Isn’t the coolest thing about podcasting the fact that it can be different things to different people? Several comments here allude to that. The fact that podcasting can be hard to describe without references to things people know (blogging, radio, MP3 players…). After all, you can podcast PDF files as well as video and audio. But people do tend to think from what they know.

Longer podcasts can be really nice. Even some fairly dry ones. Some quick and witty ones are also cool. And holding a strict schedule is difficult to do, for a lot of people (including bloggers). Cool thing is, there’s room for all of this. What is podcasting likely to achieve if it comes to the point at which 95% of podcast listeners only listen to two or three main regularly-produced podcasts? Now, something which seems to be missing from podcast directories (haven’t looked specifically, but didn’t notice this yet) is a way to sort and search for podcasts by types. You mostly want short, infrequent, blog-like podcasts? There should be an easy way to find them. You only want podcast versions of professionally produced radio-like shows? That list should include non-mainstream shows. In fact, we should be able to have different podcast subscriptions for different situations. Don’t know about you but I have a hard time listening to people talk when I write. Music podcasts can be cool but most of them have sections of talking. Kind of distracting. On the other hand, it’s fun to listen to talk-intensive podcasts while walking or commuting. It’d be useful to have different playlists for different activities. Actually, same holds true for music. Not everyone listens to the same music while doing the dishes or taking a shower.

Short podcasts are great for those moments at work where I’m waiting for Lotus notes to stop crashing or driving my rather short commute home.

The difficulty with short podcasts is the time that goes into finding stuff that is interesting vs. the time it takes to listen to it seems non-proportional. I’m sure there is great stuff out there that I just don’t want to spend an hour searching for only to get a few minutes of content a week.

I think a meta-feed would be really cool — perhaps a ‘productivity channel’ which has podcasts from 43 Folders and other sites. I subscribed to Ryan and Jen’s Lost podcast (the one the article refers to), and it was great, but HUGE. Although I listened to it every week, I didn’t listen to ALL of it every week.

Frankly, I’d rather subscribe to the “Lost channel” that has some smaller segments from lots of different people, then maybe select the best shows on that ‘channel’ to listen to. I think a higher level of aggregation before hitting the user would be beneficial to all.

I could do a segment every week or two on TiVo for a channel :-) But anything more than that, and I think I’d get a ‘thumbs down’.

[…] 43 Folders: “I think the problem is the expectations podcasters may have created for themselves and for their audience — being cleft to this 1st Generation notion of podcasting as ‘regularly-scheduled MP3 Radio Show.’” […]

Had to look up logorrheic

log·or·rhe·a (lô’g?-r?’?, l?g’?-) n. Excessive use of words.

Hahaa!

Couldn’t agree with you more. Of course, my podcast is, in fact, short, single-topic posts that come out when I (or one of my contributors) have something to say. Crazy, huh?

-R

iFeel PodFaded after iTake some drugs. iKnow the drugs make me Think Different. sometimes, me and my GarageBand will PodCast our PodSafe music via the iTunes music store. Later we might hit the bar where iMac on the ladies.

… seriously, this podthis, pod that, i this i that crap is making me sick… i may need iBucket

Be careful, Chris. “iBucket” requires Firewire 800 and 10.4.4, so be sure to check your current specs, pre-purchase.

Amen.

Imagine my surprise when, after recently upgrading to a new 5G ipod, I decided to subscribe to a few podcasts. Late to the game, I had no idea I was biting off 30-45 minute pieces of audio. Fairly techno-webtwooh-savvy, but absolutely new to podcasts, I thought they were just what you’re suggesting they become. Of the first five I subscribed to, I’ve yet to listen to an entire one.

Who knows what cool stuff might have been buried in the second half hour but who’s got the freaking time.

Never mind already.

You’ve definitely got this whole thing figured out, Merlin. I love how your podcast is brief and to the point, while seemingly every other podcast out there is padded with all kinds of inane blather. Hopefully other podcasters are taking notice.

Amen, Merlin. Podcasts seem like such a great idea, but there’s so much chaff.

One that I used to listen to was about a half-hour long; if it were only the useful stuff, it could be ten minutes long. Instead, every podcast contained about ten minutes of interesting information, and twenty minutes of meta-discussion about how he was sorry he didn’t update more often and what sort of mic he was using and how difficult is was to come up with things to say sometimes and so forth.

It finally chased me away. Put up ten interesting minutes every two weeks or whatever. Don’t post podcasts that mostly apologize that your podcasts are late.

You know, I don’t get together with my sisters as often as I’d like, but when we do see each other we don’t spend 2/3 of the time talking about how we should get together more often.

Great post! I need to heed the advice you’ve given here.

[…] Flash: “Podfading” ravages the landscape of logorrheic bloggers Me? I like the idea that a podcast is simply another way to post. Nothing more. Same way that Flickr and del.icio.us — to name just a couple — let me share something in a way that isn’t a traditional blog post, recording audio lets me (try to) make a certain point in my own way and with tone (and, one hopes, personality) that are a contrast with typically dry blog writing. But maybe that’s just me. […]

I couldn’t agree more. For instance, there a slew of podcasts at Techpodcasts.net that are on really great topics. But I swear to god those people can suck the life out the most vital lively topics. To their credit, they do it regular as clock-work. I just wish podcasters in general, like you suggest, would throttle back on the frequency and focus more on publishing 45’s of their best stuff.

‘Hi! I’m Merlin! I’m the best at podcasting! everybody should be exactly like me!’

Hold on.. that’s exactly true. Damn you’re good.

Aloha! My wife Jen and I were the “Lost” podcasters mentioned in the Wired piece. Your mention of self-imposed expectations definitely hit close to home. In our case, I guess listeners could have been satisifed with something less frequent, less structured, more spontaneous… but I didn’t think I could be. And as we said up front when we retired, “It’s not you. It’s us.”

I love podcasting as a phenomenon, and enjoy just as many stream-of-consciousness random rants (or “posts”) as I do topical, focused, meticulously produced programs. I think both are fantastic, and while I presume the “radio show” model you mention makes less sense coming from the “podcasters as audio bloggers” standpoint, I wouldn’t dismiss it as people simply mimicking or getting stuck in an “old school” paradigm.

Listeners, after all, can sometimes prefer something well packaged and presented - like, say, preferring a carefully composed book or guide to a zine or blog. Both have their place, as does everything in between.

I agree that podcasts sure sound like they should be something like blog posts, short, sweet, and to the point. And, fortunately, many are. (One of my favorites is a three-minute daily nugget… though I tend to catch up in ten-episode gulps!) But some of the most popular ones are basically recordings of panel discussions and interviews — grass-roots CSPAN for your ears! I think podcasts are as free and unconstrained as you say they should be. No need for a fixed half hour or hour or other program in the vein of TV or radio with ad spots.

Some folks might choose to be as much like a slick FM talk show as they can, but I’d bet most really are letting it “be what it is, allowing it to evolve without all the herding and expectations.” I guess I just need to learn to let go a little myself.

My podcast is updated wheneever I feel like it and have time. It’s a series of book reviews, about 5 minutes per show. For now, they’re reviews “from the archives” meaning I wrote the reviews a couple of years ago and am now reading them into the podcast.

All of 15 subscribers. I don’t think the “make them short and targeted” model is working for me.

Oh, good. I post that lovely thing and then misspell my own URL. Go me. sigh It’s bookramble.blogspot.com.

Couldn’t agree with you more. There was a podcast that was pretty regualr, now its been ages since there was another episode

I think podcasts should keep to about four minutes, the average length of songs that people keep on their iPods. I listen to my podcasts in my mix.

I have personally found that vidcasts are much more accessible for my lifestyle. I work long hours and I am not likely to come home and listen to an hour long podcast, but a vidcast, I can plop on the couch and watch it like a TV show, and relax.

The fact that I’ve downloaded nearly 3 GB of podcasts from various sources over the past year but Merlin’s are the only ones I’ve actually listened to tells me he’s right on the money.

Here’s to more short podcasts. Every time I try to listen to one (except Merlin’s) I get frustrated at the rambling. Podcasts with two or more people are even worse - half the time it’s like listening in on a conversation on the bus. They’re just chatting with each other with no regard for the audience.

Things like IT Conversations are the exception: they’re recordings of “real” events in front of live audiences, and that has its own built-in limits (even though longer than a 3-minute quickie.) Also, anyone who does a 1-hour speech at a conference comes there with pages of notes and has a definite idea what to say. Don’t make a 1-hour podcast unless you can say the same.

Can there be an interesting long podcast? I like to think mine is, but mainly because I got a good piece of advice starting out. My father-in-law listened to the first draft of Ep 1 and mentioned it took a little time to get to the interview. After that, I vowed that after the opening music ended, you’d hear the guest within a minute.

I now do a long and a short show, both interviewing business authors, and so far, no one has told me to shorten the long show. In fact, I got the most feedback for my longest show, an interview with Shel Israel that went 45 minutes.

I freely admit that, without a guest, I’d be lucky to fill 4 minutes every 2 weeks. I’m OK with the radio model, just not with 99.9% of radio content.

Hallelujah! As 40 minute drone-casts start to fade away you may want to check out these for your short list:

The Skinny on Sports – (10 minutes) http://skinnyonsports.podshow.com/ Comedy4Cast – Comedy in 4 minutes or less http://www.comedy4cast.com/

And The M Show – 10 minutes news, talk & entertainment

Can there be an interesting long podcast?

You bet. But think about it in terms of films.

Personally, I can watch the first 2 Godfather movies over and over (and I do), and they’re each over 3 hours if memory serves.

Now, is it easy for a first-time filmmaker to be Instant Coppola™ and make an engrossing, perfectly-paced 3-hour movie right out of the gate? And would he or she want to start a filmmaking career by then committing to making a new one every six months?

It’s something that got beaten into my head pretty early on — start small, learn the building blocks, say as much as you need to say, then stop.

I’m really not trying to criticize anyone in particular or be a douchebag about any podcast that happens to be over 10 minutes — I just think it’s awfully ambitious to expect anyone to produce something entertaining and listenable with long format shows on a regular basis. It’s certainly not advisable if it’s the first time a person has ever spoken into a mic.

Merlin, I’ve been through so many kinds of media it’s scary. I was a DJ on the radio, which had abandoned 30-minute and hour-long comedy, music, and drama shows in favor of playing songs on 45 rpm records that lasted, at best, 3 minutes. I moved into magazine publishing just as desktop publishing came on the scene, which allowed two guys in a garage to turn out a product equal in quality to the big publishing houses. About the same time, cable TV killed broadcast by offering everyone niche programming that spoke to them. While at the magazine (which was dedicated to the Commodore Amiga), we lauded the developiment of the first small-studio video production tools - video digitizers, the Amiga Video Toaster, Lightwave 3D - that allowed individuals to produce programming of a quality that had previously required a full-blown studio. And then came the World Wide Web. Now we’ve got songs and TV programs offering themselves up for download at any time, for a small fee, and individuals, not big production companies, creating the majority of the content in this crazy medium. In my lifetime, this has evolved into an on-demand world. Thinking a podcast - or anything else - has to come out to some predetermined length on some regular schedule is just old-fashioned 20th-Century thinking. That meme - that business model - is dead. Now it’s all about (a) targeted content for the ‘long tail’, (b) we don’t need no steenkin’ schedules, and (c ) content that isn’t ‘content’ any more because it doesn’t have to fit into a container.

If anyone is interested in trying “Meta-Feeds” for podcasts check out www.gigadial.com The New England Podcasters use it as a way to aggregate all of the member’s shows. Of course geographic aggregation is kind of “Old Marketing”, perhaps “Quality Podcasts” or “The Short List”.

[…] Interesting article in Wired about podfading - even more interesting response here. […]

the thing i dont get is.. why even podcast while you can post whatever audio feed you want to any wordpress blog with some plug ins?

what is the meaning of “real time” anyway? we don’t need that do we? you cast the stream, those who could catch it listened to it, and then, it is not there anymore.

maybe we should just accept that the “linear data feed” era is over. linear tv, linear radio, are not anymore.

Record whatever you want, audio, video whatever, put it online anywhere, and if it’s quality stuff, the blogosphere will find it and give it its due credit.

and you don’t need an iPod [which is at the same time one of the worst and best products i’ve ever seen] to do that you know? just a mic, and a sound card.

do a radio show, post it on the net, and let me be able to listen to it anytime i want. do your blogs aural, or even better videoBlog the things if you can.

text-based communication is not a good way to communicate. Audio is better, video better still. Of course we’re bound with the limitations of linguistics but, mimics, intonations, gestures, tell much much more than just the text.

I dream of a day we find a way to communicate completely. without omitting any sensory data that our brain can process. including smells, tastes, all the stuff. [i mean, can you tell me how chicken tastes? :)]

and about selling the stuff on iTunes, why even sell something while you can create incredible revenues through new advertising methods if you have quality content?

let “others” pay you, rather than your most beloved “intended audience”. there is no more separation between the “producer” and the “user” we all produce, we all use.

the motto for our age is “do it yourself”. if you don’t differentiate me from yourself, maybe we’ll discuss in a blog or another, we’ll share thoughts and maybe create something even better.

we’re in the creation process of a gigantic earth-sized brain. we’re all connected like neurons, we get input from each other, we share our every thought with everyone else on the planet.

iTunes is just an application, and a bad one at that, since it binds the user to specific hardware, specific rules.

when people realize this, i don’t think they’ll just going to sit back and continue “podcasting”. someone will do a better job at creating a new “sharing” software, which will run with every mp3/video player/recorder [or cellphone ;)] you’ve got, that allows you to post whatever you want in whatever format from wherever you want over whichever protocol.

it’s just a matter of time i guess.

[…] J’écoute de nombreux podcasts, certains d’entre eux sont longs et fréquents. Je suis assez d’accord avec l’article de Merlin Mann sur le podfading : faites des podcasts quand l’envie vous chante, pas forcément formatés comme des émissions de radio. […]