IBM: Hey guys... um... guys?

So nice to see IBM getting into podcasting, as detailed in this podcast. Oh look, the boys at Podtech.net have put an ivory tower at the top of the page to set the scene, how nice. And the interviewer has to kowtow to the company's internal nomenclature before the transcript even begins, that's a good start. I could go through the transcript piece by piece pointing out how wrong wrong wrong it all is, but that would take too long. Podcasting is not something that should be controlled via press release, which is all this extended "suck job" (to use a phrase of my sister's) amounts to. Please excuse my cynicism, but I have heard this kind of thing from IBM before in relation to knowledge management, enterprise portals, intranets, and every other fad technology but that fact remains, as one of the Big Blue wonks says:

... in a large company like IBM you’ve got a lot of experts, you’ve got a lot who are among the best there is at what they do, but it’s easy to get lost in such a large company.

When the podcasting fad is over (or at least mainstreamed out of coolness), you still won't be able to just pick up the phone and find anyone in IBM, and if you do go through the intense and lasting pain of finding someone (as I and many other IT journos have done over the years), they rarely have anything new or vital to say on the record. Say what you want about Microsoft, they let Robert Scoble surface from within and then promoted him. Who is IBM's Scoble? Interesting to note the first trackback on that story is Scoble himself.