Journalist David Tebbutt links from his blog to an article he wrote for Information World Review entitled Genie in a Bottle. In it, he explores the deep fear that some companies have about introducing social computing into their operations. As Al Tepper, head of online development at Caspian Publishing points out in the piece, some companies have quite valid reasons to be scared - and they should be. In his words, "if you’ve got something to hide, you’ve got something to fear." As Tebbutt concludes:

This is bad news indeed for those who maintain their position through manipulation, hoarding information or playing politics.

In which case, you have bigger, more fundamental issues to worry about than social media.

I had a great conversation today with Michael Nutley, editor of New Media Age. We met up at the Soho Hotel - not for the first time, though this time we skipped the bar and sat in the drawing room. Much nicer.

Mike and I talked a bit about podcasting, and I admitted that there is no podcast I listen to regularly. (There are a few reasons for this, but primary amongst them is that I rarely hook my mp3 player up to my PC to change the line-up. I'm waiting for wireless transfer, I guess.) I do try to listen to the election podcast that my partner, Antoine Clarke, does with Brian Micklethwait every Tuesday night, but the truth is that I have access to Antoine's election insight whenever I want it, and hear a lot of that stuff on a day-to-day basis anyway. Plus, I'm not an election enthusiast.

One of the dilemmas that Brian and Antoine seem to have is how long or short the podcast should be. (Here's Brian blogging about that very topic today.) When Brian was round for dinner the other week, he said something about how, when he opens up a podcast and sees that the whole file runs at something like 32 minutes or whatever, his heart sinks. I can relate. But the point is that a podcast is just a recording of a conversation, and you shouldn't rush the conversation if it's interesting to you. Better to provide detailed show notes so that people can choose to zip right to the parts that interest them. Michael Vanderdonk summed this up quite well in a comment on the blog for Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz's For Immediate Release podcast:

The real anoying part for me is that ‘time’ is the measuring stick. If you are baking a double chocolate mud cake, the cake is ready when the cake it ready. Speeding up the cooking time to have it ready ruins the cake. Taking the cake out half baked (pun intended) ruins the cake. Skipping ingredients or preparation steps, ruins the cake. Accept the fact, Neville and Shel, that FIR takes over an hour to ‘bake’. Let the listeners decide how they want to slice it…

Second verse, same as the first: Control what you can, not what you wish you could. Let people have a choice. Do your thing and then get out of the damn way.

For anyone who thinks that customers having online voices is a passing fad or something that can be fought with bare teeth or lawsuits, you might want to heed the tale of the ad agency that sued a blogger for badmouthing a client - and found themselves on the receiving end of an avalanche of bad PR and hostility. Individuals and communities are online and are here to stay. Some of those individuals - and perhaps entire communities - may have negative things to say about your company. You are going to need a better strategy for dealing with that than Shut them down.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who will be taking part in the Blogs & Social Media Forum on May 17 (and who actively encouraged VNU to stage this event), uses the social bookmarking tool Furl to flag up this Center for Media Research item on internet radio listeners:

A new study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research finds that the weekly Internet radio audience increased by fifty percent from 2005,(satellite radio awareness tops sixty percent of the U.S. population, while the AM/FM radio audience remains strong. The report chronicles this expansion of the radio market and its implications for advertisers and media planners. The monthly audience of Internet radio tops an estimated 52 million; an increase from 37 million people in 2005. The weekly Internet radio audience also increased 50 percent over the past year, with 30 million listeners last year.

Adriana comments:

So much for those who say that the internet is for geeks and not their main customer base. Also, it is worth noting that "Online radio listeners are 36 percent more likely than the average consumer to live in a household with an annual income of more than $100,000." Now tell me that it's not worth making full use of the internet communication potential!

Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger says he thinks of 'user-generated content' as 'us-generated content'. I like. David also links to the Economist article Among the audience, which mobile marketing expert Tomi Ahonen mentions here. Great quotation re Barry Diller:

"What an ignoramus!" says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. "Look around and there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs," he says. "Diller is assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He's completely wrong." Not everything in the "blogosphere" is poetry, not every audio "podcast" is a symphony, not every video "vlog" would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.