An interesting and relavent quote

I am listening to some old podcasts from Dave Winer and he had a quote that hit me: "It is easier for users to become manufacturers than for manufacturers to become users." The idea is that as a user you have an idea of what something needs to do to meet the market needs, however it is tougher for someone who does not use the product to make a useful product. He offers no scientific evidence, but just an observation. (Note - this was an older podcast from 2/4/05. He recently changed his RSS feed and I got some older shows, some of which I had missed.)

Now I found that interesting because I was recently looking at iTunes at my smart play list at work to try and change it to automatically remove a podcast once it has played, however the list is based upon the genre and there are multiple genres which stopped my current playlist method from working.

Doing a quick analysis, it seems that people who listen to podcasts on a regular basis all used the same genre (podcast) yet the others who are doing this as an extension of their business and do not seem to listen on a regular basis. The result is multiple genres (or nothing setup at all) because, and sing along if you know the lyrics, "the manufacturers are not users."

Some other examples - Using the same name for the album title and not putting a date on it and making random file names that in no way relates to the album title.

Now there were 2 notable exceptions to this, both on the user side, however in one of those cases I would agree with the genre they have on their podcast.

Fortunatley my current client has the ability to change the genre to a consistent value and over time I will have the smart play list I want at work. However this is another example of where users have provided the needed things.

I am getting caught up on the above Dave Winer dump to my computer plus all my other regular shows. I will do a more normal post later today, but I thought this was interesting and required a quickie post.