Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

For the first time I listened to a podcast all the way through. While it wasn't as bad as the first time, I still think podcasting sucks. It's radio for the sake of being radio, and whoever thought it up decided not to try and use the advantages available when you're using the web as distribution instead of airwaves. In short podcasting still sucks for the reasons radio sucks.

The podcast I listened to was an episode of the Gillmor Gang. It was a pretty interesting show, and I wanted to write about some of the topics covered on this blog. But because podcasting is the way it is that was impossible.

What I have is one huge audio file, and the permalink to that particular show. This is fine and dandy if I want to talk about the episode as a whole. In that case I can just link to the permalink and be done with it. Podcasts aren't good blog content though. The Gillmor Gang episode ran about an hour. It's impossible to reference just part of the show. The content is as granular as a radio show, instead of being as granular as a blog entry. The only solution I have is saying something like Download the episode and fast-forward to 30:12 into the file.

Not cool at all. I can't blog you if I can't link to you. And If I can't blog you, I can't talk about you and that's sad.

The solution as I see it is in playlists. Instead of publishing one huge audio file, you break it up into many smaller parts. Think of them as chapters. Each published as their own blog entry. Then publish a playlist which points to all of these chapters. Your podcatcher would download the playlist, and then download each chapter in order and transfer them to your iPod or whatever.

For the iPod user the end result would be the same — an on-demand radio show. The difference would be that it would be easier to find your place if you pause/stop playback, and it would be possible to skip boring chunks (like the intro). As an added bonus it would be possible for bloggers to link to exactly the part of your podcast that they want to talk about. It's not perfect, but it's better.

After that we can start talking about adding links inside the podcasts, so we can get rid of this whole spelling out URLs nonsense.