I’ve been thinking about getting involved in podcasting for a while now. So when I saw a favourite blogger of mine asking for contributors to a new podcast he was setting up, I thought it was the ideal opportunity to dip my toe in the water.

The podcast is the idea of James O’Malley, a fine chap with a jolly good blog. His thinking is to have a number of contributors chipping in to a weekly podcast which will be around 15–20 minutes long. The podcast will be along the lefty / liberal / atheist / skeptical / rationalist lines. Read James O’Malley’s explanation for more.

What was missing was a name for the podcast. A bit difficult to come up with a name for something that only exists in your brain. But with the vague template in mind, I set to work, along with the other contributors, to think of a suitable name.

Suddenly, it came to me. After I had been lying in bed literally unable to sleep for hours, it suddenly came to me: The Pod Delusion. Yes, I know. I’m a genius. Not quite a living legend like James O’Malley though. Nonetheless, the fact that I came up with the excellent name means that The Pod Delusion is definitely my podcast. The fact that I put no effort whatsoever into creating it, producing it or commissioning pieces for it is frankly neither here nor there.

Anyway, I am quite excited about The Pod Delusion. With the stellar line-up of contributors, it seems like it’s going to be ace. If everything goes to plan and this week’s pilot goes down well, you can expect a new episode every Friday. My plan is to publish all transcripts of my contributions, or an accompanying article, on this website as and when each podcast is published.

Here is the first episode of The Pod Delusion. I have just listened to it myself. Since it’s the first ever attempt, it is a tad ramshackular, but that will get better over time. All-in-all, I think it’s a fine listen.

Hopefully sometime soon it will be available over iTunes too. You can follow @poddelusion on Twitter.

My first little piece for The Pod Delusion is about product placement. When I first set about doing it, my intention was to try and make it serious. I had actually been planning to write here about the product placement hoo-ha, but then decided I could kill two birds with one stone by making it my Pod Delusion contribution too.

Unfortunately, I got a little bit carried away with the fact that I was working in an exciting new audio medium. I inserted a few audio jokes which won’t work in writing. From then on, the whole thing became just a collection of bad jokes about product placement, strung together by the flimsiest of wafer-thin serious points.

So, bearing that in mind, here is my contribution to this week’s Pod Delusion.

It was announced last week by Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw that product placement will soon be allowed on commercial channels. I suppose there was an inevitability in this. After all, commercial broadcasters finding it harder to sustain themselves through traditional advertising in a multichannel world. Plus, we are living in an era where so many people use PVRs to fast-forward through the adverts anyway.

There has to be some way to fund commercial television. After all, what would we do without ITV? Okay, that’s a bad example. But what would we do without Channel Five? Well okay, but you get my point.

Many worry about the effects that product placement will have on the viewing experience. With product placement, there will be a question mark over the purity of the programmes we watch. Will our programmes be peppered with subliminal advertising that attempt to brainwash us into changing the brand of soap powder that we use?

I’m not so sure that will be such an issue. After all, we are well used to product placements in major films. Television programmes from other countries are filled with product placements already. I am sure that most people are savvy enough to tell what’s going on.

For instance, it can be disconcerting to watch an episode on Neighbours when one of the characters decides to open the fridge. Inexplicably, the fridge is filled from wall to wall with nothing but cans of Sprite! That is obviously a nonsensical scenario. It would have been far more realistic if the fridge was filled from wall to wall with cans of tasty Dr Pepper — “what’s the worst that can happen?”

The odd thing about imported programmes is that due to the stricter laws in the UK, our broadcasters have to blur such product placements out. But this only brings attention to the fact that there is an alien blob floating around on the screen.

Focusing on the blobs on American Idol, for instance, you can clearly see that the judges have large cups on their desk. These cups are predominantly red but with a distinctive white swirl that can only be associated with Coke. Mmm… fresh, ice cold Coke.

The new product placement rules do not affect the BBC. But it would be interesting to consider what it might be like if one day the rules were relaxed for the BBC too. After all, is there anything more ridiculous than the slightly awkward attempts to avoid using brand names during makes on Blue Peter? Referring to “sticky back plastic” may be quaint and traditional, but it is also distracting and sets off a klaxon in your brain that sounds something like: “SELLOTAPE! SELLOTAPE!”

I once saw a Blue Peter make where you had to use a “crisp tube”. What on earth is a crisp tube? Crisps come in packets don’t they? What they were talking about was a pack of Pringles. Given that Pringles are the only make of crisps to be sold in that style of tub, you can more or less guarantee that sales of Pringles went through the roof anyway — all because of the BBC’s massive abuse of power.

Well I think I have said all there is to say about product placement. I think what I will do now is take off my Specsavers glasses and shut down my Asus Eee PC. Then I think I will listen to my Apple iPod, while eating a fresh sandwich from Subway.

Or perhaps I will just go for a piss in my Armitage Shanks toilet.

The media is changing very quickly, and there are a lot of difficult issues that have to be sorted out. With the massive (and still growing, maybe even still accellerating) success of blogging, podcasting and vlogging, the boundaries between the mainstream media and the pamphleteers are becoming ever-more blurred. This week Michael Grade wondered about the digital challenge.

…I do not believe we are more than two or three elections away from the moment when some commercial channels will be ready to proclaim: “We win it for Tony, Dave, Ming (or whoever).”

Grade notes the difference in culture between the print media and broadcasters:

In the UK, we have developed quite different expectations of different media. With broadcasting, balance and impartiality have been statutory requirements: democracy is judged to be served by the absence of bias and partisan editorial agendas. For print, with its long history of struggle against state censorship, democracy is seen to be served by freedom of expression, and is characterised by partisan editorialising.

Television channels are still fairly heavily regulated by Ofcom. This is designed to keep television news impartial, which is said to ensure a healthy democracy. But were newspapers to be regulated in this way it would be rightly called an undemocratic suppression of free speech.

It might seem like a discrepancy. But up until recently, broadcasters were part of a privileged elite. A television channel could have a lot of power. You don’t have to go back far to find an era where the UK had only three and a half channels. People would be stuck with what they were fed. Television audiences of over 20 million, although almost unheard of today, were not that unusual back then.

A license to broadcast was a powerful thing to have. It was a privilege, and with that privilege came responsibilities. As such it was reasonable to regulate these channels’ news output. Otherwise just two or three companies would have had a ridiculous amount of influence over the electorate.

It was very different with newspapers. In theory, anybody could publish a newspaper. It certainly had fewer barriers to entry than broadcasting did. As such, press freedoms were cherished. A diversity of opinions unimaginable to broadcasting was available in print.

Today it’s a very different story. In just a few years it will be the norm for every television owner to have access to a few dozen different channels. There are hundreds available on Sky. It is now cheaper to run some television stations than it is to publish a magazine. And there are certainly more television channels than there are national newspapers.

The traditional analogue terrestrial channels are seeing audiences dwindle. The BBC, ITN, even Sky are all becoming less powerful. Competition has increased greatly. Viewers have so many choices, and broadcasting is no longer so much of a privilege. Yes, many of the new channels have been set up by the traditional broadcasters — but this is more of a damage limitation exercise than anything else.

But it’s not just the advent of digital television that is giving the traditional media companies food for thought. A far bigger problem is being posed by the internet. Young people spend far more time on websites like YouTube and MySpace than watching television. We live in an age where the world seems to be increasingly run by large, soulless corporations. But the internet is making those large, soulless corporations run scared.

Viacom (MTV) is particularly miffed that Generation MTV is fizzling out and almost bought Bebo to try and stay hip (it laucnhed MTV Flux instead). Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace after being slow off the mark to adapt to a new world in love with the internet. Most strangely of all, ITV bought Friends Reunited.

But in terms of news coverage, the emergence of citizen journalism should usher in a new era of free speech in broadcasting. With the advent of vlogging and websites like YouTube, who is to say what is and isn’t broadcasting? It is conceivable that one day soon there will be a blogger or a vlogger who is just as influential as somebody on the television.

For some governments, this means that you should regulate citizen journalists in the same way as you would regulate broadcasters. This year in Singapore the government attempted to gag bloggers during the election campaign. The Indian government also ordered ISPs to block popular blogging sites Blogspot, Typepad and Geocities. Two years ago, French authorities famously arrested a blogger for criticising the city mayor. Does that not all sound like a suppression of free speech?

Citizen journalism has created a new category of person somewhere in between the traditional journalist and the pub ranter. It’s a grey area. We would expect the traditional journalist to adhere to certain standards; we certainly would not expect the pub ranter to. So what should we expect the citizen journalist to do?

People in this arena are becoming increasingly ambitious. There will soon be the launch of a new internet television channel, 18 Doughty Street. Those involved are already among the most successful bloggers around. If 18 Doughty Street succeeds (still a big ‘if’, of course), traditional media companies will have to take notice.

As I said, the reason broadcasters are regulated is because they were in a privileged position. But they are now no longer in such a privileged position. We can get our news from a growing number of different outlets. Today, anybody can write an article or make a film and reach a large audience. There is now genuine competition in the media. There will always be a place for the mainstream media, but they are surely becoming less powerful.

Soon enough Ofcom’s impartiality regulations will look like an anachronism. Soon it should be time to wave goodbye to the impartiality regulations in favour of freedom of speech. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every news outlet would have to become a Fox- or Independent-style ‘views’ outlet. Broadcasters — particularly the BBC — will always want to appear unbiased. There probably isn’t much of an appetite in the UK for a Fox News-style channel — although I can see an opinionated channel based on The Sun being successful.

The point is that we are now lucky enough to be in a position where we have pretty much unlimited access to as many different opinions as we want. So it’s time to celebrate this diversity instead of suppressing it. Murdoch wants to launch a Fox-style channel in the UK? Why not let him? There’ll be thousands of citizen journalists ready to challenge.