JD on EP

By the way, I got to Dan's post through a Memeorandum thread about a Forrester poll showing 1% of consumers reacting to "podcasting". The thread attracted my attention because of all the people hollerin' about how wrong Forrester was, but few of these attacks I read through had a link to a specific claim that was rebutted.

I'm guessing it was probably a survey methodology difference at the core, but all the podcasting enthusiasts didn't get to the point of what they objected to in Charlene Li's article, and provide the reader a way of comparing claims. Ironic, in light of Dan's point above.

Here's Charlene's source info: "Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. " No idea of how that survey was conducted, or who the sampled audience was. This methodology info is probably in their full paid report and her post is more like advertising than a solid statement in itself, but there's been a whole lot of blogosphere noise'n'fury this morning over an example, where text does not automatically suffice.

Lean and indexed definitely make video more useful.

Playback speed is also an under-rated aspect of information-videos (differentiated from entertainment-videos). Consuming a video feed at 2x's real-time speed still allows you to hear and understand the important information without losing much visual information - particularly true with talking head videos. Being able to change video playback speed allows the viewer to speed through the sections with low information density without missing anything. When a section with high information density is encountered they can slow the video back down to real-time or slower to absorb all the details.

When professors provide video recordings of their lectures, students will often use this technique to "scan" through the boring bits. This allows students to learn in faster-than-real-time. Imagine completing a 4-year degree in 2 years.

For many years now, I've been hoping for the Flash Player to be able to play back audio and video at non-real-time speeds. It's a feature that other video players/formats have had for some time and would make Flash videos more useful.

Don't forget video hyperlinks, the ability to navigate to a section of interest in the video. Nobody shares video hyperlinks right now, although most video players support it. There is a technology waiting to be used for productivity purposes!