Gary Wang at his Toodou-office

internet - The staggering explosion of podcasting

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman noted it last week in an interview with the Financial Times with amazement. When his now famous book "The world is flat" was published in March 2004 podcasting was unknown.

Three weeks ago, in the first week of November, the audio version of this book was the number one selling podcast album on Apple’s iTunes, ahead of all kinds of rock and roll, rap and whatever. That got me enormous juice with my teenage daughters.

China is following in lightening speed and Epoch Times interviewed Toodou co-founder Gary Wang (the other founder is fellow-Dutchman Marc van der Chijs). Launched in April it now has 120,000 registered users, responsible for thousands of podcasts, including video. Most users would download only. Gary Wang:

We wouldn't mind following an example, but there is no one to follow. We have really had to forge our own path with this thing, especially in terms of business models. There are so many different approaches to multimedia user generated content. There have actually been a lot of new of these types of websites launched in the US just in the last few months, and while we won't do exactly what they do, we may adopt some elements from others and integrate them into Toodou's website.

Toodou has to employ some staff (five to ten) to check for content that would be against the Chinese rules, Wang says. Since key word filtering does not work for podcasts, Toodou has to check all content piece by piece, at least in theory.

Most of our content producers are 18 to 25 years old. However, there are also several who are in their 30s or 40s, and one of our oldest podcasters is a 75 year old guy who does calligraphy and makes videos of those outdoor gatherings where a mostly older group of people practice ballroom dancing.

(The link to Gary's weblog give a translation of the Epoch interview).