Flutterby™! : Podcasting

Wes Felter on Podcasting:

Sorry Adam, Dave, Doc, and Dan, but I hate podcasting. It's a total waste of my time to listen to something when I could read it.

Spurred on by Mark's efforts, I sat down today to record an audio blog. I've got a whole bunch of ideas flying around, but for some reason, despite borrowing a really sweet mic from a friend, I still had some unreasonable ticks and noise on the track. So I'll just write my points here:

1. The point of audio blogs is to help fill that space where I've got an otherwise unused sense. To replace NPR and George Noory when I'm in the car. The innovation here is not that people are putting audio content on the web, that's been going on for as long as I've had net access (anyone remember IUMA?), it's the automation in transferring new content to portable players.
2. I don't know how long that time is, and, as Wes points out, listening is not my most efficient way to absorb information, so don't expect me to listen through an hour and a half of "wait, this web page is here somewhere" and "uhmmm". That's fine for now, but once I get a few sites that have content, I'm only going to listen to a fraction of your entry. How about taking those 30 minutes and making me a 5 minute spot with a little editing.
3. Just because you can lay a music track down to cover the empty spaces, doesn't mean you should.
4. I don't care if you think it's geeky, Ogg is a good idea because not only are the files smaller and better sounding, it's not patent encumbered.

There, now you don't have to sit through half an hour of Dan thinking he's some sort of producer type person.