This is the first post on a series about challenges for the future internet and new media industries. Think of it as a todo list for web entrepreneurs – problems which need to be solved. Maybe Jason Calacanis could help himself to an idea!

We live in a widely heralded age of new media; anyone can put out a podcast, video or music track on the internet, and make it available to whoever wants it for next to no money, and in many cases hardly any time. Everyone’s doing it as well, right from Oratos with the Gizbuzz Podcast and PodDev to the BBC with From Our Own Correspondent and many other programmes.

What Oratos and the BBC have in common with regards to our publishing of rich media is that we both lack any tools to tell us any meaningful analytics concerning our publications. It is easy to find out how many times a file has been downloaded from your server from your logs. You can do an IP lookup and find out where any given downloader downloaded it from. But that’s about where the definite information ends.

You can conjecture more information – for example, I can look at the referrers to my post about the latest Gizbuzz podcast, and see where people came from. However, what if, as Google Blogoscoped did, people link directly to the mp3? Furthermore, how do I know whether people who downloaded the podcast listened to it? I have certainly downloaded many podcasts which I have never listened to, for whatever reason. How do I know how people listened to them? Is the Gizbuzz podcast popular for the daily commute, or do people settle down in front of their computer and concentrate?

I need to know the answers to these questions, not just for personal interest. For example, if our podcast is listened to on the commute, it should certainly strike a lighter tone than otherwise. In order for any content series, such as a podcast, to be successful in the long term, it needs to respond to consumer wants. This is infinitely harder to do if it is impossible to have full information about those who are listening to you.

There is also another problem caused by this lack of information: it encourages the use of DRM in content encoding by media giants. Large scale corporate media demands proper information about its audience, and is simply not prepared to publish in a format that it cannot monitor. By wrapping content in DRM, a content producer can control what plays that content, and the player can phone home with information, such as whether an episode was listened to in full.

At the moment, it is not possible to have full analytics without using DRM. However, for new media to flourish, and for old media to embrace it, this needs to be possible. I can’t think of any possible solution, but that’s not what the point of this series is about. At some point in the near future, this problem needs to be solved. Someone get on it!