BusinessWeek Has Podcasts. Entrepreneur Magazine Has…Missed the Point?
Published October 14th, 2005 in Articles, Business, New Media, TechnologyI just received an invitation to listen to an interview with the founder of the Small Biz Games on Entrepreneur Magazine Radio. I hadn’t known that Entrepreneur Magazine had a radio show, though, as I think about it, I do recall Entrepreneur columnist Romanus Wolter, who will be conducting this interview, saying something about it.
Entrepreneur Magazine Radio is a production of wsRadio.com, which offers live streaming audio of Hay House and eBay Radio as well as the Entrepreneur Magazine shows. So far, so good. But I noticed something strange right away: the audio format options offered for archived Entrepreneur Magazine Radio shows at are .wma and .ram—streaming versions of Windows Media and Real Media. Where were the .mp3 files, or even downloadable .wmv or .rm files?
When I clicked on a title, a window with ads at the top and bottom, the usual controls for streaming media (pause, stop, skip forward, skip backward, volume), and a little “Playing Now” box appeared and the show started to play. At the bottom of the “Playing Now” box it says “Like this show? Get the RSS feed. Record on MP3.”
The RSS link takes you to a long list of wsRadio RSS feeds. “Record on MP3,” on the other hand, takes you off the wsRadio site to a page about Replay Radio, a $49.95 product for recording audio on your PC. In other words, the only way to get an MP3 from this site is to make it yourself, and they prefer that you use their sponsor’s product to do so. Replay Radio must be giving Entrepreneur quite an affiliate kickback.
The jaw-dropper is that there’s an RSS feed for this show (http://www.wsradio.com/rss/3.xml) and it has no enclosures. If you paste that URL into iPodder (or whatever podcatching software you use), it will tell you “No Episodes Found.” What good is an RSS feed for a radio show which isn’t really a podcast?
There are WSRadio programs which have podcasts, just as there are plenty of broadcast radio stations offering podcasts. BusinessWeek has several podcasts; I subscribe to “Cover Stories,” “Technology & You,” and “The Blog Elite”—which recently featured an interview with blogger and podcaster Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion and Across the Sound fame.
If BusinessWeek can do it, what’s stopping Entrepreneur Magazine Radio from creating a real podcast so listeners can take it anywhere? Is it those kickbacks from Replay Radio? They’d do better to use that product instead of selling it, and aim for affiliate kickbacks and advertising dollars from Apple instead.
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