The spectacular advent of New Media in the last few years has had a substantial impact on communications for those of us who like to communicate that way.

However, unlike the “evangelists”, I’ve always felt it’s been largely played out around the edges of the mainstream and remains a fringe activity still. The mainstream provides the journalists, editors and publishers; blogs etc. provide the stringers.

Getting excited about people getting excited is not a valid business case.

The current fashion for podcasts and vidblogs is another new fad yet to prove itself in the real world, at least on centre-stage.

My own view is that life is too short for podcasts and endless snippets of poor quality video about people making fools of themselves. Bundling them all onto normal blogs only makes the platform virtually unusable and overly-complicated.

So how are these “technologies” doing in the commercial world?

Recently we had Evan Williams’s confession that his podcast outfit, Odeo, was struggling. Manfully, he blamed himself – but might not the market bear some responsibility too?

Now BlogExplosion, the traffic-generating social network, has announced it’s giving up on podcasts and vidblogs on its already heaving website. The latest email newsletter reports : “Shortly after we created it, it seemed apparent that BlogExplosion really wasn’t the place for podcasts and vidcasts. For that reason, we have decided that effective October 1st, 2006, we will be retiring the podcasts area of BlogExplosion.”

I’ve also noticed that Robert Scoble — recently headhunted by a Valley podcast startup is beginning to question whether the geek base is enough of an audience. He probably senses that to address a wider listenership they will have to match mainstream reach, quality and technical sophistication. Can he become a Ted Turner overnight? Doubtful.

So are we seeing the end of phase 1 of the pod/vid craze? The answer is almost certainly yes.

Is there a Pod 2.0 out there waiting for the evangelists to grab? Yes, but only if they scale up to broadcast standards. Otherwise it’s just geeks playing with toys and talking to each other in an echo-chamber.

But what, I can hear you shouting, about Youtube, surely a massive success for Video blogging? Well, venture capitalist Mark Cuban has just posted about “The coming dramatic decline of YouTube”.

Considering the RIAA will sue your grandma or a 12 year old at the drop of a hat, the fact that Youtube is building a traffic juggernaut around copyrighted audio and video without being sued is like…. well Napster at the beginning as the labels were trying to figure out what it meant to them. [...]

Take away all the copyrighted material and you take away most of Youtube’s traffic. Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal. Like any number of competitors out there that decided to follow copyright law.

He ends his post : “Youtube, we hardly knew you.”

A fitting epitaph for yet another tubular bubble on the internet. But, in reality it’s just another ending before another beginning. Some folk have stretched the envelope and come up against the law of the land and the complexity issues of real media operation.

Jason Calacanis has also weighed in with : “… we all know that YouTube is on the brink of extinction.” And his parent company, Time Warner, has just agreed to supply its own videos to YouTube. Mysterious.

These technologies will be taken up, but in the proper setting of high-end, high-class, big media. Unless the little ones learn to scale up and comply with the law, they will just bounce off the granite cliff face inhabited by the big boys.

In the longer term these new media will either remain as serious games for the dedicated amateur, or they will develop mainstream excellence and become part of it.