Friedman: Podcasts in China

[Owen Densmore]

Interesting take by Tom Friedman on podcasting.  He correctly  
understands its bottom-up (read complex) nature.

(Note: This is from my local library, not the NYTimes, thus is not  
potentially illegal.  It allows emailing the content.)

Owen

Friedman: Podcasts in China

And you thought the Cultural Revolution was over. Sorry, it's just  
beginning, only China's new Cultural Revolution will be driven this  
time from the bottom up -- by podcasters with Apple's little white  
iPods or competing players, not from the top down by Maoists with  
Little Red Books.

Yes, I know, I am a little ahead of myself. Very few Chinese have  
ever even seen an iPod, so the podcasting that does exist here is  
largely done through PC's. (Podcasting is the technology that enables  
individuals to produce their own poetry and songs, videos and photos,  
and upload them onto a podcasting Web site, then offer this content  
to anyone who wants to sample it or subscribe to it.) Once the prices  
come down for iPods, both for those that play audio and for Apple's  
newest version, which also plays video, there will be a huge market  
here for Chinese-language podcasting.

I got a little glimpse of the future visiting a small apartment in  
suburban Shanghai, home to China's leading podcasting Web site,  
Toodou.com.

''We already have 13,000 channels on our site and about 5,000 of them  
are updated regularly,'' said Gary Wang, 32, the Fuzhou-born and  
U.S.- and French-educated Chinese engineer who founded Toodou. Any  
Chinese can create his or her own channel of video or audio content  
on Toodou (which means ''potato''), and other individuals sign up to  
get that channel's new uploads. Eventually Toodou will charge a  
monthly subscription fee.

''I want to create hundreds of thousands of different channels,  
maintained by just average people, where other people can access them  
and download the material,'' Mr. Wang added. And he will, because of  
how easy it is to upload and podcast homemade video and audio  
content. There are almost no barriers to entry. (His site does self-
censor porn and anything that's obviously against Chinese law -- but  
anything else goes.)

Toodou's most popular podcast today shows two 20-year-old Chinese  
women who lip-sync a popular Cantonese rock tune. ''They got bored,''  
Mr. Wang explained, so they bought their own Webcam, which you can  
find here for as little as $6, used Microsoft Movie Maker, which is  
free with Windows XP, made their own little three-minute MTV-like  
podcast and uploaded it onto Toodou.com. It's been viewed 75,000  
times in three months.

''It took them one hour to make and 15 minutes to edit,'' Mr. Wang  
said. The women, called the Beans, now have their own Internet fan club.

Another favorite is a podcast by two Chinese architecture students in  
Houston Rockets jerseys (the team of the Chinese N.B.A. star Yao  
Ming) who lip-sync a Backstreet Boys tune. A slide show on life in  
Shenzhen has been viewed 16,000 times, with lots of accompanying  
commentary from viewers. The second-most-popular podcast right now  
shows an underground rock band at a Shanghai bar.

Toodou's goal, Mr. Wang said, ''will be to connect [Chinese] people  
to their tastes and to their potential collaborators. We will have a  
huge content database, and we will share the revenue with content  
providers.''

For now, a lot of it is junk, but that will change. The podcasting  
tools are so easy to acquire that it will force competition,  
experimentation and better quality. Mr. Wang first heard of  
podcasting only 13 months ago. Today he has the most popular  
podcasting site in China, with 100,000 registered users, 8 employees,  
40 volunteers and a U.S. venture-capital backer.

News of his site was spread free by Chinese bloggers. His office  
costs $500 a month, and some of the employees sleep there. Almost all  
of the software that runs Toodou.com is from free open-source  
material on the Web: an Apache Web server; FreeBSD, a free Unix  
operating system; MySQL, a free database system; and PHP, free  
programming lingo. Mr. Wang wrote the basic algorithms that run  
Toodou.com himself.

Unlike earlier techno-media revolutions, which began in the West and  
moved East, the podcasting revolution is going to explode everywhere  
at once, thanks to the Web and free technology tools. That's why the  
next phase of globalization is not going to be more Americanization,  
but more ''glocalization'' -- more and more local content made global.

''We have different songs and we want to express different things,  
but the desire is the same,'' Mr. Wang said. ''We all want to be seen  
and heard and be able to create stuff we like and share it. People  
from all over the world will draw knowledge and inspiration from the  
same technology platform, but different cultures will flourish on it.  
It is the same soil, but different trees will grow.''