Somehow, in the initial excitement of podcasting, many have the misconceived notion of a podcast format as an hour long production, as though they were a syndicated radio talk show. There aren’t many reasons that a podcast post should be longer than a Blog post. Would you subscribe to a Blog that posted hours worth of reading material? Every day? NEWS FLASH: PODCASTED AUDIO IS NOT FREE TO THE SUBSCRIBER! It takes bandwidth to download, MB to store, and most importantly - time to listen to it.

Blog postings over two pages are LONG… Podcasts longer than a voicemail message are LONG. Podcasts over 10 minutes are REALLY LONG, and require people to schedule the listening into their free time somewhere. The longer the post, the less likely it is that people will make time to hear it. More than a half-hour per day is nearly insane, and you either need to be Really Interesting, or have some Really Good Information (or both) to maintain subscribers.

With this in mind, here are two tips I can offer to reduce the size of your posts, thereby increasing your number of subscribers:

1) BREAK IT DOWN: Break your recording into sections and label them like Blog posts so people can pick and choose what they listen to, as well as skip to the next post without having to listen to the entire thing. For example, instead of releasing an entire CD as a single post, release each track separately. Instead of releasing an Hour long talk show, release each topic as a separate 5-10 min post (Are you listening Engadget? Dave Slusher?)

2) EDIT: No one expects podcasts to be professional; it is part of the geeky, quirky, kitchiness of the medium that makes it interesting (HEY! I’m a geek with a microphone! Here me babble, and say “Ummmm…” and “Ahhhhhh…”!!! How Unprofessional! And it’s reaching the Entire Blogosphere! Hehehe...) So editing mistakes out is probably a mistake -leave them in. But editing for content is another matter. If you drift off topic for too long, or experience technical problems, you owe it to your audience to cut that crap right straight out. If you are tech savvy enough to do a podcast, you can also cut up or re-record your audio before posting it.

A prime example of "How NOT To..." is Adam Curry’s 1-7-05 “Source Code” post, weighing in at just over 43min long, After 4 min into it, he still had not started yet! Instead, he rambles disjointedly about how the previous recording didn’t work, and how he bought a coconut, and how good the coconut tastes, and how a coconut makes an unwieldy drinking container, and that the ceiling fan in his hotel room is noisy, and he actually turns it on for you to prove it, and he did actually BLOW HIS NOSE, which was a thoughtful way for him to waste his listeners' time, as well as space in their mp3 players, and makes him come off as someone who just likes to hear his own voice, or someone who thinks you are fascinated enough with his life to want to hear the sounds he makes in the bathroom.

I am picking on Adam Curry because he should know better, given his background, and being a forerunner and evangelist in the field of podcasting. He should be setting the standard. 'Mikes Manic Minute' is a bit extreme in the other direction, but something between these two extremes better suits the standard.

Drifting off-topic for a moment is OK and fun and sometimes funny, but pissing away the first 4 min of a 45 min post is rude to the listener. Expect them to do what I did: Unsubscribe. Worse, if the majority of podcasts behave this way, the entire technology will not see the adoption rate I’m sure we would all like.

On a side note, I would just like to say that I hate the term “podcasting” more than anyone, but even I realize it’s too late to change it now. Just let it go. As bad as it is, I can’t image a term for anything worse than “Blog”, which is one of the sounds a toilet makes, and no one seems to mind that….

Conrad Zero
www.conradzero.com
conrad@conradzero.com

Labels: Blogging, idiots, Open Letter, podcast, rant