Exhibit [A] in the case for niche aggregators

Not sure where I was going with my "fine-slicing aggregation" post? Steve Rubel comes up with a perfect example to demonstrate:

As I browse through the podcasts on the iTunes Music Store I notice something really important is missing - The Long Tail. While each album listing points me to others people have purchased, the same metadata is missing when it comes to podcasts. We should be able to see a link that says "people who subscribe to this podcasts also subscribe to..." Take a look at the images below and note the differences.

The lesson: the best way to present one kind of product is not necessarily the best way to present another. I gave the example of hotlinking the individual performers on Jazz albums, much as IMDB does for actors and directors, so you can follow their individual careers. But the podcasting example is even better.

As this demonstrates, the iTunes interface is too inflexible (so far) to present podcasts as usefully as it presents pop music. That's either an opportunity for Apple to adapt iTunes so it offers different UIs for different kinds of content (much as Google has with everything from Google Maps to Google Print) or for a specialized aggregator focused just on podcasting to rise. Either way, this shows why one-size-fits-all aggregation doesn't work, and how to slice it finer to suit niches better.

Comments

[Jake L]

I think Bloglines does this for blogs (or something like it). You can also track podcasts in Bloglines. But I'm not sure it's as elegant as iTunes in that it doesn't interface directly with the player.