Uncle Sam almost finds his (podcasting) voice

Uncle Sam finds his (financial) voice

You know how sometimes an institution comes so close to getting it, but then stops short? If it’s the US government, you kinda wanna scream a little, don’t you?

Case in point: the Securities and Exchange Commission. There’s a credit meltdown going on these days, and I was using EDGAR to check up on my broker’s claims of safety in certain bonds. Somehow — I don’t quite remember how — I stumbled across the SEC’s podcast.

Guess what? sec.gov has been at it for a while (the feed has episodes from May, 2005), the content is great and the production vales ain’t bad. You might be thinking, “Hey, they get it.” (Actually, I was thinking, “The SEC gets it better than some of my clients, for whom podcasting is still like motorized vehicles are to Amish folks.)

They got so tantalizingly close: they make a podcast, they put up an RSS feed (I have clients today for whom podcasting means, “Record something and post it on the website”) and they’ve stuck with it. I can even forgive Uncle Sam for burying it somewhere obscure on their website.

But, at the end of the day, they ran outta steam: they failed to list the podcast in iTunes. They’ve guaranteed themselves obscurity.

I’ll bet the iTunes selection staff would’ve been happy to feature it. (I dream of having a podcast featured in the iTunes store!) Putting the sec.gov podcast into every (free!) podcasting directory was a no-brainer.., an easy, logical end-step they clearly could’ve done. After all, they clearly understand most of the rest of what makes a podcast a podcast.

So, no cigar for Uncle SEC. Too bad, I would’ve digged a geek government.


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