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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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16 December 2004 - 3:14 pm
Apparently the blogging world is leaving me behind. As others embrace the latest and greatest in trendy blogging, I cling to what I've always done and wonder why the cool kids have abandoned me.
The new trend I'm talking about is podcasting. What is podcasting? It's the practice of recording your weblog posts as audio files (typically as mp3s) for other to listen to. I'm not opposed to trying to expand the boundaries of the web, but I don't much like this implementation.
My objections cover a number of broad topics: bandwidth, archiving, searching, accessibility.
First, bandwidth. Distributing weblog posts as sound files eat much more bandwidth both for the distributer and downloader. And you no longer have the instant gratification of getting a post when you want it; you have to wait for it to download. It seems to me that you need to offer your listeners something more than the sound of your voice if you expect them to download these things to their iPods.
Next, archiving and searching. Archiving these things would be a ridiculous expense. All the posts on -273 and the affiliated weblogs fill slightly more than 7 MBs. That's four podcasts at the most. And I can compress the whole database with proper SQL markup down to 2 MBs. Have fun trying to further compress your podcasts. And how on earth do you search these things? I guess a diligent person marks their podcasts up with decent meta-data, but it seems unlikely that most people do that. And I haven't seen any tools that effectively search audio contents. Text, of course, is easily searchable.
Finally, we have accessibility. I'm sure podcasters will tell you how they can listen to podcasts in places where they don't have access to or the ability to read typical weblog posts. Working out at the gym or something like that. But you also limit who can get your posts because those who browse at libraries or at work might not want to listen to your post but they might be more than happy to read it.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on podcasting. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.
Posted by on 16 December 2004 at 3:14 PM
Comments
You're wrong. To hear why, please download podcasting_is_awesome.mp3.
Posted by ab9 on 17 December 2004 - 11:41 AM
I thought that podcasting was mainly for sharing music from mp3 blogs, for which it seems mostly appropriate. My main beef is that setup on both ends seems kind of crufty.
Posted by Charlie on 17 December 2004 - 3:12 PM
My experience with podcasting is admittedly rather limited, but what I've seen from it isn't music, it's people talking. Dave Winer is a big proponent of podcasting and he uses it for audio posts on his weblog. And here is his description of podcasting, which is better than the link I put in the main article.
Posted by david on 17 December 2004 - 3:39 PM
Looks like you were right, both on what it is, and why it's just silly.
Posted by Charlie on 30 December 2004 - 2:01 PM