So long and thanks, IT Conversations

I got an email this past week that I’ve been dreading for a long time, but half-expecting…IT Converstations is shutting down. One of the first and best podcasting resources is going away.

The good news is that their existing content is safe; some of the sub-sites are rolling back to their original sponsors (ie, Social Innovations Conversations, for example), and the main ITC corpus is going to the Internet Archive, with ITC providing transparent redirects for as long as possible. Class act, IT Conversations…I expect no less from Doug and Phil, of course.

I understand the decision, but nonetheless, IT Conversations will be *sorely* missed. I agree with Doug that, in a sense, they’ve reached “Mission Accomplished”…over the past decade, podcasting tech conferences has gone from almost impossible to bog standard, and ITC was a big part of making that happen.

There was a pretty long period at the beginning of the “podcasting era” (2004-2006 or so) where the IT Conversations website was generally a daily pageload of mine. And invariably I would find something fascinating and interesting to toss into one of my feeds. Many of the conferences and even individual podcasters that I follow today came from a IT Conversations episode.

And even today, they continue to innovate. ITC’s Spokenword.org is a novel service that provides benefits that I don’t see many other places. Spokenword allows for the curation, rating, and organization of “playlists” describing podcasts from all over the Net. It’s a great service, with a great API that allows for proper programmatic manipulation. It’s not surviving the transition, though…I’m really going to miss it. I know of tools that can give me part of what Spokenword provides, but I may have to wire some of it together myself.

So I’m sad to see them go. Nevertheless, I want to thank Doug Kaye, Phil Windley, and all the other folks who worked together to make IT Conversations such an amazing resource. You did a fantastic job, and were instrumental in bringing me into the podcast fold. I really appreciate everything you’ve done.

We’ll see y’all on the Interwebs.