time. He said, I can see a much quicker adoption timeline for CEO podcasting than CEO blogging. Stick a microphone in front of a CEO and say, what would you like to tell your employees today?

You get a much quicker buy-in than sitting a keyboard in front of ’em and saying, blog A messages for the world to read. A word of warning to corporate communicator, type says Rex. Don’t script it for the CEO With podcasting voices, not a metaphor for writing in a conversational, believable fashion, voice is actually voice.

That’s 20 years ago. I think that still resonates today, shall don’t it. It does, although it turns out to only be semi prescient because podcasting certainly has taken off to the point that it’s influential in presidential elections now. But I would say the number of companies doing internal podcasting is still relatively low.

There’s not a lot of CEOs talking into microphones to record a podcast and sharing with their employees what they wanna share that day. [00:07:00] A couple of other changes in format that we went through. One when we started, we were doing interviews within our episodes, and as they got longer and longer, one of our first thoughts was if we started an interview podcast, then our show could just be us and.

The interviews can be in the interview feed. So we split that out and as I mentioned before, that led to book reviews and a feed we used to call speakers and speeches when we were able to record our talks or get permission to share other people’s talks that we thought were relevant to our audience. We also changed the format.

We started off calling it four immediate release but as we started these other shows and calling them FIR book reviews. FIR this and FIR that we decided to change the name of this show to the Hobson and Holtz report which continued up through episode 8 24. But that’s when you took a hiatus.

Work got very busy and I changed the format of the show where I was putting together a panel of communicators. Yeah, every week which [00:08:00] was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. And then you joined me on a couple of those panels and then had a hankering to return to the show. Yeah, we, the hiatus started in 2015 where as you said it was a pretty a pretty busy, extremely challenging time.

And that was not long before I, I packed it all in and joined IBM which is was in the kind of wings as it were. And, but I had a, I did have a hankering, I was a guest on a couple of episodes in early 2017, and then we decided to get back together again. That was a, 2017 was a year I took off my dad had died and there was a lot of stuff going on.

So the timing from this contextual point of view was just right. And so we did that. And here we are. Here we are eight years on, still doing it. Oh one. One other thing to mention before we move on to a another related topic is that we have had a number of correspondence over the year. We. We don’t do that anymore.

But this began because we were getting audio comments from Lee Hopkins out of [00:09:00] Australia. And one day I said, if he keeps sending in these audio comments, we might as well just make him a correspondent. And then we, the next comment we got from him was, this is Lee Hopkins, your correspondent from started doing what was called the Asia report. And then when he wasn’t able to continue doing that, Michael Nestley stepped in and did, yeah. The Asia report. We also had regular reports from folks like Mark Story and David Phillips and Eric Schwartzman. Yeah. From Hollywood. Yeah, Michael Nesty was based in Singapore.

Lee was in, in Adelaide, in, in Australia. David Phillips is based here in the uk. Eric Schwar, as you said. In Hollywood. Mark, I think, was in Washington at that time. He was Eric’s now I believe in New York. I forget to not forget to mention Dan York, who’s the longest. Correspondent in this context, and he’s still with us filing his tech report every month.

He’s in the US East Coast, I think Vermont at the moment. So yeah, pretty global reach with all these guys. And thinking about Lee funnily enough, I remember [00:10:00] the I ident we created for him and you found a guy on one of those services that would create. Jingles and intros and all that kind of stuff to introduce.

Yeah. Today I would just use Suno. Yeah, the one he one, the one this for Lee, that was well done by the guy who recorded it was, put another shrimp on the Barbie. It was so characteristically stereotypically Australian was the point we were trying to get across. And Lee was a really good sport.

He really played to that well. So that was a, that was an interesting branding perspective. It was fun while it lasted. Yep. We’re gonna talk about some of the milestones that we recall from over the years. And Neville, you’re gonna take the lead on that. There are just two I wanted to mention before you do.

One is our interview with Richard Edelman. He agreed to, to speak with us. I believe he was at the gym. And, my, my guess is he was using a payphone at that point and dialing in somewhere. But it was a great interview. It was almost an hour. We covered a lot of ground. And then when was that?

Do you have the [00:11:00] end, the date? I don’t, I can find that out. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but it was in, and I don’t have a date on, it was in the, it was in the early days. So roughly would’ve been around what, 2006, 2007. That kind of time. Probably, maybe a little later. Okay. I’ll look it up while you’re covering some of the highlights and see if I can put a date on that.

Okay. As well as the other one. And this is one that I continue to reference today. In conversations with people, various contexts, and this was an interview we did with two gentlemen. One of them, I can’t recall his name but he had been an attorney in the trucking industry in the US and now was.

Crossing the United States meeting with hospitals to try to teach them that. Listening to your lawyers and sending doctors who have made a mistake during surgery into their rooms to hide and call their lawyers led to less favorable outcomes [00:12:00] than simply admitting to the family or the patient what had happened, why and how you’re gonna make it right.

The other was Helio Fred Garcia. From the Logos Institute, and I believe he’s at Columbia University. I’ve seen Fred speak oh, four or five times. We’ve had several conversations. I’ve read a couple of his books and that was a, just a spectacular conversation, just a real revelation in terms of the insights that are provided.

Into crisis communication despite everything we, we read and see and study and all the sessions we go to at conferences. You think you’ve heard it all, but this was just loaded with Revelations. It was a great interview. There’s a lot we could have picked to include in this episode to talk about milestones.

But if we’d done ’em all, we’ve been here to rival the two and a half hours episode that we did in 2020. So we haven’t done that. Good ones to mention. It was not easy. But there are quite a few that struck me [00:13:00] as memorable. Back in those very early days. In particular one that come, came to mind was the interview we did with Michael Wiley, who was the, his title at the time, director of New Media at general Motors, GM Communications.

And that was a milestone because General Motors was very active with a blog. Where the chief Blogger was a man called Bob Lutz, who’s big. Figure in the US auto industry. He was blogging about small block engines, the cars, the works, and the bog was called the GM Fast Lane Blog. And they were also experimenting with podcasting.

And so they were very early business adopters of. Blogs and podcasts long time long before we called it social media and indeed Michael’s, Michael Bo title directed New Media. That was a phrase that was in common use at the time. So we had a only a 20 minute conversation with Michael, but it was a kind of a scoop for us to get the huge interest at that [00:14:00] time in what a big corporation like General Motors is doing with new media.

So we had a conversation with Michael. That was a great chat and he told us what the primary goal’s worth for the Fast Lane blog, and that was a kind of a scoop to be able to share that fact publicly. Now, of course, looking back 20 years it was it doesn’t seem such a bigger deal. And indeed, I would say most people have gone through all that since then in, in what they’re trying to do from business point of view.

But he said, just to quote him. To get beyond our old ways of communication with a new direct line of communication to all stakeholders. That’s the primary objective. So unfiltered communication, that was a phrase Bob Lutz used quite a bit direct to the audience, bypassing the middleman, which is the PR firms, the ad agencies, the mainstream media, all that revolutionary notions at the time, not.

Unpopular, but contentious to many typical communications issuing press releases. Said [00:15:00] Michael, talking to the media who repurposed your messages for you, and there’s no way for customers to get their thoughts back to you. We’ve been wanting to create this direct line of communication so that our various stakeholders aren’t going to message boards to talk about us.

They have an opportunity to come and talk directly to us. We’re big into getting feedback from our customers, employees, and others. Taking their comments to become a better company and develop better products. We’re really getting some excellent feedback just about every discussion we have on the Fast Lean blog.

We’ve had an excellent dialogue. That may not sound a big deal, Dave. That was a huge deal back then. A big company like that. A public listed company talking about direct communication with customers and soliciting direct feedback, bypassing all the usual channels. That was revolutionary. So that was really great getting that opportunity to hear all those things.

And Michael told us at length other things too about how they were looking to expand that with other bloggers. But Bob Lutz was the star blogger without any question. He also told us a little bit [00:16:00] about their plans for podcasting. But it was the blog that was the big deal. And we had other things quite a bit too, actually.

We talked a bit about. How communicate, or rather this followed on a couple days later, actually, other communicators who listened to that interview went away and wrote up their opinions about it on their own blocks. Nowadays it’s just social medias. You gotta social networks and do all that kind of thing.

But they gave top marks to, to Michael and to our conversation. So a couple of quotes here. From people who are still around today. Lela Fever, common crafts, he said, I think it’s safe to say that GM is getting it Cluetrain style. This was great to hear from someone at gm. You should really check out the interview and for those listeners of you in the Gen Z arena, you might not have heard of C Cluetrain.

You should pay attention to what that was at the turn of the century. That was huge. The Clue Train Manifesto. Kevin O’Keefe at Lex Blob, he is definitely still around as Kevin, like large law firms. General Motors is learning from its first [00:17:00] blog. He said legal marketing professionals can learn much from GM and their PR blogging efforts.

Philippe Boreman, our friend Philippe in in Belgium and points further south in Northern Africa. He said GM has started to podcast and suddenly you see the topic being discussed everywhere. And Alan Moore Brett here in the uk. I haven’t seen Alan for quite a long time now, but he was pretty prominently active in those days.

He said Gmma being far more expansive in utilizing digital channels to build far more effective communications. With its stakeholders than just a blogging vice chairman. So you’ve got the sign of what others saw and how they felt. This was so important at the time, and I agree. It was pretty important.

So there was that one other one that I wanted to mention, even though it’s in passing, I think because we might have some updates on this, is we were really fortunate to secure, and this was quite a scoop, an interview with Steve Ruble when he was working at. Cooper Katz, a PR firm in New [00:18:00] York.

The prior, before his accelerated rise at Edelman, before he went there and he had a great blog, it was very influential called Microper Persuasion. And longtime listeners will remember that I’m sure I said in the blog posts at the time. These arguably Steve is arguably the most.

Prominent and influential blogger in the PR profession, either side of the Atlantic, and I think he really was Shell, so we had a great chat with him. You asked him and. No, that followed later. This was in March, 2005. The business week article was later than that. You asked him a question about how things are going with the blog and what developments are gonna be with that.

And he said, I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing blogging like a madman. And what I’m trying to do is really, I wanna shake the tree. I think that PR professionals need to really, get what’s going on here and jump on board. And I think that the three of us and the other 97 of us who currently blog in the PR industry, we need to do a better job of talking to the everyday PR man or [00:19:00] woman and what it means to them.

I. ’cause I think a little bit of what we’re doing now is talking amongst ourselves and talking amongst the people who do get it in social media land, actually in mainstream media land as well as, with the different opportunities we get to talk the press. But I think we need to get everyone on board.

I think we’re still having that conversation, Cheryl, don’t you? Although it’s probably 9,700 PR bloggers now. A thousand even. Yeah, exactly. And there’s a lot more ways in which you can communicate. Now I noticed, by the way, just reminding myself he called it, he mentioned social media in that interview.

That was the first reference I remember hearing about what we now commonly call social media. It’s also worth remembering that Steve Ruble and Joe Jaffe started their podcast was it across the pond? Was that what it was called? Across the Sound? Across the sound shortly after we started ours.

And so did oh, it was Terry F and David Jones started inside PR after listening to FIR. Yep, it’s true. [00:20:00] And another milestone episode I felt was episode 100, a hundredth episode that suggested that we might have longevity with this thing that we started in 2005. The hundredth episode was actually on January the fifth, 2006.

So one year on from our first episode, we published a 100th episode. That’s an average. That works out about just under two a week. That’s about right, isn’t it? Yeah. ’cause we started, it wasn’t long before we went biweekly. You are right. And we, in that episode, we talked about a range of topics.

You using a CV as an RSS fees and a podcast. The World Economic Forum was podcasting and blogging, or had planned to at their upcoming event. What are the CEO’s biggest fears about these new media? Dan York’s report was in there and we had listeners, comments, discussion, upcoming interview with the music and all that.

But the comments. Lots of them. I think we’re gonna talk a bit more about comments in a while, aren’t we? That was the 100th episode. So we, we were quite well established then. We looking at the the show notes we [00:21:00] had a section we called from our US northeast correspondent.

That would be Dan, I would say. We had news briefs as we called them at the time, the snippets of information listener comments, discussion where people sent in audio or wrote text comments in the blog, and we discuss those comments and have a conversation about those comments that took up a big chunk of each episode in the show.

We don’t do that anymore. Things have evolved. Commenting is not a big thing, but we’ll talk about comments later on, I think. So that was the 100th episodes. A huge milestone for us in 2007 was the publication of the podcasting book that we collaborated on. And that was something that emerged from a conversation I had back in 2005.

So two years prior with Yvonne Devita, who was how would you describe Yvonne? A book agent doesn’t quite do it. She was more like an editorial publishing guide, had all the contacts in the publishing industry. [00:22:00] Yeah. She worked with people who were self-publishing and helped them get their book into shape.

We put together we planned this book. You and I had a conversation about it. You, at that time were already a well published author. I think you’d done four books at that time, and this is something you were quite well accustomed to. I wasn’t. I had the junior role in here as the, as.

It wasn’t a 50 50 venture. You did most of the writing, but the book was out. It was the second book. Of worth that focused on podcasting from a business perspective. The first was Todd Cochran’s book that he published in late 2005. I think I’m right. I bought it. I remember when it came out. But our book was modestly called How to Do Everything with Podcasting.

The bus, the focus was very much on business and it came out in June, 2007. That was when it was available in the us from Amazon and other online sellers, as well as normal books sellers, and it was made available on Amazon in the UK and July the first of that year. We had great reaction to it.

Shell, didn’t [00:23:00] we had warm reviews everywhere you looked. It was really heartening to see all of that. At least my point of view as the kind of junior author, if you will. Yeah, we got some good feedback on it. Not everybody agreed with everything that was in it. If you read the reviews on Amazon, there’s one person who thought it should have been better Fax checked.

But I couldn’t find any specifics that he was arguing about. No, I would urge you not to read it now. It is woefully out of date, especially in terms of most of the technology. I think the things that are still accurate have to do with types of microphones and the like, everything else. Yeah. Has changed.

Yeah. I think, I guess only thing I would add is about how to do a business podcast is still valid though. Yeah. A bit like Todd’s book, it’s outta date when you talk about the equipment. Yeah. And even the reasons why you’d want to podcast. And the tools available to you. The services are available to you and how you go about it.

Totally changed. I agree. So that is worth bearing in mind. I would say to anyone, yes, go and read it. If you wanna look back at what things were like back in [00:24:00] those days. I would argue though that nevertheless, in the business sector, there are still some valid insights. That still apply today?

Trouble is how do you separate it out from the stuff that doesn’t apply today? That’s the trick. Don’t rely on this, but it was a milestone for us in 2007, two years later, after that first conversation, we published a book. I think we got some more things to talk about that are a little bit later.

But let’s stay with with that period from 2007 up to about 2015. So seven, seven years or so. And some of the things that we were doing during that time, for instance we used to not. I wouldn’t say regularly, as in every year, two or three times. We did quite comprehensive listener surveys.

And remember at that time we had sponsors Reagan report Reagan Communications with the Prime sponsor. You’ll probably remember the others. Chip Griffin, I think, was was the one who started sponsor. Custom scoop chip, and they would do the media monitoring minute, which I think Jen zing pre what a lot of other podcasts ended up doing, which was having [00:25:00] substantive content from their sponsors rather than a pitch.

And Jen Zing enzyme ended up coming in and doing some of those too. She at the time was, she was great of chips. Yeah. We also had Igloo software and there were some others in there that I. I can’t remember that we had as sponsors, right? So that was the kind of the golden age of sponsors paying money to be associated with our podcast.

Not enough to retire on or even take that cruise we talked about back in those days. Shell, but it was nice and it signified. People had a belief that. This was worth supporting and they’re willing to put some money into it. Oh. Yeah. So of course that was another one. It’s worth before. It’s worth mentioning, again, a thanks to all the sponsors at that time because that was the pinnacle from that point of view.

It was good. And we were able to do some of the things that we were, we planned to do with knowing that we had people like Reagan and others who were supporting us in that regard. It’s probably worth now talking about the [00:26:00] technical challenges you mentioned at the beginning of this episode.

How and how we started and I’ll mention just briefly ’cause I know this is gonna come into Mix Miners, but that was a bit later on. But Skype was instrumental. It wasn’t a challenge. Skype was an enabler for us, wasn’t it? Skype was an enabler and a challenge. We would not have been able to do this if Skype had not been around in the early days.

No, because the cost of an international call and the technical requirements for recording to record and international call at the quality levels that were required even in the earliest days for podcasting. Even on the Daily Source code the first podcast, Adam Curry. That Adam Curry, yeah.

Started as he was developing the podcast catcher, which is more that we’ll talk about in terms of the technology was saying that if it’s not listenable, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, people won’t listen. So we knew that the audio quality had to be, it couldn’t be a phone call and Skype, no was the answer.

The problem was that [00:27:00] you couldn’t record both ends of a Skype call and the idea of a double. Which is where we each record locally. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to us, but it hadn’t. But so we came up with this thing involving virtual cables, which was a piece of software that you would install that would allow you to run two instances of Skype simultaneously.

So I would have one running and have that output going to one recording device and the other one running and going to another. Recording device. Initially we were recording on the computer, but that was unreliable at the time. Keep in mind, there was no cloud yet at this point. So we did that for a while and then I would mix them together in, audacity, which was the free audio editing tool that most podcasters were using at the time because nobody wanted to invest in the professional editing software. Podcasting [00:28:00] hadn’t gotten beyond the hobby level at that point. The research I did led me to the mix minus, which allowed me to do this through a single soundboard out to separate recording devices, which worked really well because that way I could use the same audio settings on everything and create a more consistent sounding show.

And now of course, we’re recording on Riverside. There were also times that we were using some other tools that were available out there for some of the stuff that we were doing FIR Live. And I promised I would let you know when the Edelman interview and. The Fred Garcia interview happened, and they both happened on FIR live, not FIR interviews FIR live number 11 15 years ago, 2009 was the one with Richard Edelman.

And the, the one with Helio, Fred Garcia and Jim Golden was the name of that [00:29:00] attorney was number 14 of FIR live on May 26th. And we used a tool for those that was called Blog Talk Radio. And what blog Talk Radio let you do was dial everybody dialed in and had a conversation, like it was a talk radio show.

And that, so they dialed in on, not via Skype or anything, but it was an interface on the web, could use their phone. There was a, an 800 number phone you could give them. I couldn’t remember. That’s cool. And it would show them as waiting and it gave you all the controls that you would have if you were a radio show host.

It was really revolutionary at the time. It’s interesting hearing that, it’s like the hybrid stage from the transition from the analog days of radio. To being digital and indeed now, of course is nothing, is way more advanced now than it ever was back then.

That was that bridge period Skype, as you mentioned. Absolutely. Was. A hu huge disruptor of telecommunications industry globally. I remember when Skype first came out of [00:30:00] 2003, I signed up for it straight away and was using the Skype out feature, which you paid for. It was about the 10th of the cost of doing normal phone calls, so the audio quality wasn’t.

Too bad, but for our point of view, it wasn’t brilliant, but it was better than the phone lines and it was easy. So that was another signal of of where, change was coming from a technological point of view. The challenges that it brought, and I wanna just mention briefly in this. At around that early period was something else that happened that was truly revolutionary, which was apple supporting podcasts in iTunes when they released iTunes 4.9 in June, 2005.

Not long after we started that drove. Immediate interest and awareness in podcasting. And I’m pretty sure we had a ben benefit from that in a very small way because that was aimed mainly at lit by differentiator, let’s call ’em consumer type podcasts that Dawn and Drew show you mentioned. And by the way, I always found them rude.

Not [00:31:00] funny, but that’s ’cause I’m a Brit, not American, I suspect. But I think the the the gates were opened with that, even though now. No, now it’s 15 years on, 20 years on, and it’s 20 years on. It’s taken the market in whole new areas where we hear stories about, the hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes created every week and the millions of podcasts that are out there.

The mind boggles with the numbers. The quality’s improved though, but getting back now to that it’s hard to imagine then what we’re able to do now. The cloud solved a lot of problems. We used Zencaster for a while, although I could never resolve the issue of drift. So our, yeah, two feeds didn’t align and I was having to do a lot of slicing and dicing of Yeah.

A nightmare audio feeds to make them align. And we. Then went to a double lender where we would record locally and you would use a service to send me your file. And that was pretty easy to sync up. I’ve been using Adobe audition for a long time now as opposed to the free audacity. And now we’re on [00:32:00] Riverside fm.

The number of podcast tools that have become available as the size of the podcasting space has grown is. Really impressive. This is everything from hardware, all in one podcasting, hardware tools to software like Riverside. It’s not the only option out there. There are several out there that are available that allow you to do this and factory in the video component.

Since we know that a lot of people listen to their podcast now on YouTube, it’s important to have that video component and we’re able to add that. Now, if you go to the FIR. Channel on YouTube you can watch. Not that there’s anything to see, it’s just two talking heads. But I suspect that most people who find it and listen on YouTube aren’t really watching.

It’s just in the background. Yeah. While they’re doing something else. But yeah, it is important to be there and Riverside is one of the tools that makes that possible. Yeah. Yeah. It is it’s taken the technological development in audio recording in the way we are doing [00:33:00] it right up into the realm of professional radio studios and so forth that do have done this kind of thing for a long time.

It, it had a big impact, I think, on people’s. Willingness to listen to podcasts, where now the expectation is they want the same listening experiences they get when they tune into to DAB radio, for instance, a pristine quality audio. It’s.

They’re accustomed to more and more professional podcasts. Precisely. You look at things like precisely serial, and that’s what they hear. So when they hear something like ours, if it doesn’t measure up in terms of the quality of the audio, yeah, but I’m talking mostly from the listen experience point of view more than anything where back then I.

It was outside the realm, even with kind of, okay, we’ve got tons of money, we could do this, which was never the case. It’s outside the realm of that. Back then, professional quality microphones, the kind of stuff in radio studios. They cost a lot of money. Now I. That cost barrier is gone and both you and I have got equipment and we have purchased equipment over that of recent [00:34:00] years in particular that we couldn’t have probably dreamed of doing back in 2005 or so.

So we’ve got the ability, so I’m in my new garden studio in Somerset, in England. That’s where we moved to in October and built this place. It’s soundproofed. I’ve noticed in recordings I’ve done recently, the quality is. Completely, a hundred percent better than it ever was before with the soundproofing panels.

So decent microphone. The pop filter you can probably see on the video. And other things, the software, Adobe addition that I use as you do. There’s a few other tools I use occasionally, but I always come back to Adobe because it’s so good. And we’re doing this on Riverside, as you say, and that uses a mix of.

Storing the recordings on your hard drive and uploading it in packets as we are going along. So it’s good to have a good internet connection. Most of the times people do have great internet connection, gigabit internet. I had that before we moved. That’s a work in progress still to get it like that in the new place.

It will maybe a [00:35:00] month or so away yet. All those things combine to to provide. A means by which we could pro produce and share content where the quality of the listing experience was really good. And if the content is good, then we’re onto a winner. Now, we don’t hear much from people these days on this.

Maybe we need to ask people directly, so perhaps the time comes into the survey to do. But I think. We are at a point where two decades in, we’ve done we’ve our own experience has been great. The journey’s been fantastic. The challenges and hurdles are all part of the excitements and experience of doing this.

It’s challenging, getting dates in and all that stuff. Sometimes given our time zone difference, which has always been the case. You are in California, I’m in the uk, which is eight hours ahead of you. It was worse when exam.

Yeah twice a year. We’re an hour closer. But but we’ve managed it and it’s, it works out. Okay. I’m just thinking back just a few years. In fact it’s to 20 I. 20. [00:36:00] So the, actually the beginning of 2020 in January, that was the formal start of the COVID-19 pandemic where we did an episode that you put this together.

She and we called it, or I did in my post describing it, maybe the longest single episode of a podcast ever. Two and a half hours this episode. To now that’s a typical episode of. Of this week in Google. And I did just listen to a five and a half hour episode of a podcast. No, that’s, that, that’s a whole different ballgame.

But this week in tech with God, what’s his name? The the John Devore, right? Neil Port. Leo LaPorte, right? This we Tech, yeah. Leo Laport. That’s right. The network. That was the benchmark for long form content. But this one you gathered 17, as we described it, the smartest communicational professionals in the business.

I. For their take on FIR effectively. And let me run off the names here. Christopher Barger contributed. Jeannie Dietrich, chip Griffin, Lee Hopkins. Marshall Kirkpatrick. Sharon McIntosh. Rachel [00:37:00] Miller. Scott Monty Christopher s Penn, Jen Phillips, Eric Schwartzman. Bill Spaniel, David Spark, mark Story, Andrea VAs, Brad Whitworth, and Dan York.

They were all in there. We had Donna Papa Costa, who was a podcaster back in those early days, created our identity, our voice identity, the podcast for communicators in her unique voice, and that was a terrific labeling for us. This is episode under the new naming episode one 1 91 that was published on the 21st of January.

It’s worth a listen to what all these guys have to say. That’s only I. Not long ago, five years ago. And it’s only got better since then, shall I would argue. ’cause we then talked about the we had another kind of note of where we were at back in January of this year. We talked about, two decades of podcasting that was a bit premature. It was in 19 years, but we had something similar. And so we’ve gone that route. That’s [00:38:00] why, one reason why we don’t have any of those testimonials in this episode. ’cause what more is there to say that these guys haven’t that episode though?

January, 2020 is really worth a listen. There’s some very smart comments from all those folks I’ve mentioned, so that was great. So that takes us to today. There’s other things we could talk about too, but there’s so much there. I think, one other thing to mention is we have done, when we have been able to is live recordings together.

When we’ve been at events typically, or. I’ve been over in California, or you’ve been over in the uk The last time we did this, actually face to face shell was when you and Michelle came over and stayed with us in 2022. And we did a, we did an episode in my dining room where we had some difficulties with microphones, but we actually managed it in the ed.

And there’s other examples. There’s a, an infamous one actually of a, when we were at a conference, I think it was in 2006. In in California and there’s some great photos, you and I sitting at a [00:39:00] table and people talking to us in the venue. And it was, we were with headphones on laptops, mixers as well.

The works was there too. You’ve done a couple at conferences and we’ve managed that. We’ve we’ve always been on the leading edge of doing this stuff, haven’t we? We did one where I was speaking, I can’t remember where it was or to whom, but I think it was in or near Boston. And I got everything set up at the conference and brought you in.

And we did an episode in front of everybody. Yeah. And one of the segments was them asking questions and being able to hear you in addition to me. And then that was published as an episode. I’d have to do a little digging to find. That particular episode, but that was that was a technical challenge in those days.

Yeah. And a lot of fun. We’ve also, over the years, had themes that have seeped into many episodes during a. 10, 12 month period. Second, [00:40:00] life was a big one of those. Certainly AI finds its way into every episode now. And by the way, speaking of the technology it should be no surprise to anybody that Riverside fm, that tool that we use for recording has added.

Many AI features that we take advantage of in editing. One of those that I just love is its ability to remove filler words, which is also, by the way, a feature of d script tool that I also use in producing this show. It can also fix the sound. It wasn’t that long ago. I. Neglected to confirm that my good microphone was the one being used to record.

It ended up being the webcam microphone and I, it sounded like I was in a tin can or on a. Landline telephone. And I ran it through magic Sound on Riverside fm and it sounded like I was in a studio talking into an expensive microphone. These technologies are remarkable. Yeah. And they are.

We’ll continue talking about ’em well into the future, I’m [00:41:00] sure. Yeah I agree. I’m sure. It’s funny you mentioned Second Life. That’s a, I’m glad you mentioned that because that was an experiment we did. That was a milestone where we established a presence in Second Life, and we experimented with things that were new at that time, such as being able to.

Pass audio to and fro second life, to outside the virtual world, into the real world. We did a number of episodes in Second Life. We even had a storefront in Second Life, like a place where you could hang out with your virtual avatar and build a community in Second Life. We tried that a bit.

That was a great experiment that we did. I think on that point about. Riverside fm. Yeah, you’re right. These tools are fantastic, what you can now do, and it is something that we’re gonna see a lot more of. So I’m thinking maybe I. Think of the time we’ve got left for this episode. It’s a quick tour over 20 years, and we are linking out to other stuff you might wanna listen to, like that episode with 17 smart professionals in there talking.

Might be worth saying. What’s [00:42:00] next? What’s coming up? Not so much for us, although we might touch on that, is in the industry as a whole everyone’s doing analytics. We’re seeing lots of very interesting. Data being produced and the interpretation of that data to suggest that podcasting, and I’ve been hearing this for years, shell, we have been hearing this for years, that it’s poised to take off.

It’s poised to break into the mainstream in the workplace. I arguably, it’s there, but it’s not mass, but that. That’s okay, because this is not about just getting big numbers. We hear enough about big numbers. We hear there are hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes produced every week. There are millions of podcasts.

Arguably the these are selective choices by people who with content that appeals to niche audiences. That’s one of the beauties. Nevertheless, you also then hear about. Some podcasts that are literally in the realm of broadcast radio in terms of audience reach, the likes of Joe Rogan in America, who’s in the Millions.

There are people making serious money outta [00:43:00] this. Spotify, notably, we’re a niche podcast. We set out the outset to reach professionals in organizational communication around the world with insights on tech developments in communication particularly, and that’s how we’ve continued doing this. Now we do this.

It’s for love, not for money. We don’t have sponsors right now, and we haven’t sought any really. EE even when we did have sponsors we weren’t getting rich. It was covering our costs. Oh, no absolutely. That, that, that was why we weren’t doing it for the kind of enrichment point of view.

It was the joy of doing it and being able to articulate things and engage with like-minded others, but in terms of what’s coming. But our sponsors all came to us too. We never, they did, went out and said, would you like to sponsor our show? You’re absolutely right. They, we’ll have links in the show notes of some of the reports about what’s next for podcasting.

And you can read yourself, there’s a lot of of opinion out there. Some of it is very informed and highly credible. One of my, [00:44:00] what I think is one of the best looks at the future of podcasting is from Riverside itself, Riverside fm, where they talk about nine trends. Coming up in in during this year and well into next year they talk about podcast growth and they segregate or they segment their research into what’s the future look like for individual creators?

What’s it look like for businesses and companies FAQs on the future of podcasting? And I think it is something that our constants I would argue that people talk about. On what is coming next the change that’s coming, they talk about, you mentioned that AI is gonna have a big role. There’s a lot of it already in place and in our experience on Riverside, for instance making podcasts as lives easier, I.

By taking a lot of the heavy lifting out of the of the audio manipulation process. I don’t mean the editing so much, although you could do it for that too. But like you said, taking out the ums and the ahs, for instance optimizing the audio quality, things like that they could speed up [00:45:00] podcasting workflows and applies to.

Every industry. So things like that’s more accessible. Upping expectations through the quality that is good. We use a tool, I discovered this about a year ago, called Crumple Pop. It’s a lovely name, isn’t it? Based in Florida. They produce a suite of tools that do magical things to audio. For instance, you are talking in a room that’s got a lot of echo ’cause there’s no soundproofing or anything.

This tool will eliminate that. No one would. Ever know that you had done this in anything other than the studio. If you are out in the street and there’s a heavy wind blowing and you don’t have a pop filter, or even if you do a wind filter it’ll eliminate all of that and general other things that it could do, some of which are quite technical.

Adobe Audition has tools now in the latest versions that are AI driven. That do things like normalize different audio tracks with literally a couple of clicks before you had to drag little things on the audio waveform and do all that kind of stuff. It’s a lot easier now. And as I said, you are finding that AI is behind much of this.[00:46:00]

Other things that in in Riverside’s predictions they’re talking about content repurposing where AI takes audio and converts it into other formats, such as short form video. And that’s something that we are seeing more and more podcasters doing. We’ve, we are doing it, as you mentioned earlier, she two talking heads and audio as a pod, as a MP four file on YouTube.

Some people like the format. That way it’s not a too heavy lift to do that, to meet that desire. It does mean though that there is further change coming from a technical point of view. We’ve gotta keep on top of that, which we do video. So video’s a big deal for podcasting. I still. Talk about podcasting, meaning audio, although I don’t say audio, podcast.

I say podcasting. And then there’s video podcasting, but that’s just me. They’ll always just podcasting at some point. Voice search optimization is where voice controlled AI assistance, like I. Google, Alexa and Siri that we traditionally used [00:47:00] to will help put your podcast rank highly when a listener searches for yours via their AI assistant.

And we’re already seeing some of the signs of that. And of course the big disruptor in that area is tools like Perplexity, AI and chat, GPT and others who are also jockeying for position to be the preferred search tool. So there’s stuff like this there’s a lot more, and we’ll share the link to their predictions so you can read it.

Private podcasting meaning it’s offering loyal community paying subscribers. We don’t do paying, but I can see that being a big deal. For many short form content. We do some of that. We always struggle on keeping the episodes short and people still talk about, Hey, can’t you cut your 90 minutes down is too long, and you get a bit tired of saying, hit the pause button and listen to the other bit tomorrow, you.

Some people like the long form. I certainly do. So it’s great. So there’s lots of interesting things tips to stay ahead. They point these out, stay on top of the latest, pay [00:48:00] attention to what’s going on record high quality content. We aim to do that, and I think we deliver on that because our quality is quite good.

There’s a lot more to look at and I wonder. Here we are in the beginning of 20, 25, 20 years since our first episode, what the next five years will look like. And I’m not looking 10 years because I think it’s gonna be entirely different. Two indicators of where we’re headed with this, I think first of all, is that you’re now seeing news reports that quote people who said something in a podcast.

Yeah. This could be anything from a report in People magazine about a celebrity trashing a colleague to a. Politician making some revelation that gets reported because they were talking no names mentioned, right in the friendly confines of a podcast that was hosted by somebody who was on the same side of the political fence as them.

So podcasting is now where news is broken. Used to be Twitter now it seems to be podcasts. The other thing. [00:49:00] That I think it’s important to recognize, and I referenced it earlier, is that while in the 2024 presidential campaign here in the us Kamala Harris’ campaign spent over a billion dollars on traditional media.

They spent far less in the Trump campaign, but he appeared on podcasts that appealed to the bro community, Uhhuh, and they turned out. For him. So I think in the post-election analysis, a lot of people had said podcasting is one of those places where politicians are going to have to. Invest time and perhaps even some money down the road because that’s where influence is wielded.

So it’s taken a long time for podcasting to get there. It was a lot of years that people said this is always going to be a hobbyist thing. It’s never gonna go mainstream. And that’s gone mainstream. And partly that’s because of the shift. Technologically from needing pod catching software which Adam Curry developed.

And he had to be fairly [00:50:00] technical savvy to use these things to now just using an app on your phone to get the podcast you want, and listening in your car when it’s. Connected to your car’s entertainment system. Discoverability has changed. It used to be a nightmare. Apple changed some of that.

And now the podcast apps have discoverability features and even algorithms that recommend podcasts to you based on your current listening habits. I think this is all going to continue to accelerate. The momentum continues to build and I think the influence available in podcasting is going to continue to increase.

I also think it’s going to be a space that makes room for everybody. You could be the Joe Rogan with. 40 million listeners, you could be us with, a thousand or so reaching out to the PR community that’s actually interested in staying up on the intersection of communication and technology.

But I don’t [00:51:00] see an end in sight for podcasting. I just see more growth and expansion. Yeah. And influence. I’m with you on that. Indeed. I’m with you on that. Indeed, much of what I’m seeing, people reporting on what they think is coming next is aligned with that sentiment. So exciting times ahead if you’re a podcaster.

If you are not yet a podcaster, think about it. Exciting times ahead await you if you decide to go this route, but like you said, she. We started in the days where you needed a computer and that’s really the only way you could do this. If you are in a generation, a lot younger than we are, you are accustomed li most likely to a mobile device.

Talk, tap, publish. That’s it. No fancy time spent on, on editing and audio and all that kind of business. It’s all, instant. That said I see I listen to a number of podcasts on in the car that are produced that way, that are long form content, 45 minutes plus. And I listen with one ear on what am I hearing quality wise.

I’m wondering how they produce this. [00:52:00] It’s all really remarkable where things have come since those early days. For us, though, we’re available on any device no matter what. And hopefully your listening experience will be great. However you get your f. It has been a lot of fun looking back over the last 20 years.

The next episode will launch our next 20 years. No idea what we’ll be talking about, but it will undoubtedly be next week, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release. Happy anniversary, Neville. Thank you. She likewise.

The post FIR #443: From RSS to ChatGPT — FIR’s 20-Year Tech Communications Chronicle appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.