Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Yesterday I listened to my second podcast, ever. It was the B&O Pilot episode from Jesper Balslev and Joachim Oschlag. The two of them have decided to make their podcast into a cross-cast, meaning that they each have the episode posted on their blogs. It also means that the episode has two permalinks instead of one. So I can't link to the location of the episode, I have to link both to Jesper's post and Joachim's post. It also means that comments on the podcast are collected in two different places. Not cool at all.

Anyway, I transferred the show to my portable mp3-player and listened to it while biking into the city. At 22 minutes the B&O Pilot had the perfect length. It takes me 25 minutes to bike to the downtown area. Five minutes longer and I would not hear the final part of the podcast. On the other hand the volume of the podcast was way too low. Once I hit the more busy streets it was hard to follow the conversation even though I had the volume all the way up.

Talking about online material in an offline medium like a podcast is always hard. You can't just click links to find additional information. B&O could have introduced their topics a bit better for those of us who didn't happen to click through before listening.

I don't get why podcasts are distributed as one big file. I would much rather have the shows broken up into smaller pieces which I could synch to my iPod. That would make it much easier to find a given section again later (if I want to quote it) and it would make it easier to stop the podcast and pick up where I left off later. It can't be hard to do technically — it would be the same as having an ‘album’. Each podcast would just be an album in iTunes.

Oh, and as for the content? Very good. I hope they do more episodes in the future.