Radio's YouTube Has Arrived

It's called BlogTalkRadio.com and it may soon do for amateur talkers what YouTube is doing for the homemade video clip. It's all very simple. Want to be a talk show host? Log in. And lots of people have been doing just that since August when it launched. Even MySpace bloggers are getting into the act. The service is free to talk show bloggers who share equally in whatever revenue BlogTalkRadio.com brings in from advertising. Listeners can subscribe via RSS feeds and the feeds can be archived. Each host gets a switchboard page and they can do links from their blogs to their talk show. Listeners listen on their computers to hear the stream but they can call in. Hosts can call in on a regular telephone to record. Listeners must listen to an ad to get the stream and they can't fast forward through them because the broadcasts are live. This is all kind of consistent with the present generations' desire for democracy. Remember their mantra: they want it their way when they want it. If this catches on it won't mean the end of radio talk shows, but it will distract listeners from seeking radio and right now Gen Y lives well without radio as it is. Again, I get the sense that radio's complacency to air only couple of genres of talk shows and syndicate them among 12,000 potential stations is part of the problem. Now radio has online competition from the folks who had eyes for YouTube and now a voice of their own thanks to BlogTalkRadio.com