JavaCast Growth Phenomenal

Important update: In one of those ironic twists, shortly after I posted this, Brandon Werner completely lost interest in the JavaCast and took down the whole site, so many of the links below won't work. Dick Wall, the co-host, has contacted me and is in the process of starting his own podcast about the Java world. Assuming he keeps at it (which I think he will, based on his enthusiasm), my prediction simply transfers over to his podcast, since it will be the only Java-based podcast at this time. I expect that within about one month, he will have 20,000 to 60,000 subscribers, depending on how well he can manage promotion and infrastructure. Finally, the interview I had with Dick will appear on his show instead.

I never really understood podcasting until I found The JavaCast. How could this show come out of nowhere to reach over 40,000 subscribers in a barely more than a month? The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me.

Basically it comes down to this: Newspapers are about broad audiences, blogging is about narrow audiences. Similarly, radio is about broad audiences, podcasting is about narrow audiences. (I guess that leaves then next logical step as vidcasting vs. television? Can't wait till the technology gets easy enough to just throw together a video interview. That would be wickedly cool.)

I heard an interview with Robert Scoble, on the awesome IT Conversations site, and he crystalized the idea in my head. People are itching to hear information relevant to their own personal interests in a timely manner.

Also, there's the issue of costs. Instead of requiring a hugely expensive studio and broadcasting license, which forces you to seek a large audience to make up the costs, you can just set up some free software on your own personal machine and do informal interviews and discussions with whoever the hell you want. There's no need to justify any costs, except perhaps the time it takes to edit the recordings. Almost anyone can do their own podcast for any particular interest they may have.

So, while podcasting as a phenomenon will be huge, the podcasts themselves will not likely have huge audiences. Well then, how do you explain JavaCast's huge audience? The answer is simply that there is currently no other podcast dedicated to Java, and the Java 'niche' is quite huge. I expect JavaCast's audience will continue to grow at a huge rate until some competitors appear, at which point, the audience will segment further into specific Java topics like Java EE, client side, security, or whatever.

In the mean time, I recommend checking out the JavaCast. The latest episode has a great interview with Bruce Tate about web development technologies, and what's possible 'beyond Java', which is the topic of his upcoming book. I met Bruce briefly at JavaOne 2004, and he signed my copy of Better, Faster, Lighter Java. Cool guy.

I just finished recording an interview with Dick Wall of the JavaCast, about IntelliJ IDEA 5.0, and how it compares to Eclipse and NetBeans. That should be coming up in one of the next episodes.